4th Generation warfare

The article Terrorist Tactics for the War With the West discusses Fourth Generation Warfare:

As they saw it, this type of warfare has "a goal of collapsing the enemy internally rather than physically destroying him. Targets will include such things as the population's support for the war and the enemy's culture." The authors predicted that armies of the future would "be widely dispersed and largely undefined; the distinction between war and peace will be blurred to the vanishing point. It will be nonlinear, possibly to the point of having no definable battlefields or fronts."

The article includes a shot of peace protesters. That's a bit of a cheap shot; should wars not be protested for fear of giving the enemy an advantage? On the other hand, as has been pointed out many times, some groups have indirect links to communist and terrorist orgs, some anti-war protesters are simply reflexively anti-American, and some are just stupid publicity seekers. This is discussed here. Saddam shoots himself in the foot by admitting that he's counting on popular opinion to prevent a war; that statement can now be used against any anti-war protester you encounter.

Supporting the idea of fourth generation warfare is the fact that many AQ supporters have been proud of the fact that they used our own technology to destroy the WTC. The fact that most of the Muslim countries are mired several centuries back and can't even dream of producing a hang glider much less a Boeing-class aircraft is acknowledged or considered a bad thing by only a small number of those country's citizens.

Similar actions might be considered forms of 4G warfare, as I previously blogged. There are a ton of examples, such as the disrespect immigrants show for their new "country." Examples here and here.

There's also a teaser for a Vanity Fair article on the Iraq-AQ link here. Probably best to just go to the drug store and read the mag.

Warblogging · Thu, 12/12/2002 - 15:18 · · Importance: 1