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I agree with this. There are some smart folks with lots of good observations and input who get too caught up in mental gymnastics trying to tie their viewpoint back to 4GW because it is a buzzword that they think will one day be vindicated in the arena of ideas. I don't see it happening. Bill Lind, Thomas Hammes, et al, are smart guys worth listening to, but I think that they have gotten too attached to the 4GW label and need to move on.

That is a common beltway trap---I was amazed to see the cascade of a word up and down the administrative and operational chain. I used to chuckle when I would note a word/phrase I had used in after action reports or sitreps finding the way into the verbage of the brass shortly thereafter.

Geez--maybe a thesaurus was not in the government supply chain.

Let me use the flawed model to project Fifth Generation Warfare. That is, the failure of technology before sheer number of combatants.

There are limits to how many soldiers conventional weapons can kill. That is, to tell an artillery batallion commander that his unit must wipe out 1,750,000 enemy soldiers.

But how can such a thing be? If those most populus nations on the planet, China and India, return to WWII-style recruitment of anyone who can carry a pointed stick, each of them might be able to field an army of 200,000,000 men.

By sheer numbers they can overwhelm a technologically superior army.

Not a far-fetched scenario, either. The Chinese were well on their way to overwhelming the US forces in the Korean War, and the day was saved only because the Chinese ranks were savaged by hemorrhagic smallpox.

Most Chinese soldiers of the time had little more weaponry than a pointed stick, but endless human wave assaults against machine gun nests eventually overpower them.

In such a situation, the US would have to resort to nuclear weapons, unless it refused to and abandoned the fight. The only power capable of standing against such raw numbers would be another nation that also have huge numbers of draftees.

Fifth Generation Warfare?

The 4GW bandwagon was a solution in search of a problem. It dwelled on the obvious and made conventional wisdom of strategic planning and structuring the non-Fulda Gap/Central Europe Order of Battle sound like something revolutionary; it wasn't.

Interesting post,,,mmmmmmm,,,If I was really pissed off,,?
Georgy Konstantinovich Zhukov, Scorched Earth...Game Over.
I think he would have made the biggest mess of the enemy.
This "Type" of warfare would seem to win over the others.
Annihilation.
Not PC,,,,
But It Works.

4GW warfare?

Naw - just old fashioned 4th estate 5th column attacks.

Win the news war and it does not matter if you win or lose the battles.

Ref - WWII we won the news war because the Govt would jug anyone that said otherwise.

RVN - lost that one in the funny papers, not the field of battle.

Right now the 'news war' is not quite as bad as the RVN conflict, but then the KGB is not pumping money into the 'peace movement' yet - Iran on the other hand....

My biggest problem with the so called "Fourth generation warfare" is that partisan war(or as it used to be called, banditry) is as old as time.

For instance, there was a wave of international partisan revolutions starting from the French Revolution and Napoleon to the Spanish Civil War in the 1930's. With the rise of the USSR and the fall of the Nazi's, things calmed down a bit, but the tactics are not new, and neither is the way to counter it.

But the difference is the US is paralyzed by its own rules, while the islamics have none.

My problem (since the posters preceding all have problems...joking!) is that we need vocabulary to help understand the problem.

By focusing on "generations" it helps to define constructs of military capability and tactics. There is nothing wrong with this.

So, I disagree with these writers who wish to engage in polemics just to earn a paycheck.

If I choose to define 4thGen as asymmetrical and then choose to define asymmetrical as terrorist tactics, how am I wrong? I chose the term and provided the definition of the term I chose.

All can discuss the meaning and concepts and solutions.

That is the purpose of presenting and defining 4th Gen Warfare! Argument, discussion, debate.