Tag Archives: Fourth generation war

Fourth Generation War Comes to a Theater Near You, by William Lind

Fourth generation war is a hallmark of failing states. From William Lind at chroniclesmagazine.org:

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above: above: Grand Master Jay (center) of the Not F*****g Around Coalition (NFAC), a black militia, stands with his men in formation during a protest for Breonna Taylor in Louisville, Ky. on July 25, 2020 (Leslie Spurlock/ZUMA Wire/Alamy Live News)

Mobs loot, burn, and vandalize while politicians advocate defunding the police. A commune was established in Seattle and turned into Lord of the Flies while government did nothing. Blacks demand equal treatment from police despite a violent crime rate many times greater than that of whites, and mainstream media will not report honestly the differences in crime rates. “Wokeness” spreads among idle youth who flunked English 101. What is going on?

What is going on, right here on American soil, is war; a new kind of war that is also very old, waged by entities other than states. I call it Fourth Generation War and, to paraphrase Leon Trotsky, you may not be interested in Fourth Generation War—but it is interested in you.

In the 1980s, when working with the Marine Corps, I came up with an intellectual framework I call the Four Generations of Modern War. Military historian Martin van Creveld’s books The Rise and Decline of the State and The Transformation of War are foundational works in my framework, which flows from one of the defining elements of the modern age, the rise of the state.

The Four Generations framework begins in 1648, when in the Peace of Westphalia the state claimed and subsequently enforced a monopoly on war. This seems automatic to us today; war means armies, navies, and air forces of a state or an alliance of states fighting similar armed forces belonging to other states.

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