Our Fourth Generation World

One of the insights of William Lind, General Van Ryper, Thomas Hammes, and other Fourth Generation Warfare theorists is that the state is declining in power. Transnational groups, nonstate entities, terrorists, businesses, tribes, religions, and other types of social groupings are gaining in power at the expense of the state. And their power can neutralize, coerce, and avoid the application of power by the traditional nation state.

This trend is apparent in what appears superficially to be a conflict of two nation-states involving Iran’s recent seizure of British sailors allegedly for violating Iran’s territorial waters. Britain’s impotence is not just a sign of Britain’s declining sense of power and purpose, though it is that, but it is also illustrative of a broader trend in international affairs, demonstrated variously by current events in Iraq, the Somalia conflict in the early 90s, and al Qaeda’s ability to thrive in spite of US intervention in Afghanistan.

Once upon a time, a first world power would have engaged in some “gunboat diplomacy” and sorted this whole situation out. But the smaller and tech-heavy modern militaries cannot easily subdue smaller nations, though their technology once gave them a decisive edge. Today, the technology is distributed on the open market, the smaller and “weaker” nations have people power, carrying with it the prospect of low tech Iranian guerilla resistance to any British intervention. And even if the formal powers of the Iranian state submit to Britain (which would have been more likely in the age of kings), parallel authorities among the imams, the Iranian people, and other social networks would make any peace illusory. Anyone with an RPG or an AK-47 would have a veto over such a “peace.”

This combination renders Britain’s technological superiority irrelevant. Further, the internal structure of Iranian affairs, in which the Revolutionary Guards are both part of the state and outside of the state, is an example of the way religious and other affiliations can trump state power. Iranian internal affairs are apparently incoherent on account of this internal trump on state power, where the Revolutionary Guards even possess a parallel military.

William Lind suggested unfacecitously in the wake of 9/11 that the US should have launched half a dozen nuclear weapons at various parts of Afghanistan. And then it should have retreated into itself, avoiding entanglement with the increasingly chaotic developing world. Perhaps. One thing that is clear is that modulated responses are an invitation to continued testing by hostile third world countries and nonstate actors alike. The combination of nonstate wiliness and the First World’s lack of will power combine to make us (because we are indistinguishable from Britain here) weak, incompetent, easily cowed, and of declining importance. There is simply no possibility for a Falklands redux. This would be a fantasy. If the First World wants to continue to be involved in the world, it must do so on the same fourth generation basis as its enemies, employing private military contractors, businesses, media, religious missionaries and other tools rather than its impressive though increasingly irrelevant military power.

The alternative is to retreat into itself avoiding these problems by developing self-contained and self-sufficient ethno-states. Globalization, pace Thomas Friedman, looks far more like British military women wearing Shia Hajabs under threat of violence, than it does Iranian youth peacefully playing their ipods.

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