Mike Gravel, the recent candidate for the Democratic Party Presidential nomination, has been asking citizens to harrass the prosecutor in a terrorism case. Gravel, of course, believes that the enemy is the US and George Bush, and that the terrorists are the good guys, sort of like Michael Moore. Here is a comment to an American Thinker article about Gravel, who should himself be prosecuted for his call for violence. (Of course the Bush Administration, the aledged distroyer of the Bill of Rights, will ignore this as he has ignored other acts of dissidents.) The following comment gives a good description of how warfare has changed. Studying this explains why we have a hard time dealing with terorists as long as our citizens take the side of those who want to destroy us.

Mike Gravel has been seriously wounded by 4th generation warfare.'

Colonel T.X. Hammes, USMC (ret) is the author of The Sling and the Stone: On War in the 21st Century (Zenith Press, 2006) and an expert on insurgent, "4th generation warfare".

Hammes, who served in Iraq in 2004, explains that what America is facing in most of our current conflicts and what we are likely to face in future ones differs profoundly from war as we used to know it. In a conventional conflict (first, second and third generation warfare) military forces opposed enemy military forces, and battlefield victories ultimately brought the war to a definite endpoint. Although the weaponry and the way battles were waged through history differ, the formula remained the same.

In contrast, irregular conflicts (fourth and fifth generation warfare and beyond) rely more on destroying an opponents' political will rather than defeating the opponent's forces on the field of battle. Fourth generation warriors achieve success through skillful use of the media, co-opting opposition leaders, wreaking economic havoc and inflicting casualties on their opponents that are not significant enough to win the conflict in the conventional sense, but are frightening and dispiriting enough to convince the opposing public to demand an end to the conflict. These wars are political, protracted (measured in decades), networked and focus on attacking the minds of the enemy. Emphasizing technology over human resources, America's traditional hierarchical military structures tend to perform abysmally against fourth generation actors.

Fourth generation warfare (4GW) traces its origins to Michael Collins and the Irish Republican Army but was codified by Mao Tse Tung in his groundbreaking pamphlet Guerilla Warfare. Mao employed 4GW tactics to defeat Chiang Kai Shek's Nationalist armies for control of China, and Ho Chi Minh used Guerilla Warfare as a blueprint for the war against South Vietnam.

But 4GW is hardly the stuff of history books, and many of its core strategies are employed by today's counterinsurgents, including al Qaeda and Hezbollah. During his presentation, Hammes noted that an al Qaeda website was the first to provide extensive quotes from Hammes' own work on insurgent warfare, and Ayman al Zawahiri (a significant al Qaeda leader) observed that more than half of the battle takes place in the media. In 4GW fashion, al Zawahiri recognized the relative importance of political victories over military ones in asymmetric conflicts and the media's role in securing those political victories.

Presiding over a superb multi-media campaign, al Qaeda releases ads within 30 minutes of its attacks. The ads target a variety of audiences: supporters, those with the potential to become supporters and the citizenry of the opposition. Hezbollah also showed a shrewd understanding of how to manipulate the media during their summer 2006 conflict with Israel and put the requisite financial resources toward it -- $15-20 million a year toward the Hezbollah television station, Al-Manar TV, which was greater than Israel's entire public diplomacy budget. Skillful use of public opinion enabled Hezbollah to turn the conflict from one of Israeli self-defense to "Israel's destruction of Lebanon."

And with technological advances and tactical reassessments, 4GW and its practitioners continue to evolve. While Mao and Ho Chi Minh believed that conventional conflict was the third and final phase to winning a fourth generation conflict, current fourth generation warriors see military victory as superfluous - a political victory is sufficient to win the war. Today's insurgents see a strategic communication campaign (engaging key audiences) buttressed by a military and terror campaign as the most effective strategy.

They have already convinced Gravel that the so called war on terrorism is really US imperialism.

Posted by: Wallace | August 6, 2008 04:47 PM