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.
But war’s definition was
not always so narrow. Before Westphalia, many different kinds of entities
fought wars: families (think of the Montagues and Capulets from Romeo
and Juliet), clans, tribes, races, religions, and even business
enterprises. India was conquered not by Great Britain, but by the British East
India Company, a business with an army and a fleet. They used many different
tools to fight; for the most part, armies and navies as we know them did not
exist. Fighters ranged from every male able to carry a weapon, through
poisoners inserted in a rival’s kitchen, to highly specialized mercenaries who
hired themselves out to anyone with cash. The Grimaldis, whose descendents
still rule Monaco, got their start as galley fleet entrepreneurs.
People fought for many
different reasons, not just raison d’état (political reasons).
They fought for eternal salvation, for slaves to sell, for booty, for land, for
pay, and because young men with idle hands like to fight—and the local women
liked fighters. War flowed not like the Arno but like the Everglades, slowly
inundating everything.
The state, as it arose
beginning around the year 1500, gradually put an end to this. The
state came to impose and sustain order and the safety of persons and property.
War not made by states threatened that order. So, the state rounded up the
non-state fighters and hanged them from the nearest tree, to the loud huzzahs
of the population.
The First Generation War
ran from Westphalia to about the middle of the 19th century. I discuss this
period in detail in my book co-authored with Lt. Col. Gregory A.
Thiele, 4th Generation Warfare Handbook (2015). It was a time
characterized by tactics of line and column, which led to (for the most part)
orderly battlefields which led in turn to a military culture of order.
That culture continues in
almost all state armed forces today. That’s a problem, because starting in the
mid-19th century the battlefield became steadily more disorderly. Part of the
reason state militaries now so often lose against rag-tag opponents is that
they have in effect one foot on the dock and one foot on the boat.
Second and Third Generation
War were both attempts to deal with the growing disorder of the battlefield,
and both came out of World War I. Second Generation War was developed by the
French Army. It reduced war to a highly centralized process of putting
firepower on targets, a process that both upheld and required a culture of
order. Third Generation War came out of the German experience in World War I.
Commonly known as “Blitzkrieg” in its World War II manifestation, it sought not
to control but to use the disorder of the battlefield through a military
culture of maneuver, speed, decentralization, and encouragement of initiative.
When the Second and Third
Generations met in 1940, the latter defeated the former in six weeks, even
though the French had more and better tanks than the Germans. Ideas, not
weapons, were decisive—which has not prevented the U.S. armed forces from
clinging to Second Generation tactics even today. They don’t work, but no one
seems to care anymore that we lose wars, so long as the money keeps flowing.
Enter Fourth Generation
War. All over the world, state militaries find themselves fighting not other
mirror-image state armed forces but the ghosts of premodern war. Once again,
many different kinds of entities are fighting wars: clans, tribes, races,
religions, businesses we call drug cartels, and so on. They use many different
means, not just armies; invasion by immigration is perhaps the most dangerous.
And almost always, the state armed forces, despite vast combat power superiority,
lose.
At the crux of Fourth
Generation War is a crisis of the legitimacy of the state. This crisis varies
greatly in intensity from one state to another, but almost everywhere we see
people in growing numbers transfer their primary loyalty away from the state to
non-state entities: race, religion, ideology, or political causes such as
animal rights, etc. Many of those people, who would never fight for their
state, are willing, even eager, to fight for their new primary loyalty. The
consequence is that the state loses the monopoly on war it claimed at
Westphalia. As van Creveld says, the key change in the Fourth Generation is
not how war is fought (although that does change), but who fights
and what they fight for.
That is much of what we
have seen going on in our streets over the past few months. Fourth Generation
War has come to a theater near you. A variety of Fourth Generation “causes”
have intersected with what I call a “supply-side war.” We have millions of kids
who have been cooped up for two or three months. They have no work or school.
They want an excuse to go out and fight, because that is what bored young
people like to do. Especially young men; young women will demonstrate but when
fighting starts they usually disappear.
These youths need a cause
to plead in answer to adults’ demand for “social distancing.” It doesn’t matter
what the cause is; saving the pangolins could work as well as “Black Lives
Matter.” Supply-side war provides the raw material in youthful fighters, while
Fourth Generation War gives them something to fight for, a new primary loyalty
to replace duty to country. And the state proves itself impotent against its
own progeny. We have seen this same supply-side war dynamic in Libya, Syria, Iraq,
Somalia, Afghanistan, and most of West Africa. Now we are seeing it in Chicago
and Portland.
Conservatives know that the
fall of the state is catastrophic. Life becomes, as our old friend Thomas
Hobbes said, nasty, brutish, and short. A friend of mine has used Hobbes’ name
as a pseudonym to pen a novel about this situation erupting in America,
entitled Victoria: A Novel of Fourth Generation War (2014).
Security forces may put
down individual disorders (and they should), but the only way to defeat Fourth
Generation War is to restore the legitimacy of the state, to the point where it
again becomes the primary loyalty of most of its citizens. What is the prospect
for that in the United States of America in the year 2020? As President Trump
would say, “Not good.”
We face a bifurcated
culture. The elite that controls the state has for decades waged war on the
common culture in the name of the ideology of cultural Marxism, also known as
“wokeness.” While many Americans who cling to our historic Western, Christian culture
also remain loyal to the state, their position is unsustainable because the
Deep State is dominated by cultural Marxists.
Conservatives’ loyalty to
America is to an America that has largely disappeared among elites. At some
point, they too will transfer their primary loyalty to something other than the
America we know now. Probably they will transfer it to many things, not just
one, adding to the disintegrative forces working on the state.
Restoring the legitimacy of
the state requires a federal government that actually cares about America
“beyond the beltway,” and neither political party offers that. Washington has
become a classic royal court toward the end of a dynasty. Court politics is
everything; the rest of the country is only a stupid cow to be milked and
beaten.
Some years ago, when I
lived in D.C., I enjoyed a lunch with the third secretary of the Russian
Embassy. We agreed that the United States had become a one-party state, which
is something Russians know something about. The one party is the Establishment
Party, and no matter which of its wings win, the Democrats or the Republicans,
nothing important changes. The same people get the same old jobs, the money
keeps flowing into bottomless sinkholes (welfare spending for Democrats,
military spending for Republicans), everyone in town prospers and the rest of
the country becomes poorer.
The 2016 presidential
election broke from this script. Donald Trump, who was not a member of the one
party and who dared defy cultural Marxism (any member of the Establishment who
does that instantly becomes an “un-person”), grabbed the brass ring. That is
the one party’s ultimate nightmare, that someone breaks their lock on policy,
power, and money. The Establishment’s bitter, rabid hatred for President Trump
springs from that fact and that fact alone. What he says or does is immaterial.
Were he St. Francis of Assisi returned to mortal life, their vitriol toward him
would be no less.
Regrettably, even if Trump
wins re-election, he will be able to do little to restore the state’s
legitimacy—a legitimacy he represents to many who voted for him, who in turn
are further alienated from the state by the Establishment’s hatred of their
champion. The one party owns the Deep State, which has served them well by
sabotaging almost everything the president has tried to do. What he has
attempted has often been right and good, but the list of his accomplishments is
short.
The Deep State’s lock on
effective action by the state makes the quest to restore its legitimacy nigh on
hopeless. Only a state that works for all Americans, that effectively provides
order, competent services, and gradually increasing prosperity for all, not
just more riches for the royal court, can be legitimate. The one thing
Americans, right and left, can probably agree on is that the chances of that
occurring are slim to none.
So, is the future of the
American state hopeless? Probably. I can see three possible outcomes to the
crisis of legitimacy of the American state.
The first is that the
dynasty falls and a competent new establishment class replaces it, one that can
make the federal government work for everyone and that ceases to wage
ideological war on its own people. In theory, this is possible, but I see no
signs of it happening, nor any forces on the horizon that are capable of doing
it. The system is so loaded against third parties that this route is
effectively blocked. The Democrats are hopelessly in thrall to cultural Marxism
because their base either believes in it, profits from it, or both. President
Trump has shown himself incapable of remaking the Republican Party in his
anti-Establishment, politically incorrect image. Could his successor do it,
perhaps someone such as Tucker Carlson? Hope springs eternal, but hope is also
a fool.
A second possibility is
that both left and right could see the horrors that widespread Fourth
Generation War on American soil would bring, step back, and work together to
avoid it. There is a way to do that, by returning to American federalism as it
was practiced before 1860.
When the Constitution was
drafted and ratified, none of the men involved ever imagined that life in, say,
Massachusetts and South Carolina would become the same. Still less did they
conceive that the Constitution gave the federal government authority to make
them the same. Were we to return to their understanding of federalism, we could
maintain the union while accommodating cultural differences. Some states would
be right, others left. If you found yourself being governed by people you
despised, you would not need to fight. You could simply move. We would still be
one country for foreign policy, defense, macroeconomics, and infrastructure.
But leftists would be free to misrule the West Coast to their hearts’ content,
while conservatives enjoyed the neighborliness and good food of the Old South.
The third and most likely
possibility is that the country breaks apart in widespread Fourth Generation
War. Welcome to Libya, Syria, and a growing portion of the world.
If the third possibility
becomes reality and America as we know it disappears from the world’s
landscape, its vanishing will be part of something larger: the end of the
modern age that gave birth to the state.
As the late Jeffrey Hart wrote, the modern age began when
Western men discarded metaphysics and said, in effect, “We are no longer
interested in questions of ultimate meaning; from now on, we care only about
the physical world.” From that time onward, a focus on the practical defined
modernity. Out of it came ships that could cross oceans and navigation to guide
them; steam power, then electricity, medicine that allowed Western men to live
anywhere in the world; and, by the beginning of the 20th century, world
domination by the Christian West.
We threw away that domination in three great Western
civil wars: World War I, World War II, and the Cold War. Now, the West is just
one contending culture among many, the state to which the West gave birth is
failing everywhere, and the questions of ultimate meaning that modernity
discarded are returning to haunt its senescence.
Can the times be redeemed? Probably not, but as men of
the West, we must try.
William S. Lind is a columnist for The
American Conservative and the agent for Thomas
Hobbes’s novel Victoria, which is a follow-on to his
earlier smash hit, Leviathan.
https://www.chroniclesmagazine.org/fourth-generation-war-comes-to-a-theater-near-you-1/