I'm about to vastly oversimplify (and butcher) the following primer on Fourth Generation Warfare. I urge you to read both William S. Lind and John Robb in place of my attempts here.
Firstly, the history of warfare in four lines:
- First Generation Warfare: Ranks of muskets or pikes, tight and orderly.
- Second Generation Warfare: French artillery in WWI, putting steel on target.
- Third Generation Warfare: German Blitzkrieg and early Israeli doctrine, manoeuvre warfare.
- Fourth Generation Warfare: Asymmetric, the war for the credibility of the State.
Fourth Generation (4GW) is a significant departure from everything we've seen before; we're no longer fighting a State, we're fighting a loose coalition of groups with (sometimes) vastly dissimilar ideologies, but with one goal - the dissolution of the target State.
There is no State military force in the world today that can effectively fight 4GW; in a Fourth Generation War there is no government to surrender, no central financial district, no ports, no infrastructure to bomb or capture, indeed no leaders to kill. All that expensive military hardware means almost nothing in 4GW.
Primary Loyalties
When people turn to family, tribal or religious groups to fulfil basic needs, they turn away from the State.
States were born out of a need to provide support to larger and larger groups of people. States provide the infrastructure to allow trade, to organise education, healthcare and security, and to help those in the society that cannot help themselves.
When someone turns to another place for these things, a group that does not represent the state, that person's loyalties shift. In a conflict between a seemingly impotent central bureaucracy and the people who give you food every day, which side do you take?
When people begin to identify themselves as members of sub-groups rather than citizens of the State, you have the seething breeding ground of 4GW.
The Plausible Promise
If a group that opposes the State, regardless of ideology, can demonstrate to other groups that the State is weak or vulnerable, the conflict can spiral rapidly. Whatever the motivation (reprisals for State aggression against members of the group, or an ideological imperative), an attack on the State (symbolic or actual) can start a war.
Groups that have nothing in common still have a shared distrust of (or even hatred for) the State. A powerful demonstration that small groups can engage the State and win, the plausible promise of success, can unite them with a common purpose.
Crisis of Legitimacy of the State
The first three generations of war were fought on the tactical, operational and strategic levels. The theory is that if you accumulate enough tactical victories, kill enough of the enemy and blow up enough bridges, you will win at the strategic level as well, eventually.
4GW combatants do make use of traditional 'war of the flea' guerrilla tactics, but 4GW is a product of media-driven lifestyles as much as it is an effective means of fighting significantly more powerful enemies. 4GW does not follow the tactical-operation-strategic model, instead fights at the physical, mental and moral levels.
If the State kills 100 insurgents for every 1 soldier lost, it may win at the tactical and physical levels but will ultimately lose at the moral level of 4GW. BBC coverage of bleeding Iraqi civilians, or Blackwater mercenaries in black ray-bans holding assault rifles, all serve to decrease the moral standing of the State; by winning the battle, the State is literally losing the war.
The goal of 4GW combatants is to destroy the traditional State model by hollowing it out from the inside; not by assassination or mass-casualty terrorist attacks, but by weakening it at the moral and mental levels. In the eyes of the world, the State is the aggressor and the bully, and, as more power stations or police officers are taken out, the State begins to lose the ability to serve its function; to protect, house, and feed its citizens.
When confronted with an impotent State, citizens vote in a new government, one that promises to capitulate to the "terrorists" if that's what it takes to regain stability.
New Zealand
I think that New Zealand is uniquely placed amongst Western democracies; not only are we at the most risk of 4GW developing inside the country (given our very open culture and borders), but we are also in the best position to fight it when it happens.