Fourth Generation war visited Chattanooga last week at the cost of four Marines and one sailor dead. It was not the first instance of 4GW on American soil, and it will not be the last.
The killer was, again, Islamic. Islam is by no means the only non-state entity to which people may give their primary loyalty, but it is one of the more dangerous.
To diminish the risk of 4GW posed by Islam, we need to take two actions. The first is to stop Islamic immigration into this country, and not only Islamic immigration, but immigration by anyone who is likely to refuse to acculturate. All immigrants who refuse to become culturally American provide a base for 4GW.
The culturally Marxist Establishment insists on keeping the border open to such people because they help it attain its two main goals, first set by Gramsci in Italy and Lukacs in Hungary in l9l9, destroying Western culture and the Christian religion. Protecting ourselves from imported 4GW is “discrimination” in cultural Marxism’s vocabulary. In a 4GW world, any state that wants to survive will discriminate very carefully in terms of who it lets in.
The second action we need to take is to stop messing around in other peoples’ parts of the globe. So ong as we keep hitting them with drone and air strikes, they will try to hit us back on our own soil. What else should we expect? That war is waged only by one side? Here, the problem is not the cultural Marxists but people who call themselves “conservatives”. They are not. Desires to rule the world and cram Brave New World down everyone else’s throat are anti-conservative. At root they are nationalist, and nationalism arose on the left, not on the right. Russell Kirk was no friend of nationalism.
Most interesting to me was our response to the Chattanooga killings. As in previous such cases, from the president on down we responded with anguish, with weeping, with great sorrow for this terrible tragedy.
That is the response of a womanized culture. A masculine culture responds by getting mad and hitting back, hard.
Of course the deaths of five servicemen were tragic for their families, friends and communities. But the pathetic spectacle of President Obama again mourning a “national tragedy” but doing nothing is not how a state that wants to live would act. (Note that few if any of the Republican candidates would behave differently.)
A womanized culture is soft. Its reaction to anything bad is to weep, hold hands, put up memorials of flowers and teddy bears and generally dissolve in a puddle of tears. The world is seen as a boudoir, and the manners of the boudoir are carried into the real world. The real world chews them up and spits them out. As any student of history knows, softness is a society’s last condition before it is swept away.
An America with a masculine culture would have replied to this and other incidents with what 4GW theory calls the “Hama model”. The President would have gone on television within a matter of hours to say to the nation, “As I am speaking, hundreds of American bombers are wiping the city of Raqqa off the map and killing every living thing in it. I warn all civilians in any other territory under the control of ISIS to flee. The same thing can happen to you.” Not only would this have hit ISIS hard physically, it would have deprived it of its base, a much more serious injury. If no civilians would remain in any area controlled by ISIS, ISIS could not function.
But presented with this alternative, our womanized culture again wrings its hands and weeps. “Oh, oh, women and children would be killed, so would poor, innocent animals. We would become war criminals. Oh, oh. Blub, blub.”
The Hama model does not contradict what I said earlier about our war of endless pinpricks. On the contrary, not doing “precise” air and drone strikes is part of the Hama model. It says, in effect, “Leave us alone and we will leave you alone. If you hit us, we will annihilate you. The Hama model is over fast.
Instead, we will continue to wage a losing war of little, indecisive actions, the kind of war women wage on each other in their offices and clubs. Not content merely to womanize the general culture, Washington is now womanizing the military itself. I don’t know which is laughing louder, Heaven or Hell. 
John Dolan wrote of this as well under the Gary Brecher pseudonym:
“Instead, Moussaoui blew into court looking like Bluto from Popeye: this big, burly, hairy, shouting blowhard full of Koranic piss’n’vinegar. It was shameful to watch the way he talked back to the useless prosecution team. It ruined the whole point of the trial. Look, this trial isn’t exactly a whodunit. Moussaoui boasts non-stop that he was in on the plot, so that’s settled. The point is to make him look weak and terrified and get him to renounce his Al Quaeda ties in public, preferably while crying like a little bitch.
Instead – and it shames me to say this – it was our guys who cried. I can’t believe it! There was a serving US Army officer on the stand, CRYING while he talked about people being (sob!) killed, yes, KILLED when Moussaoui’s pals from the “How to Fly a Commercial Airliner without Landing” aviation school slammed that commuter jet into the Pentagon. This dude was soaking his hanky while Moussaoui looked on and sneered.
Now don’t start telling me about how manly it is to cry. In the first place, no it isn’t. In the second place, even if you think so, they sure don’t think that way in Waziristan and Yemen and Java. In those places, a US Army officer weeping while he talks about casualties means one thing: w-e-a-k. Trouble is, we’re so used to all this boo-hoo crap about 9/11 for home consumption that we don’t see that when it’s time to put on a show for the Muslim hordes (and that’s what this trial is).”
Excellent post and reply.
I’d (provisionally) agree with the application of the Hama Doctrine – but isn’t it a bit counter-intuitive w.r.t. 4GW? If I’m understanding it correctly, a “nutshell” breakdown of 4GW is that a state actor can’t just bomb its way to victory over a non-state, decentralised actor like ISIS…?
Frankly, we need a militia doctrine – armed Americans all over the place, ready to respond with deadly force when a Muslim (or any other) non-state actor begins to commit a terrorist act. Meet 4GW decentralisation with 4GW decentralisation.
Now who didn’t cry when” Ole Yeller died?
It works if you can manipulate the moral level of war. Leveling a city and otherwise staying completely out of the region turns terrorists into the bad guys because their actions brought the destruction, rather than it being associated with Western invaders.
Doesn’t the current civil war in Syria sort of discount the Hama-model? Sure, the Muslim Brotherhood went away for a while but the resentment sat boiling underneath in the meantime until an opportunity arose to exploit it. The world is not a static place. The Hama-model may as well be a fancier way of saying, “whack-a-mole.”
Isn’t the Hama-model also the exact opposite of not messing around in other peoples parts of the globe?
“The second action we need to take is to stop messing around in other
peoples’ parts of the globe. So ong as we keep hitting them with drone
and air strikes, they will try to hit us back on our own soil. What else
should we expect?”
An endless cycle of blood-shed. That’s what we can expect through the application of the Hama-model. Remember when the Japanese attacked Pearl Harbor and we all got pissed? Why should it be any different for Arabs and Muslims?
Let’s also keep in mind 9/11 and how Al-Qaeda played America like a fiddle and we inexplicably found ourselves in Iraq. It’s like William Lind preaches 4GW except when his sense of masculinity prevents him from doing so. Then he reverts to a standard 2GW “steel on target” mindset, i.e. fighting dumb. Whatever happened to the higher level of war? Or does that just get tossed out the window when our feels prevent us from thinking clearly?
Yeah, but Goliath would still be Goliath and David would still be David. It would be easier to manipulate a moral victory out of being carpet-bombed than it would be to justify its practice.
Hama only applies if we aren’t otherwise involved. One brutal response to an unprovoked attack is not “messing around in other peoples’ parts of the globe.”
Was there ever a second Pearl Harbor once the Hama model got applied to to the Japanese home islands?
The Hama model bought Hafez al-Assad insurance against domestic uprisings. That insurance wasn’t passed down to his son because Bashar was seen as softer and weaker than Hafez (and softer, he certainly is).
The popular uprising that triggered the war was based on an economic collapse on multiple fronts. A multi-year drought wiped out Syrian agriculture and sent a million people from the farms to the cities in search of work. At the same time, the U.S. invasion of Iraq sent a tidal wave of two million Iraqi refugees into Syria. These mass movements of people into Syria’s cities along with the drought created shortages of housing and food and sent prices for both through the roof. The U.S. invasion of Iraq also spiked oil prices and thus forced Syria to cut the fuel subsidies it offered to its citizens, causing even further inflation of all goods and costs of living. And the financial crisis in 2008 wiped out the markets for Syria’s exports in Europe, closing factories en made and compounding the unemployment crisis.
The people of Syria rose up in the streets because of a total economic meltdown, not because they hated dictatorship and wanted democracy.
It was at this point of crisis though that Syria’s exiled Islamist parties saw the opportunity to return and challenge the regime again, when they could hijack the mass protests in the confidence that they’d have the backing of the West and the Gulf.
If you’re asking how the Hama model would help us against IS, consider the question of why the Islamic State has not staged any sort of mass attack against Iran or Russia.
With powers like Israel, Turkey, and Saudi Arabia, the answer could be that they’re enjoying the support, or benign neglect, they’re receiving from them and are saving these targets for later.
But Iran and Russia are their diehard enemy. Why don’t they strike Iran? Because they don’t know how either would respond, but they do know that neither of these powers’ responses would be retrained by a concern for the loss of life.
On the other hand, they knew all too well what to expect from the U.S. The Anaconda Plan by way of watered-down air campaign. IS calculated that they could hold out against tactical airstrikes and that the pressure of the Anaconda would squeeze in more recruits, so they had no hesitation about executing Americans.
Why haven’t they killed Israelis? Perhaps in part because the Israelis might do just what Lind said: flatten Raqqah, ISIS’ logistics hub and the lynchpin tying the Syrian and Iranian fronts together.
ISIS will gamble with its life but it is not suicidal. Imperial Japan took a suicidal gamble in attacking Pearl Harbor but it did not commit further suicide by attacking the USSR as well.
ISIS acts against the U.S. with a free hand because it calculates no risks it can’t handle from doing so. The U.S. threatens to escalate by…more airstrikes on tactical targets. Nothing they can’t handle. More arms to the Kurds and Syria’s worthless rebels…nothing they can’t handle. More U.S. advisors to train the worthless Iraqi Army…nothing they can’t handle.
If on the other hand they could not predict how the U.S. would respond, if they knew that unrestrained force was on the table, then IS will likely become far more hesitant to provoke America, much as it is to attacking Israel or Iran.
I see what you’re saying, but I’m not really sure that Muslims think that way.
Muslims are very clannish. We see that all the time. A Muslim terrorist can commit the most horrid atrocity, and even the “peaceful, moderate, Westernised” Muslims will hem and haw and make all kinds of excuses to justify it (Israel, wars for oil, whatever).
I’m thinking that if we flew in and bombed Raqqah further back into the stone age but otherwise put no boots on the ground, they’d still blame us, not ISIS.
ISIS took an early leap to statehood. It claims the legitimacy of the state, therefore it must uphold internal order. IS maintains its legitimacy for a fraction of its people by enforcing Islam in its purest and most primitive form. It maintains it from the rest by promising to keep them safe from the Shia in Iraq and from Assad’s army in Syria.
Leveling ISIS’ capital would strike at its legitimacy by showing that it can’t keep anyone safe anywhere.
ISIS also has internal lines of supply and logistics now that it operates as an army that controls territory. Fighting in the desert is not unlike island hopping. Japan’s island base garrisons were not self-sustaining. They needed to be supplied. Was there ever a Battle of Rabaul or of Truk? Japan’s largest bases were never seized through direct attack, they were bypassed and starved by cutting off their supply lines.
ISIS garrisons will not starve to death but they will run out of ammunition if they can’t maintain their logistics. That is one of the fundamental reasons the Iraqi Army has collapsed so spectacularly so many times thus far against them: Iraqi logistics are so bad that most of their troops don’t have enough ammo to make a stand even if they wanted to.
ISIS does not enjoy the advantages of concealing terrain like the Vietcong or FARC did in the jungle, where it could hide its entire supply network under the trees.
It’s all there in the open. It has a few exposed junctions and hubs like Raqqah. Smashing these will disrupt the whole network and have an impact at the front lines.
This is an element of 3GW that Lind proposes, not 2GW. Striking from behind with surprise and calculated force in order to collapse the enemy at the front. What the U.S. is doing right now is 2GW, albeit in heavily diluted form. The U.S. is dropping bombs on tactical-physical targets, ISIS foot soldiers and vehicle convoys, in support of tactical movements on the ground by the Kurds and Iraqi Army. The U.S. is using the body count strategy, hoping to bleed out ISIS through attrition: application of firepower multiplied by time equaling victory. A fundamentally 2GW calculation.
Firepower always has been and always will be an essential element of warfare. Going from Second Generation to Third and Fourth Generation War does not mean abandoning the use of firepower. It means reapprasing the way one uses firepower and what objectives one is aiming to achieve. 2GW is war of brute force. 3GW and 4GW are waged with calculated applications of force.
A calculated application of force is not necessarily a small one. There was nothing small about the blitz through the Ardennes, or 9/11 for that matter, a tremendous operation for just twenty men to have pulled off.
Bottom line: do not assume Mr. Lind has gone mad and lost touch with his fundamentals when he talks about this.
Thank you for your replies. Very informative and gives me much to ponder.
Great comment
Kill tens of thousands of innocent people (including thousands of children) because 5 men wearing US military uniform have been killed. Very Christianist. Also, a wonderful invitation to nihilists and ‘false flag’ attacks. “We don’t like X, so we’ll kill a few Americans and claim it was done by X. It’ll be foolproof. Those morons can’t tell us apart anyway”
“Was there ever a second Pearl Harbor once the Hama model got applied to to the Japanese home islands?”
What a silly comment. Japan attacked America because their leaders believed that a war with the US was inevitable, so why not strike them while they’re weak. Right now, the US are the main reason why China isn’t dropping nukes on Japan so attacking Pearl Harbour now would be dumb.
The United States killed something like two million Japanese and burned every city in the country to the ground. Don’t you find it strange how little resentment they feel over that compared to people whose suffering at our hands was far less? Japan had thousands upon thousands of people eagerly volunteering to fly planes into American ships and blow themselves up by the end of the war.
What happened to them? Japan itself had political reasons to align itself with the United States – just like Egypt or Saudi Arabia. But Egypt and Saudi Arabia are full of people who hate America and run off to wage war against America. So why have we never in all the decades since the war seen a Japanese ‘jihadi?’
It’s not a silly question to ask ourselves.
“So why have we never in all the decades since the war seen a Japanese ‘jihadi?'”
Some ideas I would float:
1) We basically rebuilt Japan after the war, expending billions on restoring infrastructure and industry.
2) Japan was above a certain level of civilization – which the Muslim world largely is not – at which there is a transition from a tribal society to a unitary state society.
3) The Japanese are not bound by a primitive religion that emphasizes the destruction of competing systems. The Emperor-worship of the militarists was actually more of an aberration in Japanese history than the norm.
I’m not worried that Mr. Lind is losing touch – I’m actually glad to see him taking this tack because it more closely mirrors the sort of hybrid approach I would advocate than does the “all 4GW all the time” approach that seems to be the view of folks like Vox Day, for example.
I’d say use 4GW when it is appropriate. Use 3GW when appropriate. Even use 2GW if such a situation in which it is appropriate would arise.
Frankly, I wouldn’t be sad if we bombed the Muslims further back into the Stone Age, if only to emphasise to them that their actions have consequences. My caveat would be that we should be under no illusions of “winning hearts and minds” as we do so. They won’t love us – but perhaps we can instill a little fear into them.
Of course, this should be coupled with a lockdown on our borders to help minimize any 4GW retaliations.
Keep in mind that Muslims routinely lie about civilian casualties and their numbers. E.g. somehow, the same dead Palestinian baby, in exactly the same posture and clothing, keeps showing up in pictures after every Israeli retaliation against Paleo rocket attacks.
War ain’t fun, war ain’t nice, and war ain’t good. But let’s not be under any illusions that the onus for casualties and whatnot are always on Americans, Israelis, or Westerners in general. At some point, Muslims need to understand that actions have consequences, and that “blowback” works both ways.
Yes, Muslims have agency. They need to be held responsible for their actions.