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A mob of young Palestinians hurl rocks and Molotov cocktails at Israeli troops equipped with the latest high-tech gear. Yet, as Palestinian casualties mount in full view of the TV cameras, the Israelis are hardly vanquishing their adversaries. Welcome to what defense experts call the "fourth generation" of warfare, an increasingly nettlesome problem for commanders steeped in 20th century military strategy and doctrine.
A decade ago, some far-sighted analysts saw this shift coming. In an article in the October, 1989, Marine Gazette, two Army officers, two Marine Corps officers, and a civilian military theorist, William S. Lind, analyzed the evolution of modern war. The first phase, they wrote, was based on massed manpower, arranged in lines and columns and armed with smoothbore muskets. The second generation relied on massed firepower and exploited the development of the rifle, and later, the machine gun. Troops, arranged in small groups, advanced in rushes. The third generation involved changes in tactics, rather than technology, and was exemplified by the German blitzkrieg. The idea was to bypass the enemy's forces quickly, rather than attack them frontally.
In the fourth generation, they predicted, combat would be even more dispersed. The battlefield would once again envelop entire societies, as it did in more primitive and ancient cultures. And military objectives would no longer involve annihilating tidy enemy lines, but rather eroding popular support for the war within the enemy's society.
"Television news may become a more powerful operational weapon than armored divisions," the article's authors predicted. The distinction between war and peace would be blurred to the vanishing point. "It will be nonlinear, possibly to the point of having no definable battlefields or fronts," they argued. "The distinction between 'civilian' and 'military' may disappear."
HELPLESS GIANTS? It's a gripping vision of future warfare -- and there are signs it's already here. In latter-day David vs. Goliath showdowns, nation states are fighting non-nation states -- clans or religious or ethnic groups -- in places like the Middle East, Africa, and Europe. And the Goliaths often lose. It's not happening just on the West Bank and Gaza. A Somali clan drove the U.S. out of Mogadishu. Hezbollah ousted the Israeli army from Southern Lebanon. The Chechnyans have humbled Russia's army.
All the high-tech weaponry the Pentagon, or Israeli forces, can muster won't give them the edge they need for victory. For what is being waged now is low-tech war in populated areas, where the combatants are hidden among civilians -- and are often the civilians themselves. It's a strategy that undermines advanced weaponry designed for open spaces and large, clear targets. "A lot of capabilities we have just simply aren't relevant," says Michael G. Vickers, director of strategic studies at the Center For Strategic & Budgetary Assessments, a Washington (D.C.) think tank.
Ever so slowly, the military is starting to grapple with the problem. "I don't think anyone has an answer for it," says Pentagon analyst Chuck Spinney. The Marines are the farthest along. They have conducted field-training war games involving fighting in cities. At first they averaged 38% "casualties," with some simulated fatalities ranging as high as 78%, according to Gary Anderson, a retired colonel and former chief of staff of the Marines Corps Warfighting Lab.
NEW TACTICS, NEW TOOLS. But the Marines managed to reduce these simulated casualty figures to about 12% with a few tactical changes: For one, they learned not to bunch up in close fighting. Squad leaders now use Radio Shack radios to command grunts, who no longer need to be within earshot. And instead of spraying crowds with pellets, the Marines concluded they'll use countersnipers to get the handful of combatants with actual guns in hostile crowds. Without the gunmen, women and children tend to be less bold. The right training also is critical. Special forces are likely to handle the pressure better than regular troops.
Among the other options is the increased use of nonlethal weapons, most of which are highly classified. These weapons could include everything from force-field weapons that create "barriers" crowds won't cross, to sticky foam that hardens and immobilizes protesters, to slicks that make demonstrators lose their footing.
But war has three dimensions: physical, mental, and moral. And it is the moral element that may pose the biggest problem for nation states. "There is no solution at the technical level," says Lind. "The problem is at a much higher level of war." He argues that a secular state "cannot defend itself because it's not worth fighting for." For Israel to win, he says, it must act like a tribe, just as the Palestinians do when they hail their own fallen as heroes and exult when an enemy is killed. But there are risks. For Israel, that might earn not only the enmity of the world but also prompt international intervention, notes Michael Eisenstadt, a senior research fellow at the Washington Institute for Near East Policy.
THE FACE OF BATTLE. Just as the U.S. failed to capture the hearts and minds of the Vietnamese, it's hard for any Goliath to win sympathy. But the psychological/moral battleground may well determine the outcome of these conflicts. Spinney believes the Kosovo Liberation Army got thousands of Kosovars to leave their homes in order to magnify the ethnic cleansing and demonize Serbian strongman Slobodan Milosevic. If so, it's the kind of tactic that will work under the "fourth generation" theory of warfare.
This problem doesn't require a lot of engineers, or billions of dollars for "Star Wars" weaponry. But the Pentagon needs to put as much energy into figuring out how to fight in this kind of theater as it puts into stealth weapons. Otherwise, we could see a lot more Somalias than victory celebrations in our future.
Crock covers national security issues for Business Week Edited by Douglas Harbrecht
Copyright 2000, by The McGraw-Hill Companies Inc. All rights reserved.
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