Understanding Fourth Generation War
by William S. Lind R ather than commenting on the specifics of the war with Iraq, I thought it might be a good time to lay out a framework for understanding that and other conflicts. The framework is the Four Generations of Modern War. I developed the framework of the first three generations ("generation" is shorthand for dialectically qualitative shift) in the 1980s, when I was laboring to introduce maneuver warfare to the Marine Corps. Marines kept asking, "What will the Fourth Generation be like?", and I began to think about that. The result was the article I co-authored for the Marine Corps Gazette in 1989, "The Changing Face of War: Into the Fourth Generation." Our troops found copies of it in the caves at Tora Bora, the al-Qaeda hideout in Afghanistan. The Four Generations began with the Peace of Westphalia in 1648, the treaty that ended the Thirty Years' War. With the Treaty of Westphalia, the state established a monopoly on war. Previ...