After I wrote the preceding entry, someone noted that I hadn’t explained all that clearly what 4GW was. I agreed. The seeming defect didn’t bother me, though, for two reasons. First and most obviously, I didn’t feel as if I had to explain the concept in detail: I’d provided links to several short introductions to the subject, and a clearer explanation was just a mouse click away. But secondly, I didn’t see much point in doing so. Even once you do understand 4GW, you haven’t learned much that isn’t more or less obvious to anyone who reads the newspapers. To my mind, 4GW is mainly a way to sell the American officer corps on the need to recognize this type of conflict as “real war.”
That doesn’t mean, however, that the form of war loosely denominated under the heading of 4GW is unworthy of serious study, nor that it is valueless to try and place it within a larger historical context. I just think it’s more useful to approach the issue from a different starting point.
The starting point I would choose are the intellectual boundaries of the subject matter we usually call military history, but which might more properly be called the history of armed coercion or the history of war.
In a previous post, I noted that one of my colleagues, John L. Brooke, had suggested to me that the proper concern of military history might well be described as “political crisis.” John made the remark over hors d’oeuvres before dinner one evening last spring. He outlined what he meant and pointed me toward Edward Countryman’s A People in Revolution: The American Revolution and Political Society, 1760-1790 (1981), a co-winner of the Bancroft Prize and one of the most influential studies of its subject to appear in the last generation.
I picked up a copy of the book and, in the fullness of time, actually began reading it. It didn’t take long to see what John was driving at. Trouble was, Countryman doesn’t use the term “political crisis” except in passing. The core concept of the book, so far as I could see, was “revolutionary crisis,” and for anyone who might be interested, this is explicated most closely on pp. 132-135 of the book. None of it is exactly original. What Countryman does is to pick and choose intelligently among a number of theorists of political and social revolution to create a model suited to explain his own case study, the province/state of New York during the late eighteenth century.
But there was no doubt in my mind that John had distinctly said “political crisis,” not “revolutionary crisis,” and after flipping through the whole book I dropped him a quick email “to check to be sure I haven’t somehow missed something important; for instance that revolutionary crisis might be a subset of political crisis. If you could reassure me (or correct me) on this point, I’d appreciate it.”
I assumed that John would write back merely to say, “Yes, that’s what I meant,” or “No: look on page thus-and-such.” What he did instead was more thoughtful.
Mark:
An interesting question. I guess that this reflects my Early Americanist focus on internal wars….
So, I would parse it this way:
All wars are dimensions or extensions of “political crises” [as in Von Clausewitz], and involved the breakdown of political routines governed by constitutions or rules.
Wars are either external/international or internal/civil.
External/international wars follow the breakdown of diplomatic [international political] routines
Internal/civil wars follow the breakdown of constitutional routines.
If they leading to constitutional reformulations internal wars are revolutionary wars [aka Am Rev and Civil War].
If they lead to/are directed at fundamental regime changes in conquered countries, external wars are revolutionary wars.
Work for you? Let me know what you think.
I wrote back:
Hi John,
Thanks for the response. Yes, that’s pretty much what I understood you to be driving at in our previous conversation.
I think the basic line of demarcation is exactly right. There’s such a thing as “normal” domestic political and international routines. As long as everyone observes these norms (whether they like them or not), we’re not in the realm of war. But when one or more sides seeks to change the status quo, finds it impossible to do so within the normal framework, and steps outside the normal framework to gain additional leverage, then we are dealing with war. I don’t think outright violence needs to be involved, though it often is. General strikes, nonviolent resistance, economic boycotts, social ostracism/intimidation, etc. are just as much instruments of war. This is easy to miss if one thinks only in terms of violence, but if one reframes the question to focus on effective strategy and tactics, it leaps into focus. The First and Second Reconstructions fit this definition of war, and it’s always been striking to me how closely the Redeemers’ insurgency adhered to the concepts the Vietnamese would later codify as their doctrine of dau tranh (literally “struggle” but more accurately translated as “people’s war.”)
I think I’d modify the external/internal division a bit in favor of state and non-state actors. An external war could be waged by a state against another state; it could also be waged against a non-state community or communities (e.g., the wars between the US and Indian nations). An internal war could be waged between the state and insurgents, usually for capture of the state (the First Reconstruction); but it could also be waged principally between non-state actors (e.g., major clashes between management and labor, the Second Reconstruction). Where two non-state antagonists are concerned, the state is seldom neutral, but it isn’t necessarily fore-ordained to be on one particular side. A key dimension of the struggle can be to bid for the state’s intervention on one side or the other. . . .
Let me know if this makes sense to you.
Evidently it did. “These are very good refinements of my rough outline. I would just add that some internal wars produce two states in contest for sovereignty. . .”
Placed in this context, 4GW emerges not as a new development in war, albeit with limited historical antecedents, but rather as a type of war that has been waged for literally hundreds of years. It is asymmetrical, in the sense that it is usually a contest between a non-state actor and an established state with a strong advantage in, if not a complete monopoly upon, the instruments of conventional violence: armed forces, police, etc. Or you could put it a bit differently and call it a contest between an aspiring political order and an entrenched political order that more or less controls the state and therefore the levers of violent coercion. But the established political order has lost its presumptive legitimacy. Those outside that order seek to alter the status quo, and finding they cannot do so within the realm of normal politics, step outside that realm, as I said before, and adopt tactics designed to gain additional leverage.
These tactics can amount to terrorism as classically understood: bombings, assassinations, etc., designed to show that resistance to the established order is in fact possible. They can take the form of guerrilla warfare. In either case, the object is to gain popular support, either though attraction or fear, and over time to build a movement strong enough to defeat the established order on its own terms. That’s pretty much classic Maoist people’s war.
But as John and I agreed, it can also take any number of forms that are not violent but are nevertheless forms of war. Economic boycotts, for instance, were a common feature of the American Revolution during the decade preceding the outbreak of what we call the War for American Independence. General strikes were used in colonial India and Algeria. Symbolic acts designed to attract the sympathy and intervention of bystanders are another effective, non-lethal tactic. The non-violent component of the American Civil Rights movement of the 1950s and 1960s, for example, was carefully calibrated to produce over-reactions on the part of Southern state and local governments that would attract the support of (mostly northern) white liberals and the attention of the non-aligned world. This in turn put pressure on the federal government to intervene.
But as scholars of the Civil Rights era are increasingly willing to acknowledge, the studied non-violence of the Southern Christian Leadership Conference, Student Non-violent Coordinating Committee, and Congress on Racial Equality was tacitly augmented by black organizations ready, willing and able to use violence in self-defense. The differences in philosophy created real tensions between these two types of groups, yet each needed the other. Militant groups would not have been able to make much if any headway among the average white liberal. Nonviolent groups alone would not have been able to survive the unyielding hostility of Southern white supremacists. In other words, an orchestration of tactics took place, and while in conventional military terms we expect this orchestration to be somehow centrally directed, it does not need to be and I suspect, usually isn’t.
One of the most disturbing aspects of the 4GW era, to those who have written about it, is the ability of modern revolutionaries to gain “unprecedented” access to the media–via the web, satellite cable news, etc. Certainly some of the specific technologies are new, but the phenomenon itself would be familiar to anyone who watched the nightly television news during the 1960s. The reason this gets overlooked is that Islamic terrorists are loathed and hated while Civil Rights activists are admired. I have no problem with the moral distinction–though it is worth bearing in mind that millions of people view Islamic resistance fighters in a favorable moral light–but in tactical terms the phenomenon is the same.
In short, Americans have fought a 4GW campaign, right here at home, within living memory. And won it. Or lost it, depending on your sympathies, point of view, and assessment of the post-Civil Rights era.
