[iwar] [fc:Zinni's.words.prove.prophetic]

From: Fred Cohen (fc@all.net)
Date: 2001-09-27 20:48:43


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From: Fred Cohen <fc@all.net>
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Date: Thu, 27 Sep 2001 20:48:43 -0700 (PDT)
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Subject: [iwar] [fc:Zinni's.words.prove.prophetic]
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September 27, 2001
 Gannett News Service

Just before he hung up his Marine Corps uniform and retired, Gen. 
Anthony Zinni spoke at a U.S.  Naval Institute dinner about the world
ahead facing his son, a newly minted Marine second lieutenant. 

Little did Zinni appreciate his prescience. 

"On his watch," said Zinni, "my son is likely to see a weapon of mass
destruction event.  Another Pearl Harbor will occur in some city,
somewhere in the world where Americans are gathered ...  it will forever
change him and his institutions. 

"At that point," Zinni said, "all the lip-service paid to dealing with
such an eventuality will be revealed for what it is."

American military institutions and attitudes were poorly equipped
psychologically or bureaucratically, to respond to an urban Pearl
Harbor, he said.  They were so antiquated that "Napoleon could reappear
today and recognize my Central Command staff."

Now, the terrorist attacks on America Sept.  11 have summarily thrust
the antique U.S.  military-diplomatic establishment into the era of a
"fourth generation of warfare." It is a historic turn that a small cadre
of futurist civilians and officers have been warning their superiors to
take seriously since before the end of the Cold War. 

"The fourth-generation battlefield," said two Marine officers, two Army
officers and a civilian in the seminal 1989 Marine Corps Gazette article
that coined the term, "is likely to include the whole of the enemy's
society."

The article, "The Changing Face of War: Into the Fourth Generation,"
reads like a rough film script for the terrorists' stunning attacks on
New York and Washington with hijacked jets, killing at least 6,823
people, many of them sitting peacefully at their desks, most of them
civilians. 

"The distinction between 'civilian' and 'military' may disappear," said
the article.  "Television news may become a more powerful operational
weapon than armored divisions."

Osama bin Laden's terror war on the United States fits perfectly into
the fourth-generation matrix. 

"There's no distinction now between combatants and non-combatants," said
Chuck Spinney, a Pentagon air warfare analyst and an expert on modern
war.  "He's bypassing our big military and will try to conquer our will
to resist. 

"His aims are relatively clear.  He wants us out of Saudi Arabia and
wants Israel to disappear.  He wants us to become so terrorized we'll go
neutral."

For 500 years the West has defined warfare, but the authors of the
article on fourth-generation warfare wrote with piercing foresight that
the new look "may emerge from non-Western cultural traditions, such as
Islamic or Asiatic traditions."

In his book, "The Transformation of War," Martin van Creveld, one of the
gurus of a small cadre of fourth-generation warfare believers, wrote
that large nation-states rapidly are losing the monopoly on violence
they won centuries ago in the 1648 Treaty of Westphalia. 

He has had little luck - until now - convincing a military audience. 

"For years on end," he said from his home in Israel, "the military have
been preparing for the wrong kind of war.  Making the switch from
fighting against their own kind to combating a shadowy terrorist
organization that is everywhere and nowhere is neither easy nor cheap. 
Therefore, their reluctance to listen is hardly surprising."

William Lind, a prime coiner of "fourth-generation warfare," says that
despite the Sept.  11 attacks, "I see not the slightest sign that anyone
in the Pentagon gets it.  This is a crisis of the legitimacy of the
state - including the United States at a time when people are
transferring their allegiance to a wide variety of other things."

A former Senate Armed Services Committee staffer, Lind heads the Center
for Cultural Conservatism at the Free Congress Foundation.  Sept.  11,
he said, made plain the biggest change in warfare since the 17th
century. 

The rise of the nation-state, with its top-down military structure,
armies of serfs and limited weapons, gave rise to first-generation
warfare.  That ended with the early 19th century Napoleonic Wars. 

The Civil War was the initial second-generation war, dominated by
artillery, repeating weapons, interchangeable parts, huge armies. 
Though fought with mass-produced, lethal weapons made possible by the
Industrial Revolution, still-primitive tactics caused wholesale
slaughters in both the Civil War and World War I. 

German generals in World War II perfected third-generation
shock-maneuver warfare because they needed a national strategy to
overcome their poor geographic position, flanked by enemies. 

All the way to the Persian Gulf War, U.S.  forces have been fighting
second- and third-generation wars, concepts well past their shelf lives. 

"The only reason Desert Storm worked was because we managed to go up
against the only jerk on the planet who actually was stupid enough to
confront us symmetrically," said Zinni, indicating wars henceforth will
be "asymmetrical" and require new thinking, new strategies. 

"Grand strategy is very important now," said Marine Col.  G.  I.  Wilson
of Camp Pendleton, Calif., a co-author of "Fourth Generation Warfare."
"Saudi Arabia's cutting ties with Afghanistan is the kind of event that
sends a phenomenal cultural and political message" in a
fourth-generation war, he said. 

So, Operation Enduring Freedom won't be anything like Operation Desert
Storm. 

Those days are over, Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld said on Sept. 
27, sounding like a fresh convert to fourth-generation warfare. 

"This is a broad, sustained multifaceted effort that is notably
distinctively different from prior efforts.  It is by its very nature
something that cannot be dealt with by some sort of massive attack or
invasion.  It is a much more subtle, nuanced, difficult, shadowy set of
problems," he said. 

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