5GW v. 1+2+3=4

POST: What If? An Alternative History of the War since 9/11

If WWIV is your gig, then Newt is your man. My problems with his approach are 2-fold: 1) adding all the first, second and third-generation efforts to a fourth-generation war will bankrupt us, first and foremost morally because of the high violence quotient associated with it, and 2) we'd go from tackling problems sequentially to accumulatively,and that would get you blowback from Muslims in general and much of the rest of the world--all of whom feel under some serious onslaught already from globalization (loss of identity) and then would have to suffer our jingoistic efforts at rapid assimilation.

Newt wants his Long War to be a shorter, Big War, but the reality is that the integration processed cannot be magically sped up. Globalization's spread and impact is way beyond our control at this point in history. We will deal with many small wars that it unleashes, but we can't bundle them all up into a single notion. We're no longer in that unitary state world, but a networked one that gets built one node at a time.

Petraeus effort is seminal and does show the way. There's just no shortcutting history with a rousing call to arms.

In short, we should be exploring what 5GW means, not adding 1GW + 2GW + 3GW = 4GW.

(Thanks: Terence Hill)

Comments

[Dave Porter]

I do like "what if thinking" and I do like asking "what will historians in one hundred years write that we should have done today?" From my viewpoint, even Tom and Newt are thinking too narrowly. Americans do not engage or understand the rest of the world the way the 21st century requires. To change this we need to redesign our-16 educational system so that most students learn foreign languages and spend time in foreign countries. We can and should turn them out completely bilingual ( Mandarin, Arabic, Hindi, Russian, Korean, etc). Then we can get soldiers and system-admin personnel that understand the environments they are working or fighting in. And maybe we could also avoid a few conflicts while expanding our international businesses

So, for me, the "what if" question of 20 years ago is "What if 5% of our students had become proficient in Arabic and had spent time in Middle East countries?"

The most important "what if" for today (that future historians will ask) is "What if 5% of US students had become proficient in Mandarin and spent time in China?"

[Christopher Thompson]

Well Gingrich goes on and on ... the problem is that a lot of his premises are quite possible just wrong. And he builds a big and probably unnecessary case on that shaky foundation. Some of the essense of what we proposes maps onto what Dr. Barnett and others propose, but Gingrich's whole package just does not seem to hold together. It is a progression of 80% right statements that build to a %20 right conclusion.

And what's this "The Irreconcilable Wing of Islam"? Does that put Gingrich in the opposed "The Irreconcilable Wing of Christianity"?

[Paul Cajka]

Interesting, since it reminds me of one of Newt's recent books in concept. Why isn't he running for President? Because the USA needs him as a Secretary of State or Defense.

[Louis Heberlein]

Thinking of the global problem/opportunity in a warfare context can be misleading because we are saturated with partial truths, but so are the academic and social themes like: "Why do they hate us?"

Academics want to get into cause and effect dialogues and speak of concepts like acasual synchronousities. Pragmatists like aircraft accident investigators try to identify the proximate cause, or at least the likely candidates, but their main effort is to identify existing conditions that could be triggered by a proximate cause and propose actions to avoid or reduce those combinations of risk factors. We are finally hearing from some pragmatists.

Unfortunately, the public dialogue is still going to be clouded by the information warfare process which is an integral part of the struggle rather than a marginal adjunct. This is ironic since we have been preaching the virtues of transparency to the people and leaders in the Gap communities.

I'm afraid that contradiction will also cause near and long term collateral damage in the old and new Core communities.

[Vinay Gupta]

Sheesh.

Two thoughts. Firstly, we should have got the lights on quickly, and kept them on, and that meant looking beyond trying to fix the electrical grid. Amory Lovins illustrated in great depth that electrical grids have glass jaws in Brittle Power 20 years ago, and that lesson has not been learned.

http://reactor-core.org/brittle-power.html (full text online, worth a read!)

Secondly, I think that 4GW is basically a semantic ghost to disguise the fact that America has gone from being scrappy upstarts to being a global not-quite-empire.

Think about this at a purely tactical level for a minute, ignoring the obvious comparison (which I am **absolutely not making**)

Was what the French Resistance did against the Germans 4GW?

If not, why not?

(Of course, the comparison that I am not making is between the US and the Nazis - there is no comparison apart from the simple fact that we're the larger, more organized force trying to hold ground against insurgency.)

It's all there, really. Networks, untrustworthy local forces and officials, support from better armed neighbors (Iran now parallels Britain, amusingly enough, carrying useful stuff and support...)

I really feel that if you strip off the relatively superficial technological changes (email rather than letters, IEDs rather than old style landmines) the fundamental tactical level is the same.

Probably unchanged since the Romans tried to pacify their lands, in fact.

Maybe if we looked backwards, at the historical lessons from previous occupying forces trying to keep order, rather than forwards at a rather nebulous discussion of new forms of war, we'd learn more.

[stuart abrams]

Reading Gingrich's blather calls to mind Barnett's frequent criticisms of Baby Boomers as global strategists. IMO, the decisive event that shaped the thinking of Boomers was not Vietnam, but rather, WWII. We all grew up hearing our parents talk about "The War" as the ultimate adventure in noble sacrifice. Accordingly, our generation has been obsessed with trying to re-create our parents' experience. A major factor behind the opposition to the Vietnam War was precisely the fact that it was not WWII - it had no nobility about it, I often remember people saying, "It's not like Pearl Harbor, when we were attacked." Newt (born 1943) still wants to be able to fight a war just like the one his parents fought.

[purpleslog]

Vinay: The French Resistance in WW2 Was Not a 4GW Force

Here's why - at this post -->

http://purpleslog.wordpress.com/2007/09/23/the-french-resistance-in-ww2-was-not-a-4gw-force/