Just had occasion to read Military History and Fourth Generation Warfare by Tim Junio in this past Spring’s Journal of Strategic Studies. It is a compelling critique of 4GW theory.

This article examines ‘Fourth Generation Warfare’ (4GW), a theory of how warfare has evolved and is evolving, from the perspective of military history. The author makes three primary claims: 4GW advocates’ boxing of history into ‘generations’ is logically and temporally inconsistent; 4GW authors misuse history by selectively choosing case studies and applying them out of context; and other arguments regarding the current and future character of warfare are more convincing. The author concludes that scholars and policymakers would be well served by considering elements of 4GW, particularly its analysis of insurgency, but that the concept should be subsumed by a broader US grand strategy that retains a strong focus on preparation for conventional warfare.

Besides critiquing the selective case studies used by 4GW proponents, Junio offers some counter-examples cases. His discussion of the Philippines insurrection and Aguinaldo’s attempts to affect the 1900 American presidential election is particularly compelling.

I’ve dropped the 4GW debate, but recommend this to anyone still engaged.

From Inside the Ring:

Air Force Gen. Kevin P. Chilton, commander of the U.S. Strategic Command, said earlier at the conference that strategic deterrence has been neglected for two decades and that the conference was called to examine the issue for 21st-century threat.

“I believe it is vitally important not only for our nation, but also for global security, that we reinvigorate thinking about strategic deterrence,” Gen. Chilton said.

This blog, for one, welcomes the call to reinvigorate thinking on strategic deterrence. Who’s going to step up? From where is the next Schelling, the next Wohlstetter going to come?

A nice bit on the USNS Comfort’s latest mission.

From April to July, the Comfort’s crew traveled to seven countries, performed over 1,600 surgeries, wrote nearly 200,000 prescriptions, and provided 43,000 pairs of glasses. All told, the crew treated over 100,000 people who lacked access to advanced medical care. One-third of the patients were children.

…The ship’s crew of 1,500, composed of international military personnel and local volunteers, worked out of twelve operating rooms and four intensive care units using state-of-the-art equipment. The ship spent ten days each at ports in the Dominican Republic, Haiti, El Salvador, and Nicaragua, among others. Total cost: an estimated $25 million.

The money quote that sums up why DoD will ultimately want to give away this mission, from a Navy hospital corpsman: “The military isn’t just about war. We have a whole humanitarian aspect.” A perfect mentality for development work. Some will worry about the military losing its warfighting ethos, of course, which is why this mission eventually needs its own bureaucratic home.

Colin Clark at DoD Buzz has an extensive discussion of Army modernization featuring Dan Goure of the Lexington Institute as the critic of the Army’s current plans. Colin begins his summary with the following:

The Army has, under enormous pressure from Defense Secretary Robert Gates, begun to turn into an institution planning for the last war — one of the greatest sins of which a military can be accused.

And ends his summary with this:

…Broadly speaking, Goure said the real problem lies with the defense secretary, who wants to rebalance the US military to fight the kinds of wars we are currently engaged in.

These are not equivalent statements. Fighting the last war may be bad, but we have to actually finish the wars we are in before someone wanting to improve our ability to fight OIF and OEF can credibly be charged with fighting the last war.

Stephen Biddle’s argument makes more sense to me:

The problem is that the United States is now waging two real wars against actual opponents who do not fight like Hezbollah in 2006 or Croatian separatists in 1991. The future is one thing–the present is another. The young Turks overproject today’s demands into the future, but they get today’s demands exactly right. And today’s wars are extremely demanding. If the U.S. military does not remake itself to maximize effectiveness in counterinsurgency, it could easily lose one or both of today’s conflicts with potentially grave consequences.

Those who have the audacity to advocate fighting today’s wars shouldn’t be accused of fighting the last war. Today’s war doesn’t equal the last war.

Barnett’s latest in WPR discusses the Inspector General’s report on the troubled history of reconstruction in Iraq.

It represents a compelling data point supporting Barnett’s argument regarding the inevitability of a “Department of Everything Else” in charge of international development, post-conflict/post-disaster reconstruction and stabilization.

Saw it on Friday; highly recommended. Barnett’s brief review sums it up well. All I have to add is that I’ve seen several awful attempts at satirizing the Iraq war and American national security over the past few years and this movie is the first one to hit its mark. Failed satires take a random set of images and ideas from current events, throw them into a blender and spread the resulting melange over the screen with an ironic raise of the eyebrow. Their mistake is overlooking the fact that a satire creates humor by speaking truth through absurdity… which requires that one know what the truth is in the first place.

For anyone who has ever spent time in the corridors of power of DC, In the Loop will make you laugh until you cry. Or maybe the other way around. Either way, you’ll see truth in it.

Excellent LA Times article tracking some of the complexities of metrics in COIN.

U.S. military officials in Afghanistan have halted the practice of releasing the number of militants killed in fighting with American-led forces as part of an overall strategy shift that emphasizes concern for the local civilian population’s well-being rather than hunting insurgent groups.

…The division command never used casualty figures as a measure of its progress, believing they had little relevancy. But public affairs officers considered a high enemy death toll an easy way for the American public to understand that U.S. forces had won an engagement.

…Afghanistan’s own security forces routinely report how many militants they have killed in their engagements. For the Afghan forces, it is a sign of their determination and bravery in the face of sometimes steep losses, alliance officials said.

The insurgents, on the other hand, seem to be pretty clear on using the number of coalition troops killed as a metric of success.

USA Today:

The Air Force will train more drone operators than fighter and bomber pilots combined for the first time this year, signaling a fundamental shift for the 61-year-old service, records and interviews with top officials show.

We don’t get this without the creative destruction of the ongoing conflicts in Iraq and Afghanistan. We also don’t get this without Secretary Gates leaning forward on UAV deployment. This is the sort of milestone that may be looked back upon as a key turning point. With the F-22 production line looking like it will stop at 187 and the F-35 still ramping up (with plenty of time for the defense death spiral to cull its numbers), UAVs are an opposite trend line.

Twenty years from now, the first generation of USAF officers whose entire experience is in UAVs will be becoming general officers. 2030 isn’t that far off in program budget terms, when you look at the time it took to field the F-22 and F-35. How many more manned fighters and bombers will we have by then? How many UAVs?

Even if UAVs fall prey to the defense death spiral, they are starting off from such a low base (at least two orders of magnitude less expensive per airframe) that they will be less expensive - and therefore able to be procured in greater numbers - for a long time. Aggregating those trends, what does the USAF’s airframe force mix look like in 2020?

UPDATE:
NYTimes reports on the latest USAF plan to develop drone technology.

Colonel Mathewson said the goal was to create economical alternatives for most Air Force missions. In that sense, the plan — which was approved by Air Force Secretary Michael B. Donley and Gen. Norton A. Schwartz, the Air Force chief of staff — helps cement a major cultural change at the service, where many pilots initially recoiled at the idea of drones.

While the report does not say the shift towards UAS is inevitable, the cost and personnel trends seem to to be moving in that direction.

This is the first case in recent years when Congress, the defense industry and the dissident voices in the military haven’t been able to prevail in a contest with a Defense secretary over the fate of a weapons program, said Jeffrey Bialos, a partner at Sutherland Asbill & Brennan in Washington and a former deputy undersecretary of defense during the Clinton administration. “This may change the politics of defense acquisition programs,” said Mr. Bialos.

“Senate Kills Funds For F-22 Fighters,” By August Cole, Wall Street Journal, July 22, 2009, Pg. 5

Jamais Cascio discusses the trends in intelligence augmentation.

Regarding the realm of pharmacology, this opens up a new environment of competition - are our cognitive medications better than theirs?

Regarding super-intelligent machines, I’ll make two points:

1) we can’t assume that we’ll be able to ask good questions of such a super-intelligent machine (the 42 problem), and

2) let’s not build SkyNet.