GEN. ZINNI - Words prove prophetic (good read)

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Zinni’s words prove prophetic

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.

-- Anonymous, September 29, 2001


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