4th Generation Warfare and Law Enforcement

I was over at the D-N-I website the other day and saw this post which talks about ‘4th Generation Warfare‘. From Wikipedia:

Fourth generation warfare (4GW) is combat characterized by a blurring of the lines between war and politics, soldier and civilian, peace and conflict, battlefield and safety…the fourth generation signifies the nation states’ loss of their monopoly on combat forces, returning in a sense to the uncontrolled combat of pre-modern times.

I found the concept of 4GW interesting because it seemed to mesh well with my experiences in Afghanistan. While there, I saw a number of parallels between the type of ‘warfare’ being fought there and the threats that seemed to be emerging in the law enforcement arena. For example:

• In the shooting wars of Iraq and Afghanistan, our enemies are non-state actors. They have wide ranging motivations such as political ideology, religion, economic interests or apolitical power grabbing. All however wish to erode or destroy the authority and power of the state.
• In the U.S., the biggest threats (at least, as described by the state system) have evolved from structured, hierarchical ones (the mafia, the Soviet Union and their clients) to unstructured, networked ones (street gangs, leaderless resistance terrorist groups, etc.)
• In both circumstances, it is quite clear that hierarchical structures (like us) don’t do well against unstructured ones. They are slow moving, reactive and have difficulty in understanding and fighting anything that doesn’t look like themselves.
• In many cases this lack of understanding results in situations where the ’structured entities’ (us) devolve into self promotion and institutional preservation. Look at the emphasis in Vietnam on body counts to demonstrate our inevitable victory there. Or today, the regular press releases about how many of Al-Qaeda’s ‘top leadership’ we’ve killed and captured to demonstrate we’re winning the War on Terror or in Iraq. Even worse, consider arguments which point to increases in spending or expansion of bureaucratic institutions as progress in the War on Terrorism.

The same holds true in the law enforcement arena. As organized criminal groups began to suffer from the superior organization and resources of the state system (RICO prosecutions, money for more cops and prosecutors, better information systems), a niche for criminal networks have arisen which make such tools less effective.

So, what is the typical response? In law enforcement at least, the trend has been to try to cram these groups into the ’structured organization’ mold. Therefore, when you see a press release for a big arrest of a street gang, you’ll usually see a chart demonstrating the organization of the gang that makes it look like it was run like a major corporation. Such organization is frequently more present in the minds of both the criminals and law enforcement than actually occurs. Dumb criminal organizations (usually the ones that get caught) try to emulate a highly structured and organized system, usually because they think such a system is the way it has to be done as well as providing an important sense of self worth (if every gang member spent as much time actually working at being a master criminal as they spend in trying to imitate one with images taken from Scarface, The Godfather and whatever else is discounted at Blockbuster this week we’d be in real trouble).

By trying to treat these 4^th generation threats as 2^nd generation we never make any real progress. Ever wonder why, when we have more people incarcerated than ever before in our history and despite almost constant trumpeting of “biggest drug seizure ever!”, “violent gang that terrorized city broken up” or “Number 3 Al-Qaeda man killed” we don’t seem to be making much progress either in serious criminal issues or the War on Terrorism? In many cases it’s because we still have difficulty in getting out collective head around the very nature of the conflict we’re engaged in.

Some point to street gangs (specifically MS-13) as examples of 4th GW in domestic terms but I’d have disagree. At least here in the U.S., they don’t constitute a significant threat to the existing state order. Like many other gangs, anecdotal tales of horrific violence are assumed to be normal behavior for the majority of members (which just isn’t true) and events that occur in other countries are assumed to be occurring here or ‘just around the corner’. So, while MS-13 and similar groups have a much greater influence in a number of Central American nations, and could potentially threaten the existence of the state, the same is just not true here in the U.S.

I discussed this with a colleague of mine and he thought that that one of the signatures of 4^th GW was the intent of the threat to destroy the existing system, which would exclude most of criminal groups existing today. Most criminal groups enrich themselves by acting as parasites on the existing system and require some form of stable system in order to operate efficiently. People need to be able to have jobs and make money in order to charge them for drugs, steal their possessions or con them out of their savings.

I don’t think intent is necessarily a defining characteristic of 4^th GW threats. Rather, it seems to me that so long as the threat, through it’s actions, has the capability of destroying the existing system (intentionally or not), it should be considered a 4^th GW threat. Do we care if network A wants to tear down the social fabric of our society and build another according to their ideology or if, for some other reason their actions destabilize our society? It seems to me the result is of the same severity which demands the same level of mobilization in order to eliminate the threat.

There is a danger in such an argument though. This certainly opens up the possibility to declare anyone who disagrees with goals of the state a mortal threat which should be silenced. We certainly don’t want to give aspiring Orwellian Big Brothers a justification to oppress citizens exercising their constitutional and human rights. How such a compromise could be reached is not clear to me but worth some more thought.

I’m also wondering if our current approach to threats might be misguided. Right now we tend to divide threats into categories based upon the type of threatening activity they are engaged in. So we have narcotics, terrorism, organized crime, and other specialized units to focus on those threats and rarely interact with each other, even when part of the same organization. It also tends to encourage law enforcement to focus on the threats they can easily disrupt rather than those that actually pose the most serious threat (and law enforcement certainly isn’t alone on this. Iraq had the misfortune of being the weakest and most easily invaded of the ‘Axis of Evil’ and so suffered the consequences. To argue it was a most significant threat to the U.S. and it’s interests of the three is just silly.)

The threats in 4^th GW, however, are likely to move in and out of these and other categories to suit their needs. I wonder if it would be better to focus on the severity (or potential severity) of threats rather than just what type of activity they’re engaging in. Apart from institutional self interest and bureaucratic inertia, does such a division of labor make sense given the declarations that we are facing ‘existential threats’? Perhaps these threats aren’t as serious to our existing order as we’ve been told but if they are it seems like the best course of action is to adapt to this new world we’ve found ourselves in rather than expecting our opponents to be concerned about making our jobs easier for us.