Quotes from William S. Lind

What chance of survival does a culture have when its own elites actively seek its destruction?

War always changes. Our enemies learn and adapt, and we must do the same or lose. But today, war is changing faster and on a larger scale than at any time in the last 350 years. Not only are we facing rapid change in how war is fought, we are facing radical changes in who fights and what they are fighting for. All over the world, state militaries find themselves fighting non-state opponents. This kind of war, which we call Fourth Generation war, or 4GW, is a very difficult challenge.

The second precondition is developing a viable strategy before entering a Fourth Generation conflict. We have already noted that our strategic goals must be realistic; we cannot remake other societies and cultures in our own image. Here, we offer another warning, one related directly to fighting Fourth Generation war: our strategy must not be so misconceived that it provides a primary reason for others to fight us.

Another change is that all three levels may show up in a small local theater of operations. A troop unit may have a beat, much as police do—an area where they are responsible for maintaining order and perhaps delivering other vital public services.

Requiring cats to hunt like dogs will benefit only the mice.

When a state's armed service is given a mission to intervene in a Fourth Generation conflict, its first objective must be to keep its own footprint as small as possible. This is an important way to minimize the contradiction between the physical and moral levels of war. The smaller the state's physical presence, the fewer negative effects it will have at the moral level.

include: Patience. The need for patience is, perhaps, the greatest difference between light infantry and line infantry. Light infantry operations proceed much more slowly, primarily due to the requirement for light infantry to operate stealthily. It takes time to discover targets, reconnoiter suitable ambush sites, and move covertly. Training must reflect this. The

The fact that the root of Fourth Generation war is a political, social, and moral phenomenon, the decline of the state, means there can be no purely military solution to Fourth Generation threats. Military force is incapable, by itself, of restoring legitimacy to a state.

Jaeger" mindset. Light infantrymen are hunters on the battlefield and every effort should be made to impress this upon new members of the unit. All hunters require fieldcraft of a high order. Light infantry should hunt enemies the same way they hunt game.

Stalking skills. Good stalking skills are essential in order to surprise and ambush enemy forces. Poor stalking skills expose a light infantry force to detection, which often means defeat and destruction.

War always changes. Our enemies learn and adapt, and we must do the same or lose. But today, war is changing faster and on a larger scale than at any time in the last 350 years. Not only are we facing rapid change in how war is fought, we are facing radical changes in who fights and what they are fighting for. All over the world, state militaries find themselves fighting non-state opponents.

Finally, despite a policy of de-escalation, there will inevitably be situations where state forces do need to escalate. When that happens, we again stress that it must be over fast. To return to Martin van Creveld's analogy, an adult can get away with giving a kid one good whack in public. He cannot administer a prolonged beating. Once the escalation terminates, state forces must make every effort to demonstrate that de-escalation remains their policy.

Fourth Generation opponents demands the opposite: close integration with the local populace. Instead of making state forces less secure, integration will improve their security over the long run. The reason is that just as troops protect the local people, so the local people will protect them.

Changing the mindset of your men is not a "one-off" event. It must start immediately and continue throughout training. One part of this is an ongoing education program to teach troops about the basics of light infantry. Such an education program may consist of guided professional reading with linked discussions, tactical decision games, sand-table exercises, and tactical exercises without troops.

It is important both for the preparation for war and the conduct of war that they know that Fourth Generation war is, above all, light infantry warfare.

At the heart of this phenomenon, Fourth Generation war,4 lies not a military evolution but a political, social, and moral revolution: a crisis of legitimacy of the state. All over the world, citizens of states are transferring their primary allegiance away from the state to other entities: to tribes, ethnic groups, religions, gangs, ideologies, and "causes." Many people who will no longer fight for their state are willing to fight for their new primary loyalty.

At the most powerful level of war, the moral level, the key to victory is to convince the local people to identify with the state, or at least to acquiesce to it, rather than identifying with non-state entities.

Accuracy. Going through the OODA loop (Observe-Orient-Decide-Act) faster than your enemies remains important, but accuracy of Observation and Orientation may be more important than speed.5 Because Fourth Generation forces are usually "flat," networked organizations, state-armed forces must "flatten" their own hierarchical structures in order to remain competitive.

Force Protection of the kind usually employed by American forces is highly disadvantageous in Fourth Generation war, because it seeks security by isolating the troops from the surrounding population.

This leads to the central dilemma of Fourth Generation war: what works for you on the physical (and sometimes mental) level often works against you at the moral level.

At the mental level, Fourth Generation war turns Clausewitz on his head. Clausewitz wrote that war is the extension of politics by other means. At the mental level of Fourth Generation war, politics is the extension of war by other means. Not only are all politics local, but everything local is politics.

Light infantry operations often follow a cycle that can be divided into four steps: Dispersion, Orientation, Concentration, and Action (DOCA).

We also see the power of weakness. In Fourth Generation warfare, the weak often have more moral power than the strong. One of the first people to employ the power of weakness was Mahatma Gandhi. Gandhi's insistence on non-violent tactics to defeat the British in India was and continues to be a classic strategy of Fourth Generation war. When the British responded to Indian independence rallies with violence, they immediately lost the moral war.

Senseless or unnecessary rules should be done away with. As