One of the ongoing themes of this column has been gangs and the role they play in a Fourth Generation world. Here in the United States they already serve as an alternative primary loyalty (alternative to the state) for many urban young men. Gangs will likely be a major player in 4GW because gang members are expected to fight. Those who won’t do not remain gang members.

The November 15 Washington Post had a story about gangs in Salinas, California, that deserves close attention from 4GW theorists. Salinas is reportedly overrun with Hispanic gangs. The Post wrote that its homicide rate is three times that of Los Angeles. It quoted a Salinas police officer, Sgt. Mark Lazzarini, on one of the classic results of state breakdown, chaos:

“Only half of our gangs are structured; the Norteños,” he said. “The southerners are completely unstructured. Half of our violence is kids who get into a car and go out and hunt. These kids don’t know their victims. How do you stop that? It’s very chaotic.”

Salinas’s new slogan might be, “Salinas: where even the lettuce has tattoos.”

But what is interesting in the Post’s article is not the gangs themselves. It is a new response to the gangs. Salinas has brought in the U.S. military to apply counter-insurgency doctrine to a situation on American soil. The Post reports that:

Since February combat veterans of Iraq and Afghanistan have been advising Salinas police on counterinsurgency doctrine, bringing lessons from the battlefield to the meanest streets in an American city…

“It’s a little laboratory,” said retired Col. Hy Rothstein, the former Army career officer in Special Forces who heads the team of 15 faculty members and students (from the Naval Postgraduate School), mostly naval officers…

Rothstein…notes the “significant overlap with how you deal with insurgencies and how you deal with cities that are under siege from gangs.”…

Leonard A. Ferrari, provost of the naval Postgraduate School, embraced the project from the start, hearing…an opportunity for a school “in transition from just a defense institution to a national homeland and even a human security institution.”…

“The idea was, not just Salinas,” Ferrari said, “but is there a national model for this”

From the perspective of 4GW theory, this is an important development. The Naval Postgraduate School is a DOD institution, part of the U.S. government. Its involvement in Salinas marks the federal government’s formal recognition of Fourth Generation war on American soil, and the need for a “national model” to counteract it. If we must involve the U.S. military to lead counterinsurgency efforts in American cities, then it is difficult to deny that we face something like insurgencies in those same cities. Again, the significance is that this is now formally admitted by the U.S. government, not merely noted by “outside the beltway” observers of 4GW.

The U.S. military officers advising Salinas on how to wage an anti-gang counterinsurgency are doing so as volunteers, according to the Post, to avoid Constitutional issues. But the camel’s nose is obviously inside the tent. Many wars have begun by sending “volunteers.” If, as likely, the volunteers prove insufficient, regular troops will follow.

As someone who believes in a strictly limited federal government, the government envisioned by our Founders, I find this troubling. But from a 4GW perspective, I also know it is inevitable. As I have said time and again, the main Fourth Generation threat we will face will be on our own soil, not halfway around the world, where we are currently pouring our strength out into the sand. We will come to regret that waste bitterly.

Objectively, what the Washington Post has reported is a milestone, to be neither praised nor regretted but merely noted. It denotes another step toward 4GW here at home. It is a step we cannot avoid. As both imported and domestically-generated Fourth Generation entities ramp up their warfare on American soil, the U.S. military will be drawn in. As is the case in 4GW overseas, it will probably fail. Old Uncle Karl was right: the state will wither away. But what follows will not be communism. It will be chaos.

Note: Regrettably, the d-n-i website, which had become the worldwide “go to” forum on 4GW, is shutting down. It is a major loss. Fortunately, John Robb has agreed to carry all my columns on his website, Global Guerrillas. All my archived columns will also be moved there from d-n-i, as will the important K.u.K Austro-Hungarian field manuals on Fourth Generation war.

William S. Lind, expressing his own personal opinion, is Director for the Center for Cultural Conservatism for the Free Congress Foundation.

To interview Mr. Lind, please contact (no e-mail available):

Mr. William S. Lind
Free Congress Foundation
1423 Powhatan Street, # 2
Alexandria, Virginia 22314

Direct line: 703 837-0483

[Comments are off; please go over to John Robb's Global Guerrillas site where Bill Lind's columns should be available shortly.]

Many thanks to everyone who wrote in.  My wife and I are deeply touched.

We’ll try to find someone to at least take over the site as it is and keep the links intact.  Several people have contacted me with ideas.  In the meantime, I’ll leave everything up unless we start having more security problems.

I have great faith in the growing number of bloggers and commentators who cover many of the same subjects we did — check out a few of them in the “Blogs” and “Other Sites” sections on the right.

DNI started in March 1999 with a grant from Danielle Brian and the folks at the Project on Government Oversight. Its original purpose was to house the growing collection of Chuck Spinney’s commentaries on the foibles of our defense program (when you read these, keep in mind this was during the Clinton era.  We were not associated with any political party).  If you’re interested in strengthening our position in 4GW, I’d suggest a generous donation to POGO.  You could also run for office.

I’d like to thank Danielle, Chuck, Marcus Corbin (our original project officer at POGO and the person who commissioned A Swift, Elusive Sword), Ginger Richards (who designed and operated all the various versions of the site), Bill Lind and all of our other contributors, and all who have taken the time to compose comments.

Chet Richards,
Editor
Singapore (for another couple of days)

In response to the killing of 13 American soldiers at Ft. Hood by an Islamic U. S. Army major, a number of senior officials have expressed their fear, not of Islam, but of a possible threat to “diversity.” “Diversity” is one of the many false gods of “Political Correctness.” But what exactly is Political Correctness?

Political Correctness is cultural Marxism, Marxism translated from economic into cultural terms. Its history goes back not to the 1960s but to World War I. Before 1914, Marxist theory said that if a major war broke out in Europe, the workers of every country would join together in a revolution to overthrow capitalism and replace it with international socialism. But when war came, that did not happen. What had gone wrong?

Two Marxist theorists, Antonio Gramsci in Italy and Georg Lukacs in Hungary, independently came up with the same answer. They said that Western culture and the Christian religion had so “blinded” the working class to its true (Marxist) class interests that Communism was impossible in the West until traditional culture and Christianity were destroyed. When Lukacs became Deputy Commissar for Culture in the short-lived Bela Kun Bolshevik government in Hungary in 1919, one of his first acts was introducing sex education into the Hungarian schools. He knew that destroying traditional sexual morals would be a major step toward destroying Western culture itself.

Lukacs became a major influence on a Marxist think tank established in 1923 at Frankfurt University in Germany, the Institute for Social Research, commonly known as the Frankfurt School. When Max Horkheimer took over as director of the Frankfurt School in 1930, he set about in earnest to do Lukacs’ bidding by translating Marxism from economic into cultural terms. Other Frankfurt School members devoted to this intellectually difficult task were Theodor Adorno, Eric Fromm, Wilhelm Reich and Herbert Marcuse. Theirs was not the Marxism of the Soviet Union – Moscow considered them heretics – but it was Marxism nonetheless.

The Frankfurt School’s key to success was crossing Marx with Freud. They argued that just as under capitalism everyone lived in a state of economic oppression, so under Western culture people lived under psychological repression. From psychology they also drew the technique of psychological conditioning. Want to “normalize” homosexuality? Just show television program after television program where the only normal-seeming white male is homosexual.

In 1933 the Frankfurt School moved from Germany to New York City. There, its products included “critical theory,” which demands constant, destructive criticism of every traditional social institution, starting with the family. It also created a series of “studies in prejudice,” culminating in Adorno’s immensely influential book, The Authoritarian Personality, which argued that anyone who defends traditional culture is a “fascist” and also mentally ill. That is why anyone who now dares defy “PC” gets sent to “sensitivity training,” which is psychological conditioning designed to produce submission.

In the 1950s and 1960s, Herbert Marcuse translated the abstruse work of the other Frankfurt School thinkers into books college students could understand, such as Eros and Civilization, which became the Bible of the New Left in the 1960s. Marcuse injected the Frankfurt School’s cultural Marxism into the baby boom generation, to the point where it is now that generation’s ideology. We know it as “multiculturalism,” “diversity” or just Political Correctness.

That is the dirty little secret of Political Correctness, folks: it is a form of Marxism. If the average American knew that, I suspect Political Correctness would be in serious trouble.

The Ft. Hood killings raise an interesting question: why would Marxists of any variety come to the support of Islam? After all, if the Islamics took over, they would cut Marxists’ throats even before they cut the throats of Christians and Jews. The answer is that cultural Marxism will ally with any force that helps it to achieve its goals, destroying Western culture and Christianity.

Obviously, there is far more to the history of the Frankfurt School and its creation of Political Correctness than I can cover in a short column. This is just a bare-bones outline. For those who want to learn more (and I hope you do), you can find a short book on the subject, which I edited, on the website of the Free Congress Foundation. Free Congress also produced a short video documentary history of the Frankfurt School, which I’m told is available on Youtube (look under Frankfurt School or under my name). The video is especially valuable because we interviewed the principal American expert on the Frankfurt School, Martin Jay, who was then the chairman of the History Department at Berkeley (and obviously no conservative). He spills the beans.

Most people in the U. S. military hate Political Correctness, but they don’t know how to fight it. The way to fight it is to find out what it really is, and make sure all your friends find out too. Political Correctness is cultural Marxism, which is to say intellectual Soylent Green. Here more than in anything else, knowledge is a weapon!

William S. Lind, expressing his own personal opinion, is Director for the Center for Cultural Conservatism for the Free Congress Foundation.

To interview Mr. Lind, please contact (no e-mail available):

Mr. William S. Lind
Free Congress Foundation
1423 Powhatan Street, # 2
Alexandria, Virginia 22314

Direct line: 703 837-0483

Comments are welcome; please observe our comment policy.

We should treat terrorists like common criminals and give them all the benefits of true and open justice — not merely because it demonstrates our indomitability, but because it makes us all safer. Once a society starts circumventing its own laws, the risks to its future stability are much greater than terrorism.

Point I tried to make — repeatedly — in If We Can Keep It.

Hat tip to James Fallows’s blog for the reference (and his commentary is also well worth the read).

James Gimian
and
Barry Boyce

Presented by the Georgetown University, Edmund Walsh School of Foreign Service, Center for Peace and Security Studies (CPASS).

November 18, 2009
Reed Alumni House
3601 O Street NW
(Brick House with White Pillars)
Washington, DC

Open to the public.

4:30 pm – 6:00 pm

Chaos, conflict, and the escalation of complex challenges seem to define our experience today, whether we’re an army commander, policy maker, business leader, or just trying to manage our world. Nowhere is this experience more evident than in the security community. Because the ordinary approaches often don’t work when things are complex, and because the stakes are so high nowadays, we need other skills and tools to rely on when things don’t go our way.

For 2500 years Sun Tzu’s Art of War has provided leaders with skillful strategies for working with complex challenging situations, conflict, and war. A model of nonlinear, synthetic thinking, this ancient text offers key lessons that are strikingly modern: the central importance of knowledge, seeing the whole system, and how networks can be managed to achieve objectives.

James Gimian and Barry Boyce have consulted and taught on how to apply the strategies in Sun Tzu’s The Art of War in a wide variety of settings over the past 25 years. They are authors of The Rules of Victory: How to Transform Chaos and Conflict-Strategies from the Art of War (2008), and produced a critically acclaimed and best-selling translation of The Art of War: The Denma Translation, currently used in the Naval and Air Force War Colleges. Gimian and Boyce are also longtime publishing and writing professionals, currently serving as publisher (Gimian) and senior editor (Boyce) of the Shambhala Sun, North America’s leading Buddhist-inspired magazine.

Join us for an exploration of strategies from Sun Tzu’s Art of War for engaging complex problems in our increasingly challenging world.

If you’re going, please RSVP

[Comment -- The Rules of Victory is a superb book.  Not easy reading, but I'd put it on a par with The Japanese Art of War (by Thomas Cleary -- and one of Boyd's favorites) in importance for reaching a deeper understanding of Boyd's strategic concepts.]

Last week’s shootings at Ft. Hood, in which thirteen U. S. Soldiers were killed and 30 people wounded, appear to be a classic example of Fourth Generation war. The shooter, U. S. Army Major Nidal Malik Hasan, was a practicing Muslim. He sometimes wore traditional Islamic dress and carried a Koran. He reportedly cried “Allahu Akbar” before he opened fire. Though American-born and a U.S. citizen (and army officer), Major Hasan appears to have transferred his primary loyalty away from the state to something else, Islam. For his new primary loyalty, he was willing to kill. That is what defines Fourth Generation war.

This incident should put an end to the misinterpretation of 4GW that defines it as “what Mao did.” Mao Tse-tung’s wars were not 4GW. They were fought within the framework of the state, for political control of a state. Mao had nothing to do with the “leaderless resistance” last week’s shootings represent. Major Hasan’s motives transcended the political. According to the November 9 Washington Post, a few hours before he opened fire, Major Hasan said to a neighbor, “I’m going to do good work for God.”

The Establishment, which continues to pretend the state (or Globalist super-state) has a monopoly on primary loyalty, predictably proclaimed the shootings the actions of “a madman.” That is what old and passing orders always say about the first avatars of the coming order (or disorder). It’s how the old order whistles past the graveyard – its own graveyard.

The cultural Marxists, leaping to the defense of “diversity,” their favorite poison for Western societies, claim Major Hasan’s massacre of his fellow soldiers does not represent Islam. Sorry, but it represents Islam all too well. Islam does not recognize any separation between church and state. States have no legitimacy in Islam; legitimacy adheres only to the Ummah, the community of all believers. The only legitimate law is Sharia. All Muslims are commanded to wage jihad against all non-Islamics. Loyalty to Islam must be the believer’s primary loyalty. Nightwatch for 5 November writes:

Two years ago, a devout Pakistani cabdriver told Nightwatch that if Allah called him or any devout Muslim to go on jihad and to kill his family and even the riders in his cab, he must do it immediately. He made that statement calmly as a matter of fact, while driving north on US 1.

This was not the statement of an insane man, but of an educated man with a degree in engineering who was making ends meet; a devoted family man and a good cab driver.

There are of course peaceful Islamics; peace be upon them. But peaceful Islamics are also lax Islamics. The ongoing Islamic revival is converting more and more Muslims, especially young men, to its purer version of Islam. That is happening everywhere, including among Islamics in Europe and America. As Islamic Puritanism spreads, violence will spread with it.

At the same time, it would be an error to think of 4GW threats within Western societies as confined to Islam. The U.S. military has already seen soldiers kill other soldiers as part of gang-related activities. Gangs may be as important an alternate primary loyalty as religion. As the state loses its legitimacy, the variety of new primary loyalties that arise to replace it will be limitless.

As this column has often warned, Fourth Generation war is not just something fought “over there.” It comes to a theater near you. That includes places like Ft. Hood. Many 4GW entities know that the best way to deal with hostile state security forces, police as well as military, is to take them from within. Last week also saw the killing of five British soldiers in Afghanistan by an Afghan policeman working with their unit. Many police departments along the southern U.S. border are owned by the drug traffickers.

The Establishment will attempt to label the massacre at Ft. Hood an “isolated incident.” On the contrary, it is just a foretaste of many more such actions to come. How might states reverse that trend? Three things might help:

1. Stay out of Fourth Generation wars overseas. Intervening in areas of stateless disorder imports their disorder.
2. Be prepared to outlaw violent alternative primary loyalties, including some religions (which in the case of the U. S. would require Constitutional amendments). To those who argue that religious tolerance must be unlimited, I ask, would we tolerate the re-establishment of the Aztec religion, with its demand for ceaseless human sacrifices, on American soil? Of course not.
3. Strengthen the legitimacy of the state, which in Western societies usually means reducing, not augmenting, the power and intrusiveness of the central government. Nothing undermines the legitimacy of a state more effectively than attempts to “re-make” a society according to some ideology’s demands, as is now happening in the West in the name of cultural Marxism, aka “multiculturalism.” A legitimate government defends its society’s traditional culture, it does not assault that culture.

Ask not for whom the bells at Ft. Hood toll; they toll for the state.

William S. Lind, expressing his own personal opinion, is Director for the Center for Cultural Conservatism for the Free Congress Foundation.

To interview Mr. Lind, please contact (no e-mail available):

Mr. William S. Lind
Free Congress Foundation
1423 Powhatan Street, # 2
Alexandria, Virginia 22314

Direct line: 703 837-0483

Comments are welcome; please observe our comment policy.

My recent trip to the Baltic included a week with the Royal Swedish Navy and the Swedish Marines, the First Amphibious Regiment. The hospitality of both surpassed anything I could have expected, including a chance to conn one of the superb Class 90 patrol craft through the skerries. At 40 knots the boat rode like a Pullman car but also turned like a Fokker DR-1. Any navy interested in controlling green or brown water would be wise to take a look at the Class 90.

As my hosts stressed to me, the Swedish armed forces have a strong Third Generation heritage. Historically they had close ties with the German military. While Swedish armies often fought in Germany, Sweden never went to war against Germany. Kaiser Wilhelm II was an honorary admiral in the Royal Swedish Navy.

But Swedish officers also told me that their Third Generation heritage is under threat. In part the danger is inherent in any military. In peacetime, the drill field comes to predominate over the battlefield. Techniques, which are done by formula and can therefore seemingly be evaluated “objectively,” become the focus of training. Tactics, which should never be schematic and can only be analyzed subjectively, receive less and less training time until they are subsumed in techniques. In consequence, the Third Generation is reduced to maneuver warfare buzzwords while the culture is lost. This happened more than once even in the Prussian/German army. The best counter to it is lots of free-play training.

But the Swedish Third Generation heritage faces another threat: us. Sweden is working more with NATO and the U.S. than it did in the past, and in each combined operation the Swedes are forced to conform to the Second Generation American model (which is also the NATO model). Gradually, that model is taking over, because it is the standard expected of everyone who works with the Americans. That is true all over the world. The great sucking sound heard by anyone who cooperates with the Americans or NATO comes from the drain that leads ever downwards, back into the Second Generation.

It is easy to counsel, Beware! But what can Third Generation armed services actually do to avoid this Charybdis? My advice to the Swedes and others who face the same danger is to learn how to operate the way the Second Generation demands, but laugh at it while you do it.

There is precedent for this. The Germans knew they could not operate with many of their allies the way they did at home. General Liman von Sanders did not imagine the Ottoman army could employ Auftragstaktik, nor did von Manstein expect it from the Romanians (nor anyone from the Italians). They adapted locally, but among themselves they kept their own superior tradition.

This is made all the easier by the fact that it is mostly staffs that must adopt the Second Generation when operating with NATO or the Americans. Swedish combat units can continue to operate as the Third Generation suggests, both tactically and culturally, while the staffs run interference for them. Staff officers can know both generations, and understand that they are slumming when they have to work with people who cannot do maneuver warfare. Again, some humor helps; just think of the Americans as today’s Ottomans. You can work with them without becoming them.

It is of course a pity that the U.S. armed forces are the Typhoid Mary of military models. Like that deadly Irish girl, we present an attractive appearance. Our vast resources and fancy gear overawe other countries and lead them to want to copy us. Regrettably, like Typhoid fever, the Second Generation culture embodied in the U.S. military is a fatal disease. It leaves its victims helpless against Third or Fourth Generation opponents.

As Americans, our seemingly hopeless task remains dragging the U.S. military out of the Second Generation mire it finds so comfortable. Swedes and others who have moved beyond us have the easier job of avoiding retrogression. Just being aware of the danger does much to avoid it. What good sailor, knowing the location of a whirlpool, sails into it? From what I saw, the Royal Swedish Navy has very good sailors.

A personal note: I spent much of my youth building models of 18th century Swedish warships. The models were scratch-built, not from kits, and they sailed. My visit with the Royal Swedish Navy allowed me to close a circle that dates back 50 years. Thank you, Sweden!

William S. Lind, expressing his own personal opinion, is Director for the Center for Cultural Conservatism for the Free Congress Foundation.

To interview Mr. Lind, please contact (no e-mail available):

Mr. William S. Lind
Free Congress Foundation
1423 Powhatan Street, # 2
Alexandria, Virginia 22314

Direct line: 703 837-0483

Comments are welcome; please observe our comment policy.

The history of occupations since the end of WW II is not replete with success.  Even the mighty Soviet Union was not able to continue to occupy Eastern Europe (let alone Afghanistan), the French failed in Algeria and Vietnam, and we failed in Vietnam.

If you count Iraq as a success, show me where our goals included installing a corrupt Shi’ite theocracy that has become a close ally of Iran, ethnically cleansing Baghdad, and eliminating women’s rights (which were among the most advanced in the Arab world under Saddam’s regime, for all its brutality) in much of the country.  We have also virtually eradicated the Christian community in Iraq, and the Sunnis are getting restless again in al-Anbar.  Some success, despite some 4,000 US fatalities and roughly $1 trillion (and counting) down the drain.

The history of real COIN, however, is different.  Legitimate governments can often quell insurgencies in their midsts usually by one of two methods:

• Co-opt the rebels and make other political changes to defuse the insurrection
• Wipe out the rebels along with much of the population that hides and supports them

India faces a virulent insurgency known as “Naxalites.”  The NYT today carries an update:

Here in the state of Chattisgarh, Maoists dominate thousands of square miles of territory and have pushed into neighboring states of Orissa, Bihar, Jharkhand and Maharashtra, part of a so-called Red Corridor stretching across central and eastern India.

Violence erupts almost daily. In the past five years, Maoists have detonated more than 1,000 improvised explosive devices in Chattisgarh. Within the past two weeks, Maoists have burned two schools in Jharkhand, hijacked and later released a passenger train in West Bengal while also carrying out a raid against a West Bengal police station.

After trying option 1, political reform / co-option, which has no appeal for the Maoist Naxalites, the Indians now appear ready for option 2:

“It may take one year, two years, three years or four,” predicted Vishwa Ranjan, chief of the state police in Chattisgarh, adding that casualties would be inevitable. “There is no zero casualty doctrine,” he said.

This will not be pretty, but if pressed to completion, history suggests that it will be successful.  This is real COIN, and those who support our make-believe version in Iraq and Afghanistan might pay heed.

[Speaking of Afghanistan, Victor Sebestyen had a piece in Thursday's NYT that vividly illustrates the folly of letting chimera such as "not appearing weak" lock orientations into a tar-baby strategy:

The Soviets saw withdrawal as potentially fatal to their prestige in the cold war, so they became mired deeper and deeper in their failed occupation. For years, the Soviets heavily bombarded towns and villages, killing thousands of civilians and making themselves even more loathed by Afghans. Whatever tactics the Soviets adopted the result was the same: renewed aggression from their opponents. The mujahideen, for example, laid down thousands of anti-tank mines to attack Russian troop convoys, much as the Taliban are now using homemade bombs to strike at American soldiers on patrol, as well as Afghan civilians.

“About 99 percent of the battles and skirmishes that we fought in Afghanistan were won by our side,” Marshal Akhromeyev told his superiors in November 1986. ]

Comments are welcome; please observe our comment policy.