The World Food Programme provides humanitarian aid in Somalia. |
As U.S. President-elect Barack Obama prepares to take office, some analysts have suggested that he will usher in an international policy rooted in “soft power” — with focus on dialogue rather than confrontation.
David Axe is an independent correspondent contributing to From the Frontline and World Politics Review. He blogs at ”War is Boring” and writes about a new generation of war in Africa, one waged in courtrooms and through humanitarian aid.
U.S. wages first battles in new generation of war
War has evolved rapidly in the last 100 years, prompting historians and strategists to come up with new terms for new ways of fighting. They call mechanized warfare, which originated in the early 20th century, the third “generation” of war, and ideological warfare waged by guerilla groups the fourth.
But what about guerilla-style warfare waged by non-ideological groups against traditional states — pirates, for instance, whose attacks can destabilize trade-dependent nations, but who don’t have strategic goals beyond just getting rich? Free-for-all violence, with indirect global effects, represents a fifth generation of war, according to some experts. And when it comes to defeating fifth-gen enemies, “the old rules of warfare do not apply,” declared Marine Lt. Col. Stanton Coerr, writing in Marine Corps Gazette, a professional journal.
So the U.S. military and its government partners are writing new rules, and putting them to the test on the first of the fifth-generation battlefields emerging in Africa.
Fifth-gen enemies do not have traditional “centers of gravity” — armies, governments, factories, charismatic leaders — that can be destroyed by military attacks. By their mere survival, these enemies undermine the notion that nation-states, their ideals and their economies are viable in the modern world.
Examples of emerging fifth-generation wars include: the escalating piracy campaign off the coast of Somalia which has threatened 10 percent of the world’s sea trade; the 18-year-old anarchy on land in Somalia, which has allowed that piracy to flourish; and the humanitarian crisis in Sudan, Chad and Central African Republic that has exacerbated rebellions in all three countries and defied the efforts of scores of nations to resolve it.
The Pentagon is just beginning to write the new rulebook for addressing these conflicts. Already, one thing is clear: old-fashioned brute force is worse than useless when it comes to beating fifth-gen enemies. Physical attacks by military forces can actually be counterproductive.
“Precisely the same technology that wins conventional wars loses unconventional ones,” Coerr contended. Trying to wage a third-generation, firepower-heavy war against an elusive, sometimes hard-to-define fifth-generation enemy will only cost the United States its wealth, its domestic political unity and its good standing in the eyes of the world.
Instead, the Pentagon plans to use less-than-lethal means to defeat — gradually, and over long periods of time — the latest-generation threats. These means include economic and humanitarian assistance, legal action and communication. Their goal is to alleviate “the insecurities and the conditions of human beings that create these insecurities across state borders,” in the words of Maj. Shannon Beebe, the U.S. Army’s top intelligence officer for Africa. These plans have already been put into effect in all three of the fifth-generation wars listed above.
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