Definition of Fourth Generation War

We call "fourth generation warfare" a type of conflict which includes several disputes that, separately, have been fought over the centuries or over the last few years.

Armed conflicts have evolved to a great extent in recent decades, such that the distance between a professional soldier today and a citizen not militarized is abysmal.

If in the middle AgesAnyone with tools from the field could face a soldier with certain guarantees of, at least, putting him in check, today this is unthinkable.

And the war is further complicated by the appearance of techniques, tactics, weapons and new battlefields (such as cyberspace), which still They take the fighting far beyond the knowledge of ordinary citizens, requiring ultra-professional soldiers to fight the conflicts.

It is in this context that wars have evolved into what has been called “fourth generation warfare”.

In this perspective on the way of waging war, uses such as conventional warfare (two armies faced with each other), guerrilla warfare, asymmetric warfare, cyber warfare, state terrorism or war of low intensity.

They also include propaganda (information, counterinformation, fake news), the economic war, politics, or states of violence street civilian.

All these "modalities" or ways of waging war (sorry if at some point I use a language that may seem frivolous or disrespectful) had been used so far more or less Independent.

There is no temporal dividing line that marks the passage from a third generation of war to the fourth, it is a rather blurred process.

Historically, perhaps one of the earliest "purest" examples of fourth-generation warfare is the second phase of the Vietnam War, when the country had been divided in two and the United States replaced France as a foreign power to interfere in the country's affairs, supporting the Vietnam of the South.

North Vietnam had a conventional army, which it used in the conflict, but it also used insurgent guerrilla and terrorism tactics (both carried out by the famous Vietcong) in full territory enemy, as well as a propaganda war also carried out by South Vietnam.

This type of conflict is called "fourth generation" because, with good logic, it is considered that three generations of types of war precede it.

The term was born in 1989, when US military analysts led by William S. Lind were trying to explain the state's weight loss in the war.

The first generation would correspond to the type of war that was born after the Peace of Westphalia of 1648 that ended the 30-year war. It was marked by row and column tactics, and took advantage of the simple firearms of that time such as the musket. The Napoleonic Wars are a good example of these.

The second generation takes advantage of the advances brought by the industrial Revolution, with online fire tactics and movement. World War I is the perfect example.

Finally, and before reaching this fourth generation, the third generation is based on penetrating the enemy lines at one or more points, and attacking them from behind. The Second World War and, above all, the blitzkrieg German are the paradigmatic example of this doctrine.

A characteristic of fourth-generation warfare is that the boundaries between combatants and non-combatants are blurred until they disappear.

Prior to revolution industrial and the introduction of high mobility in armies, the casualty balance of a war was nourished mainly by soldiers killed in battle, Although there have always been civilian casualties, the product of acts of war such as the sieges of cities and subsequent carnage if the assaulting army managed to get in.

In the fourth generation of ways of making war, every person can be a potential soldier, either because he carries firearms like, for example, a guerrilla fighter, or he can be a propagandist, or a cyber attacker.

An example of this type of war could be the one carried out against the terrorist group ISIS, since it has its part of conventional warfare (on the Iraqi and Syrian), propaganda (online actions, as well as some cyberattacks committed by the so-called Cyberercaliphate), and terrorist, with actions committed by civilians against civilians.

The so-called "hybrid war" would also be a type of conflict that would enter into the fourth generation, and that has the clearest exponent in the Russian operation to take over Crimea.

In fourth generation war cases in which at least one of the sides is not a state agent, it tends to present a decentralized and autonomous structure.

This is what is known by cells, as in the case of the terrorist attacks caused by the Islamic State, which are carried out by individuals alone, or by small cells with little or no connection between them, so that when one falls, it does not affect the others.

Many times, the objective is not so much to defeat the enemy, as to convince him that his objectives will only be achieved at an exaggerated cost, which makes him question his performance.

The way of making war has evolved a lot since some primitive man threw a stone at another; swords, shields, spears, gunpowder, catapults, carabiners, rifles, machine guns, cannons, tanks, grenades, missiles, nuclear bombs, airplanes, computers, manipulated information... And we still have to see more changes, but a fifth generation is still a long way off.

Photos: Fotolia - Intueri / Martin Fally

Issues in Fourth Generation War