Main Historical Events that Signalled Transition into Modern Fourth-Generation Warfare
The trend towards infiltrating an adversary’s society coincides with not only technological but social/economic/political advancements. During colonization, countries were equipped to “field larger, more technologically-advanced armies” (Hammes 17). Second-generation warfare, which emphasized “indirect firepower” resulted from the economic prosperity of industrialism, along with the infrastructures that enabled high production (hammes 19). Third-generation warfare, as famously employed by the German armies in WWII, focused on infiltrating the “command and control” of one’s adversary (Hammes 31). They initiated “intense training programs” that taught leaders to “lead their units into the gaps” of their adversaries’ armies (Hammes 24, Hammes 27). Furthermore, the need to legitimize one’s military tactics to civilians emerged: civilians were no longer “blindly faithful” to the military and thus had to be persuaded by Hitler’s “myth as part of his propaganda” for the war cause (Hammes 25). Fourth-generation warfare first emerged before World War II, but whose practices weren’t acknowledged by Western states yet (Hammes 44). Mao Tse-Tung, leader of the Communist Party, turned towards the peasant population in order to secure intelligence and man-power to fight the Chinese Civil war (Hammes 47).
During the Vietnam War, Ho Chi Minh and Vo Nguyen Giap expanded on Mao’s three phases of an insurgency, tailoring them to provoke the national leadership into doing things that legitimize their rule in the eyes of the public. They also implemented propaganda that struck at the US’s “natural divisiveness of a democracy” in order to destabilize US public support for military involvement (Hammes 74). They continued to enforce Mao’s standard of flexibility as 
during the late 1950s, “different parts of Vietnam were in different phases of the insurgency” (Hammes 62). In 1975, the Viet Cong successfully carried out their final phase in the “Spring Offensive,” representing the beginning threats of asymmetric warfare to greater powers. Therefore, to interpret US loss in the Vietnam War as a result of conventional warfare would be to ignore the Viet Cong’s ascription to 4GW, by ascribing to Mao’s three phases and implementing propaganda efforts to weaken US willingness to continue the war from abroad.
While during the Cold War, losses in asymmetric battles were seen more as outliers, today we are confronted with more unconventional wars against insurgencies. During Operation Desert Storm (1991) we were still able to win with conventional warfare because Iraq was weakened by internal struggles. While we were previously able to compensate our lacking “capabilities to wage asymmetric or irregular conflict” with conventional firepower, “deployments to Somalia, Haiti, and the Balkans in the 1990s” led to withdrawals because the “demand” for counterinsurgency tactics were too high (Nagl 22, Nagl 25). However, even after such withdrawals, military education at the tail end of the Cold War still emphasized the possibility that the Soviet Union will launch a grand conventional attack (Nagl 22). Therefore, the consistent stagnation of our military institution has led us to treat current military conflicts as conventional, when they’ve required tactics aimed at affecting the public faith in our adversaries, including nonstate actors.
Today, cyber-attacks further accentuate this shift towards political rather than conventional wars. As early as 2004, Russia launched a plan to alter votes in favor of pro-Russian candidates in the Ukranian presidential election via a virus (Polyakova and Boyer 2). While viruses like this have perhaps become more detectable, Russia has focused even more inwardly at the United States’, still attacking its democracy but by “undermining faith in the US democratic process” (Polyakova and Boyer 2). Through the unrest of the traceable Russian cyber-attacks coupled with disinformation campaigns launched around the 2016 presidential election, Russia aimed at delegitimizing the election and thus, the military decisions of the future president (Polyakova and Boyer 3). Therefore, disinformation campaigns have contributed to the further infiltration of societies in this generation of warfare.
Image Creds:
Mao Tse-Tung: https://chineseposters.net/sites/default/files/images/e13-859.jpg
Vietnam War Protests: https://www.washingtonpost.com/resizer/UysddGs73-ce1s0NUyFGZXvm2Mw=/1484×0/arc-anglerfish-washpost-prod-washpost.s3.amazonaws.com/public/KQQW43EXZ4I6PAXE6EDW63LBKI.jpg
Anti-Hillary Russian Post: https://www.inquirer.com/resizer/ZhE3nuIQfyI_2tAEU8XEy6M-HWQ=/1400×0/center/middle/arc-anglerfish-arc2-prod-pmn.s3.amazonaws.com/public/PY6CJOAQLRBYXEO6RIDDMYSV5Y.png
Russia meme: https://i.kym-cdn.com/photos/images/newsfeed/001/353/228/97f.png (edited by Lior Raz-Farley, Adobe Photoshop 2020)
