{"id":45,"date":"2020-11-05T09:24:50","date_gmt":"2020-11-05T14:24:50","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/courses.bowdoin.edu\/government-legal-studies-2680-fall-2020-yellow-jackets\/?page_id=45"},"modified":"2020-12-16T12:16:54","modified_gmt":"2020-12-16T17:16:54","slug":"historical-analysis","status":"publish","type":"page","link":"https:\/\/courses.bowdoin.edu\/government-legal-studies-2680-fall-2020-yellow-jackets\/historical-analysis\/","title":{"rendered":"Historical Analysis"},"content":{"rendered":"

Main Historical Events that Signalled Transition into Modern Fourth-Generation Warfare<\/b><\/p>\n

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The trend towards infiltrating an adversary\u2019s society coincides with not only technological but social\/economic\/political advancements. During colonization, countries were equipped to \u201cfield larger, more technologically-advanced armies\u201d (Hammes 17). Second-generation warfare, which emphasized \u201cindirect firepower\u201d 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 \u201ccommand and control\u201d of one\u2019s adversary (Hammes 31). They initiated \u201cintense training programs\u201d that taught leaders to \u201clead their units into the gaps\u201d of their adversaries\u2019 armies (Hammes 24, Hammes 27). Furthermore, the need to legitimize one\u2019s military tactics to civilians emerged: civilians were no longer \u201cblindly faithful\u201d to the military and thus had to be persuaded by Hitler\u2019s \u201cmyth as part of his propaganda\u201d for the war cause (Hammes 25). Fourth-generation warfare first emerged before World War II, but whose practices weren\u2019t 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).\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n

During the Vietnam War, Ho Chi Minh and Vo Nguyen Giap expanded on Mao\u2019s 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\u2019s \u201cnatural divisiveness of a democracy\u201d in order to destabilize US public support for military involvement (Hammes 74). They continued to enforce Mao\u2019s standard of flexibility as \"\"during the late 1950s, \u201cdifferent parts of Vietnam were in different phases of the insurgency\u201d (Hammes 62). In 1975, the Viet Cong successfully carried out their final phase in the \u201cSpring Offensive,\u201d 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\u2019s ascription to 4GW, by ascribing to Mao\u2019s three phases and implementing propaganda efforts to weaken US willingness to continue the war from abroad.\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n

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 <\/span>Desert Storm<\/span><\/i> (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 \u201ccapabilities to wage asymmetric or irregular conflict\u201d with conventional firepower, \u201cdeployments to Somalia, Haiti, and the Balkans in the 1990s\u201d led to withdrawals because the \u201cdemand\u201d 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\u2019ve required tactics aimed at affecting the public faith in our adversaries, including nonstate actors.<\/span><\/p>\n

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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\u2019, still attacking its democracy but by \u201cundermining faith in the US democratic process\u201d (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.\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n

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Image Creds:<\/p>\n

Mao Tse-Tung:\u00a0https:\/\/chineseposters.net\/sites\/default\/files\/images\/e13-859.jpg<\/a><\/p>\n

Vietnam War Protests:\u00a0https:\/\/www.washingtonpost.com\/resizer\/UysddGs73-ce1s0NUyFGZXvm2Mw=\/1484×0\/arc-anglerfish-washpost-prod-washpost.s3.amazonaws.com\/public\/KQQW43EXZ4I6PAXE6EDW63LBKI.jpg<\/a><\/p>\n

Anti-Hillary Russian Post:\u00a0https:\/\/www.inquirer.com\/resizer\/ZhE3nuIQfyI_2tAEU8XEy6M-HWQ=\/1400×0\/center\/middle\/arc-anglerfish-arc2-prod-pmn.s3.amazonaws.com\/public\/PY6CJOAQLRBYXEO6RIDDMYSV5Y.png<\/a><\/p>\n

Russia meme:\u00a0https:\/\/i.kym-cdn.com\/photos\/images\/newsfeed\/001\/353\/228\/97f.png<\/a> (edited by Lior Raz-Farley, Adobe Photoshop 2020)<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Main Historical Events that Signalled Transition into Modern Fourth-Generation Warfare The trend towards infiltrating an adversary\u2019s society coincides with not only technological but social\/economic\/political advancements. During colonization, countries were equipped to \u201cfield larger, more technologically-advanced armies\u201d (Hammes 17). Second-generation warfare, which emphasized \u201cindirect firepower\u201d resulted from the economic prosperity of industrialism, along with the infrastructures […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"parent":0,"menu_order":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","template":"","meta":{"footnotes":""},"class_list":["post-45","page","type-page","status-publish","hentry"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/courses.bowdoin.edu\/government-legal-studies-2680-fall-2020-yellow-jackets\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/pages\/45","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/courses.bowdoin.edu\/government-legal-studies-2680-fall-2020-yellow-jackets\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/pages"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/courses.bowdoin.edu\/government-legal-studies-2680-fall-2020-yellow-jackets\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/page"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/courses.bowdoin.edu\/government-legal-studies-2680-fall-2020-yellow-jackets\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/courses.bowdoin.edu\/government-legal-studies-2680-fall-2020-yellow-jackets\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=45"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/courses.bowdoin.edu\/government-legal-studies-2680-fall-2020-yellow-jackets\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/pages\/45\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/courses.bowdoin.edu\/government-legal-studies-2680-fall-2020-yellow-jackets\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=45"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}