2004); Gary Zukav, The Dancing Wu Li Masters (Morrow, 1979); and Bill
Bryson, A Short History of Nearly Everything (Broadway, 2003).
9. Numerous works cover this topic, from the time (and works) of Cicero to
the work of Shelby Foote and Douglas Southall Freeman. Niall Ferguson and
Max Boot have looked at such first-generation war from the state perspective.
10. See Figure 3 on empire-states.
11. Ideas on the generations of warfare come from several sources, most
notably William Lind, who has published a draft of FMFM 1A. Lind was
a favorite of Marine Commandant Alfred M. Gray, and Lind’s ideas have
permeated all Marine Corps professional education for 20 years; as the
number “ 1” would suggest, these manuals are the bedrock on which Marine officer instruction is based. See also Walter Russell Mead’s discussions
of hard and sharp power in Chapter Two, Power, Terror, Peace and War,
Alfred A. Knopf, New York, 2004, and Frank Hoffman, Parameters,
Summer 2007, who delineates crisply the debate between the classical school
of rational actor-driven war and this uncomfortable fourth generation in
which we find ourselves.
12. Boyd, Col John, USAF, Patterns of Conflict, 1986 (no copyright), p.
111. Boyd is particularly interested in how to “pull an opponent apart.”
Such action need not be, and properly expressed, often is not, military or
even kinetic. Just like Sun Tzu, Boyd would rather win without fighting.
His ideas correlate directly with those of Osama bin Laden.
13. Lind, FMFM 1A. These ideas permeate the book. See also Boyd.
14. Huntington, Samuel, The Clashof Civilizations, Simon and Schuster,
New York, 1986. Huntington takes a hard-eyed, realist view of the world,
insisting that the West and the “non-West” are rising in concert and insisting that one cannot understand conflict without understanding culture. Huntington is academic, dour, and contrarian—and invariably right.
15. Boyd, pp. 64 and 107.
16. Zinni, Gen Anthony C., USMC(Ret), breakfast meeting with author, University of San Diego (USD), April 2004. The discussion has been transcribed,
recorded, and published by USD’s Kroc Institute for Peace and Justice.
17. Sachs, Jeffrey, “The Geography of Economic Development,” Strategy
and Foreign Policy, Naval War College Press, Newport, RI, 2006, p. 272.
18. Barnett, Thomas P.M., The Pentagon’s New Map, Putnam, New York,
2004. This idea permeates the book.
19. Hoffman, LtCol Frank G., USMCR(Ret), “Neo-Classical Counterinsurgency,” Parameters, U.S. Army War College, Carlisle, PA, Summer 2007, p. 78.
25. Naim, Moises, “The Five Wars of Globalization,” Foreign Policy,
Jan-uary-February 2003, p. 30.
26. Boyce, Maj Giles “Russ,” Operations Officer, 3d Battalion, 4th
Marines, and commander of forces in Haditha, Iraq. Interview with author, February 2005.
27. Hoffman, p. 80.
28. Fertig, LTC Randall, USA, Symposium on Counterinsurgency,
RAND Corporation, 1963, p. 80.
29. The ideas of drives being frustrated, of the agency of final disappointment, and of the power of crowd dynamics comes from Ted Robert Gurr,
Why Men Rebel, Princeton University Press, Princeton, NJ, 1970. Gurr
is a sociologist but truly understands crowds and violence. See Figure 5
that was created to illustrate these points.
30. David Kilcullen is a former Australian Army infantry officer and an expert in counterinsurgency and was, until fall of 2007, senior counterinsurgency advisor to GEN David Petraeus, USA. To Kilcullen goes the
credit for the idea of al-Qaeda as the “clearinghouse” for the global jihad.
He points out that the jihad is not what the insurgency is; it is what the
insurgency does. Nonetheless, the global jihad and the global insurgency
are right now one and the same.
31. Johnson III, COL James, USA, Joint Military Operations final paper,
Naval War College, Newport, RI, November 2007, p. 9.
32. See Linda J. Bilmes and Joseph E. Stiglitz, The Three Trillion Dollar
War: The True Costofthe Iraq Conflict, W. W. Norton, New York, March
2008. These researchers used econometrics to figure out how much the
war, in and of itself and separated from normal military spending, will
cost.
33. Bennett, Drake, “Small Change: why we can’t fight terrorists by cutting off their money,” (sic) The Boston Globe, 20 January 2008, p. K2.
34. Boyd, pp. 155, 177.
35. Marine officers are seasoned on the Powell Doctrine, but such insistence on overwhelming force draws from the underpinning provided by
BG Fox Connor, USA, the little-known mentor to both GENs George C.
Marshall and Dwight D. Eisenhower. See Mark Perry, Partners in Command, (Penguin Books, 2007). Secretary of Defense, Robert Gates, in his
article, “Reflections on Leadership,” in the Summer 2008 issue of
Parameters, provides an interesting analysis of this intellectual thread. Connor’s
three rules of war are never fight unless you have to, never fight alone, and
never fight for long.
20. Department of Defense, Irregular Warfare Joint Operating Concept,
11 September 2007, p. 7.
21. Vego, Milan, Operational Warfare, United States Naval War College,
Newport, RI, Lesson 1004, p. 309.
22. Lind, FMFM 1A.
23. See Figure 1. Bohr atom versus QTW model.
24. Lind, 5GW blog.
>Editor’s Note: The author holds a master’s degree from Harvard’s
John F. Kennedy School of Government and graduated with highest distinction from the Naval War College in 2008. While at the
Naval War College, his thesis, “Don’t Trust the Big Man,” delved
further into the ideas explored in this article, using Africa below the
Sahel as the case study on which this article is based. His thesis is
available at the Defense Technical Information Center website.
Join the Debate
Agree or Disagree? Join the discussion at www.mca-marines.org/gazette/Coerr.
