A lesson from: "4th Generational Warfare Handbook"

Learn about grand strategy

I went looking for a book on the subject of 5GW or 5th generational war. While I couldn’t find a definitive book on the subject, I did find “4th Generational Warfare Handbook” ¹ The concept of 5GW relies upon a framework put forth by William S. Lind in the 1985 book “Maneuver Warfare Handbook” Reproduced in the appendix of “4th Generational Warfare handbook” we can briefly walk through the four generations of modern warfare talked about from Lind’s perspective and later other military theoreticians.

The Generations

Generation 1: Line and column tactics. In other words, the very rigid types of battles we expect to find in a movie about the revolutionary war.

Generation 2: Centrally controlled artillery with coordinated infantry. In other words, the still rigid but more modern fighting we’ll see in movies about WWI and WWII.

Generation 3: Also called Maneuver warfare, it adapts to the chaos of the battlefield rather than relying on everyone following orders. According to Lind, this method was never adopted by most militaries around the world despite it being superior to the 2nd generation.

Generation 4: As Lind lays out, 4GW is a regression to the kinds of war fought before the Peace of Westphalia that begins his first generation. “Once again, conflicts have become many sided rather than two-sided. . . The fact that the root of Fourth Generation war is a political, social, and moral phenomenon, the decline of the state, means there can be no purely military solution to Fourth Generation threats.”

Generation 5: Is criticized by Lind, but it puts “non-kinetic” warfare front and center as the true battlefield.

Tryin to win in three dimensions, Squared

I’d recommend reading the entire handbook and corresponding literature if Military strategy and tactics are your thing, but I wanted to share a chart I found to be particularly interesting and useful while reading the book.

The three classic levels of war are generally understood as strategic, operational, and tactical. Standard military procedure would be to make sure the tactical orders given to a squad on the battlefield have the proper operational support of the battalion and help advance the strategic goals of the mission.

The 4th generation introduces three new levels - the physical, mental, and moral levels. As Lind says “the central dilemma of Fourth Generation war: what works for you on the physical (and sometimes mental) level often works against you at the moral level. It is therefore easy to win all the tactical engagements in a Fourth Generation conflict yet still lose the war.”

The handbook proceeds to put these values into a grid to help harmonize the various levels one must understand in order to accomplish a mission.

A grid like this isn’t only useful for the battlefield. Entrepreneurs and others in the pursuit of ethical profit make analogies to war all the time.

If you have a good product your selling (like this newsletter for one) - a lot of times you can think you’re doing all the right things to win someone’s business. What “The Grid” shows me is that sometimes our analysis can be too simple. Often times there are intangible, or harder to define reasons why someone says no, even if your product or service can really help them.

While I don’t recommend going to war in order to win someone’s business - perhaps the grid can help make sure when you’re looking to “win” you are doing so as a grand strategy, not tripping over yourself in the dark.

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1. FYI: if you click the links that take you to Amazon, and buy the book I receive a small commission!