Product Description

Ongoing events in Iraq show how difficult it is for the world's only remaining superpower to impose its will upon other peoples. From Vietnam, French and US, to Afghanistan, Russian and US, to Israel and the Palestinians, to Somalia and Kosovo, recent history is replete with powerful military forces being tied up by seemingly weaker opponents. This is Fourth Generation War (4GW), and Colonel Thomas Hammes, United States Marine Corps, tells you all about it. The author explains asymetrical warfare (4GW) as the means by which Davids can defeat Goliaths.

"4GW (Fourth Generation Warfare) is the only kind of war America has ever lost. And we have done so three times – in Vietnam, Lebanon, and Somalia. This form of warfare has also defeated the French in Vietnam and Algeria, and the USSR in Afghanistan…As the only Goliath left in the world, we should be worried that the world’s Davids have found a sling and stone that work." – Chapter 1, The Sling and the Stone: On War in the 21st Century

The War in Iraq. The War on Terror. These types of "asymmetrical" warfare are the conflicts of the 21st century – and show how difficult it is for the world's only remaining superpower to battle insurgents and terrorists who will fight unconventionally in the face of superior military power.

This change in military conflict may seem sudden. But in his new book, The Sling and the Stone: On War in the 21st Century, Thomas X. Hammes, United States Marine Corps, details how "Fourth Generation Warfare" or "4GW" has evolved over decades, with powerful military forces from economically advanced nations being defeated by seemingly weaker opponents.

Hammes, a full colonel on active duty, spent years training insurgents in various locations around the world. He was stationed in Somalia in the early 1990s before the withdrawal of American troops after the events in Mogadishu. In The Sling and the Stone, he uses this extensive experience and his lifelong study of military history to illuminate how war is evolution, not revolution, and that a "weaker" opponent will continually evolve to use ways to avoid direct military engagement. Instead of winning militarily, an insurgency will work to test the political will of a more powerful nation to stay the course during a war. "We win the battles," he states, "but we lose the war."

Hammes has seen the capability of insurgents firsthand. "I was particularly impressed with two aspects of the men I met," he writes. "First was their utter determination to continue the struggle despite the odds. They were not deterred by fear of death…The second outstanding trait was the remarkable ingenuity they displayed for overcoming problems. I found insurgents are not impressed with conventional power. Any nation that assumes it is inherently superior to another is setting itself up for disaster."

The U.S. has not properly prepared, he contends, for the military needs and political will that will be required to win a "low tech conflict" outside the expectations of the Department of Defense’s 20th century planning for a short-term conflict with a high-tech, symmetrical enemy like the Soviet Union. Featuring an overview of the first three generations of modern war, Hammes then focuses on examples of the evolution of 4GW, and how it will require decades instead of months or years to win. He also examines in detail "transnational" enemies like Al Qaeda, and how the U.S. military’s focus on high-tech weapons designed to overpower an enemy in a short amount of time means little when the enemy has a different concept of the time the conflict will last.

The Sling and the Stone is must reading for anyone who wants to know what it will take for the West to "win" the war on terror. As a leading expert on insurgency, asymmetrical warfare, and the unconventional methods used by insurgents like those in Iraq and Afghanistan today, Hammes explains in full detail what to expect from the enemy in the first major war of the 21st century.

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #248110 in Books
• Published on: 2004-09-12
• Original language: English
• Number of items: 1
• Binding: Hardcover
• 336 pages

From Booklist
Hammes is a career Marine Corps officer, and with this selection, he argues that the U.S. has adapted poorly in response to the new generation of guerrilla warfare. Fourth-generation warfare, as Hammes calls it, is what American forces encounter in Iraq and Afghanistan and Israelis find in Palestine, and it is the way of the future: guerrilla warfare characterized by political acumen and patience, using communications networks and strategic strikes to demoralize and exhaust conventionally superior militaries. For many military strategists, including those presently running the Defense Department, this new world order amounts to a call to newfangled technological arms, but for Hammes, smart bombs and spy drones are not the answer. The solution is to study our enemies as they have studied us and build a networked, flexible, and, here's the kicker, less hierarchical military structure that employs humans to fight the humans fighting us. As few as five years ago, such analysis would have had limited appeal, but in today's political climate, this concise, surprisingly readable book will attract a broad readership. Brendan Driscoll
Copyright © American Library Association. All rights reserved

Review

About the Author
A graduate of the U.S. Naval Academy and a career Marine, Thomas X. Hammes has spent most of his twenty-eight years serving in infantry and intelligence assignments. Colonel Hammes is considered by many in the defense community as the foremost expert in insurgent warfare. He has written numerous articles on defense issues and has appeared on PBS’s News Hour. He is a senior military fellow at the National Defense University. He lives with his family in Northern Virginia.

Customer Reviews

Forget the battles, let's win the war
In 1991, Israeli historian and military analyst Martin van Creveld shocked the defense community with his book, The Transformation of War. At least, he shocked that part more worried about post-Soviet threats than about buying weapons. Van Creveld preached that future danger to the West would come from groups other than state armies and that they would employ means that we would find repulsively violent and indiscriminate. In the intervening 13 years, all this has come to pass, but, as Marine Colonel T. X. Hammes eloquently argues in this important new book, you ain't seen nothin' yet.

What we are in fact seeing is "fourth generation warfare," (4GW) a term coined in a famous 1989 paper in the Marine Corps Gazette and now easily available on the Internet. Hammes argues that 4GW, far from being something academic or esoteric, represents the cumulative efforts of "practical people" trying to solve the problem of confronting superior military power. Their efforts are bearing fruit: "At the strategic level, the combination of our perceived technological superiority and our bureaucratic organization sets us up for a major failure against a more agile, intellectually prepared enemy." Amen.

The failure, in Hammes' view, will not be defeat in some Clausewitzian "decisive battle," but failure nonetheless as American politicians, tiring of the costs and despairing of victory, withdraw our forces short of achieving our objectives. He traces the evolution of 4GW through its successes--Mao, the Vietnamese, Sandinistas, Somalis, and Palestinians (in the first Intifada)--and its failures--the Al-Aqsa Intifada and perhaps al-Qa'ida, although the verdict, I fear, is still out on the latter.

It is the transnational element--we are not confronting state-based armies or even isolated insurgencies--that is driving the evolution of guerilla warfare into 4GW. So the 4GW danger in Iraq is not so much the insurgency but whether the conflict acts as a recruiting depot, training facility, and War Lab for violent transnational ideological groups, as was the case in Afghanistan.

Hammes concludes that when 4GW organizations remain true to their socially networked roots, and keep their focus on influencing their state opponents' desires to continue, they win. Such organizations only lose when they drop out of the 4GW paradigm--as when the Palestinians of the Al Aqsa Intifida shifted their focus away from influencing Israeli and Western opinion and directly towards destruction of the State of Israel, or perhaps when al-Qa'ida brought the war to the US homeland on 9/11.

In the last third of the book, Hammes raises issues that should trouble every US political and military leader. Perhaps most penetrating, given DoD's current focus, is the observation is that if information technology is the key to success in future combat, then we're probably going to lose. The reason is that dispersed, rapidly evolving networks can more quickly invent ways to exploit new information technologies than can large, bureaucratic, hierarchical structures such as the Pentagon. The parade of viruses, Trojans, and other worms that assault our (non-Mac) computers daily attest to the truth of this argument.

The solution, in Hammes' view, is to become more of a network ourselves. He is brutally realistic about the problems this entails--for starters we would need to eliminate about 50% of the field grade and general officers on active duty, which agrees with most studies of successful transformation--to "lean," for example-- which suggest reducing management ranks by 25-40%. Such thinking is a refreshing change from the gradualist school of "transformation" prevalent in DoD these days.

Many of his other recommendations will be familiar to those who have read US Army Major Don Vandergriff's The Path to Victory, which Hammes credits as the basis for his own personnel proposals: Solve the people problems and our troops will figure out ways to employ suitable technologies. Hammes' application of Vandergriff's ideas to fashioning a military capable of 4GW are among the most innovative parts of the book and potentially among the most decisive.

By the way, watch for Hammes' sly take on the phrase "coalition of the willing," which reveals a biting wit generally thought rare in Marine colonels.

If you are curious about where armed conflict is heading over the next 20-30 years, you must read The Sling and The Stone. You may not agree with all of Colonel Hammes' recommendations, but you'll find it hard to argue that he hasn't made a correct diagnosis of the problem. And just in time.

Overall Excellent Primer
Edit of 20 Dec 07 to add links.

In the context of the thousands of book on strategy, force structure, emerging threats, and so on, this is a solid primer and excellent work for both those who know nothing of the many other books, and a good place to start for conventional military minds ready to think more deeply about transformation.

This is an excellent book over-all. His two key points are clear: 4th Generation Wars take decades, not months as the Pentagon likes to fight; and only 4th Generation Wars have defeated super-powers--the US losing three times, Russia in Afghanistan, France in Viet-Nam, etc.

The author offers solid critiques of the Pentagon's mediocre strategy (Joint Vision 20XX) and its preference for technology over people, an excellent short list of key players in world affairs, interesting lists and a discussion of insurgent versus coalition force strengths and weaknesses in Iraq, and a brutal--positively brutal--comparison of the pathetic performance of "secret" imagery taking days or weeks to order up, versus, "good enough" commercial imagery that can be gotten in hours.

There are flashes of brilliance that suggest that the author's next book will be just as good if not better. He understands the war of ideas and talks about insurgent handbills as a form of ammunition that the US is not seeing, reading, or understanding; he points out that Al Qaeda is like a venture capitalist, franchising and subsidizing or inspiring distributed terrorism; and he is superbly on target, on page 39, when he points out that when Al Qaeda attacks in the US, the only thing that is "moving" is information or knowledge. Everything else they pick up locally--hence, US homeland security comes down to intercepting the information, not the players or the things they use to attack us.

The author is among those who feel that we must nail Egypt, Syria, and Iran, among others (I would include Pakistan), for exporting support to terrorism.

I have a number of underlinings and margin comments throughout this book, so it is by no means a light read. It is a very fine place to start understanding war in the 21st Century, and an excellent foundation for reading the more nuanced and broader works of GI Wilson, Max Manwaring, Steve Metz, Ralph Peters, and others.

Other seminal works in this area, with reviews:
Uncomfortable Wars Revisited (International and Security Affairs Series)
The Search for Security: A U.S. Grand Strategy for the Twenty-First Century
Tactics of the Crescent Moon: Militant Muslim Combat Methods
The Tiger's Way: A U.S. Private's Best Chance for Survival
War of the Flea: The Classic Study of Guerrilla Warfare
Wars of Blood and Faith: The Conflicts That Will Shape the 21st Century

Good Darwinian Perspective on War
War evolves, rather than transforms, is the central thesis of this book. The author should not be taken to task for over-emphasizing Fourth Generation warfare so much. The way I took it is that the author was rightly proud of his championing certain concepts, so the overemphasis was not excessive. It's a good primer on insurgency and counterinsurgency as well, and even starts to get into the neofunctionalist approach to nation building. Better works can indeed be found, such as Chaplin's in-depth Mao's Legacy and surely on Vietnam, but the book really starts picking up with the chapters on al-Qaeda, Afghanistan, and Iraq. Overall, all the case studies in the middle chapters are enlightening. The last five chapters also contain some relatively good ideas for military reform, but the focus is too much on personnel issues, such as 360-degree job evaluations and the ideas in Vandergriff's Revolution in Human Affairs. Although the personnel focus is understandable given the author's brief coverage of CONUS and Homeland Security issues, the strength of this book lies not in the critique of bureaucracy it tries to provide, but in the way the author uses history and a consistent perspective to generate social scientific insights, and in that sense, it is traditional, but also innovative and suggestive in some places.