Milstack Saturday (22 March 2025)
The best of what I read, watched, or listened to in the past week
The recent wave of attacks on Tesla vehicles, as well as dealerships, charging stations, and storage lots linked to them, brings to mind a forecast made recently by David J. Betz. In a future civil war in Great Britain, Professor Betz predict, insurgents will prefer the destruction of physical infrastructure to fights against human beings. These events also led me to ponder the question that my old friend Donald Vandergriff posed last week in a piece posted to his Substack. Should we refer to these outrages as part of a ‘soft civil war’, he asked, or do they qualify as ‘fourth generation warfare’?
These thoughts, in turn, led me to revisit the article that introduced the term ‘fourth generation warfare’ into the martial lexicon of the Anglosphere.1 First published in October of 1989, The Changing Face of War: Into the Fourth Generation, made the following forecast.
The distinction between war and peace will be blurred to the vanishing point. It will be nonlinear, possibly to the point of having no definable battlefields or fronts. The distinction between "civilian" and "military" may disappear. Actions will occur concurrently throughout all participants' depth, including their society as a cultural, not just a physical, entity.In the course of looking for places where readers might find copies of this classic article, I ran into a piece published in Parameters in 1993. Written by Kenneth F. McKenzie Jr., who would later preside over the precipitous withdrawal of US forces from Afghanistan, it described the theory of fourth generation warfare as Elegant Irrelevance.2
After completing this walk down memory lane, my search shifted from theory to technique, and, in particular, to ways folks involved in shooting wars have been using drones. Thus, I discovered Reconnaissance Fires Complex, in which Duncan L. McCulloch (of Duncan’s Diatribes) provides an excellent description of the deep background of the ‘reconnaissance fires complexes’ that play such an important role in the tactics used by both sides in the ongoing war between Ukraine and Russia.
Note on Links
My experiment with the use of superscripted acronyms to warn readers about the provenance of links has convinced me to try another approach. Thus, the links that appear in the text of this article will take you to pieces published somewhere in the wide and wonderful world of Substack. Links to material hosted on other sites appear only in footnotes.
For more in the way of Milstack goodness …
To subscribe, share, or support:
Elegant Irrelevance: Fourth Generation Warfare can be found on the websites of the US Army War College Press and the Hathi Trust.
The Changing Face of War can be found on Global Guerrillas (John Robb’s older blog, not his Substack) and Academia.edu,
No shots fired but if I stare hard enough I can find “4th generation war” in the Old Testament, per that criteria.
Probably also the battles in Central Europe post WW1.
We’re really not seeing anything new, we should also consider endemic constant war and violence isn’t that unusual, the entire MidEast , often the Balkans, Any given American Frontier 1601~1890, etc.