Hamas’ 4th Generation Warfare and our Own-Goal Newsmedia
Guest post by Doyle Quiggle with small additions by RL:
The so-called “Return March” now being staged for a world audience on the border between Israel and Gaza, a drama directed primarily by HAMAS, is the toughest challenge Israel has yet faced in the morally perfidious arena of 4th generation warfare. 4GW is best described like this:
At the heart of this phenomenon, Fourth Generation war, lies not a military evolution but a political, social, and moral revolution: a crisis of legitimacy of the state. All over the world, citizens of states are transferring their primary allegiance away from the state to other entities: to tribes, ethnic groups, religions, gangs, ideologies, and “causes.” Many people who will no longer fight for their state are willing to fight for their new primary loyalty. In America’s two wars with Iraq, the Iraqi state-armed forces showed little fight. But Iraqi insurgents whose loyalties were to various non-state elements waged a hard-fought and effective guerrilla war.
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. Military force is incapable, by itself, of restoring legitimacy to a state. This is especially the case when the military force is foreign; usually, its mere presence will further undermine the legitimacy of the state it is attempting to support. At the same time, there can be little doubt that state-armed forces will be tasked with fighting Fourth Generation wars. This is not just a problem, it is a dilemma – one of several dilemmas state militaries will face in the Fourth Generation of modern war.
I strongly suspect that HAMAS leadership — Ahmed Yassin, Mahmoud Zahar, Hassan Yousef, Abdel Aziz al-Rantisi, Mohammed Hassan Shama’a, Abdul Fattah Hassan Dukhan, Ibrahim Fares Al-Yazouri, Salah Shahada (Founder of the Qassam Brigades), Issa Al-Nashar — have either all closely studied the 4th Generation Warfare Handbook, or, more likely, have a brilliant intuitive sense of what the book so laboriously explores.
In any case, HAMAS displays a remarkable deftness in defining the March of Return as a peaceful demonstration while surreptitiously waging insurgent warfare. Violating the Geneva Conventions, HAMAS have planted its operatives, armed with explosives and weapons, among the so-called peaceful demonstrators. They have also sent little girls to the frontlines, directly into harm’s way.
By getting the world media, including much of the Israeli media, to define (and thus to perceive) the March as a peaceful demonstration, while using it to wage insurgent warfare, HAMAS have scored a major victory in 4GW. Anything the IDF does to protect the border or even the lives of its own troops will make the IDF look like they’re using excessive force, never mind the fact that the limited force they’ve applied so far has, in all likelihood, kept the “demonstration” from becoming even bloodier.
Pretending to hold “peaceful” demonstrations and deftly tricking the world media into defining the March (marching is a martial metaphor) as a peaceful demonstration by unarmed civilians, HAMAS have created a damned-if-you-do-damned-if-you-don’t moral predicament in which anything Israel does short of withdrawing from the area will undermine the legitimacy of the Israeli state. By making its defense forces appear “immoral,” HAMAS make Israel itself appear illegitimate.
And Israel understands this only too well. As Yair Lapid, leader of a main opposition group put it:
“Israel’s moral power is part of national security and is also what gives us the qualitative edge over our enemies.”
That is precisely the tactical goal of 4GW insurgency:
While the three classic levels of war carry over into the Fourth Generation, they are joined there by three new levels which may ultimately be more important. Colonel Boyd identified these three new levels as the physical, the mental, and the moral levels. Furthermore, he argued that the physical level – killing people and breaking things – is the least powerful, the moral level is the most powerful, and the mental level lies between the other two. Colonel Boyd argued that this is especially true in guerrilla warfare, which is more closely related to Fourth Generation war than is formal warfare between state militaries.
The history of guerrilla warfare, from the Spanish guerrilla war against Napoleon through Israel’s experience in southern Lebanon, supports Colonel Boyd’s observation. This leads to 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 very easy to win all the tactical engagements in a Fourth Generation conflict yet still lose the war. To the degree you win at the physical level by utilizing firepower that causes casualties and property damage to the local population, every physical victory may move you closer to moral defeat, and the moral level is decisive. (William S. Lind and Gregory A. Thiel, 4th Generation Warfare Handbook)
As the Gaza situation now stands, Israel is losing both the moral and the mental levels of this 4GW battle. The media depict the narrowest possible view of the situation at the border, which does make the IDF appear to be using excessive force. However, when the entire border situation on the ground is viewed as it is faced by the IDF, including the game-changing fact that HAMAS peppers armed operatives throughout the crowd (thereby violating Geneva Conventions), then the IDF appear to be demonstrating remarkable trigger discipline.
In order to survive the highly chaotic situation on the ground and protect Israel’s border, IDF Troops must be able see the ground reality for what it is. They cannot afford to allow themselves to become alienated from tactical, on-the-ground realities by HAMAS-concocted, media-authorized fictions about peaceful demonstrations. It’s downright Orwellian to call demonstrations peaceful that include well-trained HAMAS operatives intent on killing IDF Troops and Israelis. In-the-rear-with-the-gear, IDF Command also need to keep themselves from being alienated from tactical reality by HAMAS propaganda.
Be the tactical situation as tricky as it may, the IDF now find themselves subject to the unforgiving laws of 4GW:
To the degree you win at the physical level by utilizing firepower that causes casualties and property damage to the local population, every physical victory may move you closer to moral defeat, and the moral level is decisive.
HAMAS leadership appear to be better students of 4GW than IDF Command, who are now considering an investigation of their own Troops for “cheering” for their own side and for firing upon so-called peaceful demonstrators. The IDF’s willingness to discipline its own troops for violating rules of engagement is as admirable as it is legally necessary, but it is also a paradoxically self-defeating proposal, another strong indication of how effectively HAMAS are waging the mental level of 4GW. HAMAS know full well that most of their world audience, especially in Europe, and much of the Israeli population have not experienced any violent border situation first-hand.
Most civilians know nothing about the life and death realities or the blinding mayhem of violent border-security situations. They do not understand what it means for an 18-year-old to have less than a second to decide whether or not to pull the trigger on a demonstrator who appears to be armed or who may be a suicide bomber. The HAMAS-designed ambiguity of the demonstrators themselves (camouflaging operatives among civilians, like little girls) , the fact that some are armed and are very dangerous, is where the moral center of gravity of this conflict lies for the IDF and Israel; they are burdened by a moral imperative HAMAS does not share: The duty to protect their own citizens and troops. In that regard, we need to consider the possibility that, by killing HAMAS operatives in the crowd before they open fire or detonate themselves, the IDF are potentially saving Palestinian lives, just as they put themselves at great risk to return that seven-year-old Palestinian girl to her family on the OTHER side of the border. At moments, the IDF do appear to care more about the lives of Palestinians than HAMAS do. That puts another twist on Golda Meir’s quip that: “We can forgive the Arabs for killing our children. We cannot forgive them for forcing us to kill their children. We will only have peace with the Arabs when they love their children more than they hate us.”
However, HAMAS are counting on civilian perceptions, over-influenced by a HAMAS-beguiled media, to determine the moral reality of the March. And so far, they’ve waged the war of perceptions brilliantly, as evidenced in how much Israeli media have accepted HAMAS’s definition of the ground situation as a peaceful demonstration.
When describing the goals of the demonstrators, CNN uses the anodyne phrase
“demanding that some residents be allowed to return to their ancestral homes in Israel.”
And while challenging Israeli spokespeople, one BBC correspondent insisted,
“Terrorist are people too.”
Yes, they are people, people armed with suicide vests, IEDs, and ballistic weapons, in other words, dangerous people–not peaceful, “MLK-style” demonstrators. Indeed, the BBC correspondent, with her sophomoric humanitarianism, inadvertently confirms the fact that HAMAS are violating Geneva Conventions.
HAMAS and much of the World Media (including the UN and UNESCO) now define Israel as a foreign invader. That’s the primary tactical and moral objective of the HAMAS March of Return: To define 1948 as an invasion and the subsequent 70 years as an occupation. Thus, HAMAS, aided & abetted by Israel’s own, oikophobic “new historians” — like David Grossman, Amira Hass, Tom Segev, Uri Avnery — have deftly finagled Israel into the trickiest of all 4GW predicaments:
If an armed service is given the mission of intervening in a Fourth Generation war in another country with the objective of saving or restoring a state, it is almost certain to lose. This is true even if it does everything right. The strategic factors working against it will almost always be too powerful to overcome. It represents a foreign country, a different culture, often a different religion. It does not know the local culture well, it does not understand local politics, its troops do not speak the language. If it comes from a First World country, it represents the rich destroying what little the poor have. At some point it will go home, leaving the locals who worked with it open to retaliation as collaborators.
Most powerfully, its very presence undermines the legitimacy of the state it is attempting to support. Because legitimacy is the ground on which Fourth Generation war is fought, any foreign intervention force is undermining the local state more powerfully than it can hope to buttress it. A mission to uphold or restore a failing or failed state is, for any armed service coming from outside that state, a poisoned chalice. The mission for which the armed forces of the state must prepare, and in which they must succeed or perish, is defending and preserving the state at home.
While the crisis of legitimacy of the state varies greatly in intensity, it now affects almost all states to some degree. It is likely to become more intense over time, in First World countries as well as the Third World countries where it is presently observed. Many First World countries, in an act of folly almost without precedent, have imported Fourth Generation war by the literal shipload as they admitted millions of immigrants and refugees from other cultures. Some of those immigrants and refugees will refuse to acculturate, often on religious grounds. Others might be willing to do so, but are arriving in numbers so great they overwhelm the acculturation process. These immigrants offer a base for Fourth Generation war on the soil of any country that receives them.
The effectiveness of HAMAS’s moral tactics in the Return March derives from this 4GW fact:
Most powerfully, its very presence undermines the legitimacy of the state it is attempting to support. Because legitimacy is the ground on which Fourth Generation war is fought, any foreign intervention force is undermining the local state more powerfully than it can hope to buttress it. A mission to uphold or restore a failing or failed state is, for any armed service coming from outside that state, a poisoned chalice.
So far, HAMAS, abetted by the world media and the UN, have effectively made Israel look like they’re attacking a morally legitimate movement and not defending a legitimate, sovereign state. Reality is that the IDF are defending Israel’s borders from HAMAS operatives. Perception is that the IDF are killing unarmed civilians. Perception is what wins 4GW, and the MSNM plays a key role in that perception.
The Western world has responded as prompted. The UN condemns Israel’s “deplorable killing” of peaceful demonstrators, and the NYT editorial board deplores the killing of an innocent journalist, without even acknowledging his own words,
Our planes are in the sky and our soldiers are on the ground. Our troops are ready for all scenarios in the evening.
much less the extensive dossier linking him to Hamas. Nowhere do we hear that Hamas is in a state of war with Israel.
Given the abysmal state of affairs in Europe, I do not wonder why the European media and so many of its political leaders have failed to see through HAMAS’s “moral tactics.” Most European journalists and political and security wonks have never heard of 4th Generation Warfare, let alone studied its best practices and tactics. However, I do seriously wonder why so much of the Israeli media fail understand this key rule of 4GW. Certainly, the authors of the 4GW Handbook could not imagine a scenario where the “home” media would turn against its own side:
Fortunately for the state and its armed forces, Fourth Generation war at home is significantly easier to win than Fourth Generation war abroad. The strategic and moral factors that work so strongly against a state military overseas diminish or vanish. At home, the state military represents the home country, its own culture and its religion. The troops are often local young men. It knows the culture and language. It is not leaving, because it is already home. Its presence, if it acts as this handbook recommends, can bolster rather than undermine the state’s legitimacy.
Do the post-Zionists believe that Israel is not their legitimate HOME? Don’t they believe that the Israeli “state military represents the home country, its own culture and its religion?” Do outsiders understand how rare and potentially lethal this hyper-critical Jewish/Israeli mindset is? As Aharon Megged put it at the height of Post-Zionism’s happy years,
Since the Six-Day War…and at an increasing pace, we have witnessed a phenomenon which probably has no parallel in history: an emotional and moral identification by the majority of Israel’s intelligentsia with people openly committed to our annihilation.
How can Israel win back the moral level of 4GW? Part of their strategy must necessarily involve their grappling with and embracing the concept of home and the deadly dangers of oikophobia.
As the 4GW Handbook reminds us:
However, while there is a great deal a state military can do to preserve its own state, there is one decisively important thing it cannot do. It cannot provide competent governance. The main organs of the state’s government and the civilians who head and run them must be competent. They must do what states exist to do, above all providing order: safety of persons and property. They must make things work: the police, the courts, the schools, the country’s infrastructure, and increasingly its economy as well (having accepted major economic responsibilities, the legitimacy of a state now depends in part on how well it manages the economy)…As state militaries give over the jousting contests that wars between states have mostly become and reorient to confront Fourth Generation war on their own soil, they will find themselves dependent on a condition they cannot create: good governance.
Given its judicious use of force in the past weeks, the IDF does appear to understand the moral perfidy of 4GW. Despite HAMAS propaganda spoon fed to us by a complicit media, the IDF have responded admirably to the moral trickery of “grey war.” Israel’s cognitive warriors, somewhat less well.
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