Fourth-generation warfare

The term was first used in 1980 by a team of United States analysts, including William S. Lind, to describe warfare's return to a decentralized form.

Unable to withstand direct combat against bombers, tanks, and machine guns, non-state entities used tactics of education/propaganda, movement-building, secrecy, terror, and/or confusion to overcome the technological gap.

However, a non-state entity tends to be more successful when it does not attempt, at least in the short term, to impose its own rule, but tries simply to disorganize and delegitimize the state in which the warfare takes place.

Many of these conflicts occur in the geographic area described by author Thomas P.M. Barnett as the Non-Integrating Gap, fought by countries from the globalised Functioning Core.

These conditions are shaped by technology, globalization, religious fundamentalism, and a shift in moral and ethical norms which brings legitimacy to certain issues previously considered restrictions on the conduct of war.

This is via non-violent means, such as Mahatma Gandhi's opposition to the British Empire or the marches led by Martin Luther King Jr.

Disaggregated forces, such as guerrillas, terrorists, and rioters, which lack a center of gravity, deny to their enemies a focal point at which to deliver a conflict ending blow.

[11] A terrorist network could be designed to be either acephalous (headless like Al-Qaeda after Bin Laden) or polycephalous (hydra-headed like Kashmiri separatists).

Social media networks supporting the terrorists are characterized by positive feedback loops, tight coupling and non-linear response propagation (viz.

[14] Lieutenant General Kenneth F. McKenzie Jr., USMC, characterizes fourth-generation warfare theory as "elegant irrelevance" and states that "its methods are unclear, its facts contentious and open to widely varying interpretations, and its relevance questionable.

Fourth generation warfare theorists such as Lind and Hammes wish to make the point that it "is not just that the military's structure and equipment are ill-suited to the 4GW problem, but so is its psyche".