Category Archives: Fourth Generation Warfare

National-Anarchist Movement Conference 2017: A Summary Reply

Image result for national anarchist movement

By Keith Preston

Special thanks to Peter Topfer, Adam Ormes, Thom Forester, and Sean Jobst for their assistance in the writing of this summary.

On June 17 and 18, the first ever conference of the National-Anarchist Movement (N-AM) took place in Madrid. The process of arranging this conference was certainly not without its difficulties, and the organizers deserve much praise for their diligence in this regard. Originally, the conference was supposed to be hosted by the Madrid section of N-AM, who dropped out of the project shortly (and out of N-AM altogether) before the conference took place. This led to the irony of a conference being held in Spain where no actual Spanish people were among the attendees. Because National-Anarchists are widely despised by leftists who mistakenly regard N-A as a “fascist” tendency, security was a paramount concern.

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No, It’s Not about “Globalism vs. Nationalism” 1

by • Anti-Imperialism/Foreign Policy, Culture Wars/Current Controversies, Economics/Class Relations, Fourth Generation Warfare, Military, Uncategorized

It’s about globalism/globalization vs non-state actors.

Some thoughts on the present political polarization, geopolitical rivalries, the G20, and “populist-nationalism.”

The present political polarization represents an effort by the various factions of the ruling class attempting to create constituencies for themselves. Most of the mainstream media represents the dominant centrist and center-left factions, academia represents the furthest left faction of the elite, FOX/GOP/talk radio represents the right-wing of the ruling class. I actually think the Trumpians represent yet another faction that wishes to pursue a new geopolitical strategy devised by Kissinger, but is being thwarted by the dominant faction and the Deep State in the process. https://www.the-american-interest.com/…/donald-trumps…/

One of the many problems with these populist-nationalist tendencies that have emerged in various Western nations is that they are not revolutionaries or even radicals, but reactionaries who resist globalization in the same manner that the anti-modernist movements of the19th century resisted industrialization. The populist-nationalists simply want to turn back the clock to the 20th century model of relatively autonomous nation-states that are middle-class oriented and ethnically, culturally, and religiously homogeneous. They’re not going to be any more successful at this than the Luddites were at blocking the Industrial Revolution, or the throne and altar traditionalists were at blocking the rise of liberal bourgeois republicanism.

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Anarchism or Vanguardism? Critique of Guerrilla Ideology of the IRPGF Reply

by • Activism, Anarchism/Anti-State, Fourth Generation Warfare, Military, Strategy, Uncategorized

The Free Online

main text  from 

Guerrilla ideology reduces all revolutionary questions to quantitative problems of military force. Nothing could be more disastrous. – James Carr,

Power does not come any more from the barrel of a gun than it comes from a ballot box. No revolution is peaceful, but its “military” dimension is never central. The question is not whether the proles finally decide to break into the armouries, but whether they unleash what they are: commodified beings who no longer can and no longer want to exist as commodities, and whose revolt explodes capitalist logic. Barricades and machine guns flow from this “weapon”.

The greater the change in social life, the less guns will be needed, and the less casualties there will be. A communist revolution will never resemble a slaughter: not from any nonviolent principle, but because revolution subverts more (soldiers included) than it actually destroys.

To imagine a proletarian front facing off a bourgeois front is to conceive the proletariat in bourgeois terms, on the model of a political revolution or a war (seizing someone’s power, occupying their territory). In so doing, one reintroduces everything that the insurrectionary movement had overwhelmed: hierarchy, a respect for specialists, for knowledge that Knows, and for techniques to solve problems — in short for everything that plays down the role of the common man. – Gilles Dauve, When Insurrections Die

 

 

 

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Trump to Arm Syrian Kurds, Even as Turkey Strongly Objects Reply

by • Anti-Imperialism/Foreign Policy, Fourth Generation Warfare, Military, Strategy • Tags:

How ironic that the overlords of the American Empire might be backing the Murray Bookchin-inspired libertarian socialist insurgents of the Kurdish territory. But this is actually in keeping with a strategy that I have long advocated for anarchist, anti-state and anti-imperalist movements around the world, i.e. building on the ground resistance while seeking aid from the official enemy of whatever state they’re fighting. Consequently, the on the ground resistance movements located in the nations of the Anglo-American-Zionist-Wahhabist axis should seek aid from the nations of the BICS-Shia-Global South axis, and vice versa. It is perfectly appropriate for the Kurds to accept aid from the USA just as it would be perfectly appropriate for the EZLN, Calexit or the Republic of Texas to accept aid from the Russians, Iranians, and Chinese.

By Michael R. Gordon and Eric Schmitt

New York Times

WASHINGTON — President Trump has approved a plan to arm Syrian Kurds so they can participate in the battle to retake Raqqa from the Islamic State, a strategy that has drawn deep opposition from Turkey, a NATO ally.

American military commanders have long argued that arming the Y.P.G., a Kurdish militia fighting alongside Syrian Arab forces against the Islamic State, is the fastest way to seize Raqqa, the capital of the militants’ self-proclaimed caliphate.

And Mr. Trump, who made fighting Islamist militants a priority during his campaign, again showed the high regard he has for Pentagon generals by endorsing their advice when faced with a policy dilemma.

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Trump Foreign Policy: Same Old, Same Old? Reply

by • Anti-Imperialism/Foreign Policy, Fourth Generation Warfare, Military

By William S. Lind

Traditional Right

The big question about the new Trump administration is whether its foreign policy will reflect President Trump’s views or long-standing Establishment positions. It is too early to offer a firm answer, but early indications are worrying.

The past several weeks have seen senior administration officials traveling the world, offering reassurances to our (mostly worthless) allies that no policy changes are coming. We will continue to be committed to war with China over the Japanese Senkaku islands, which are uninhabited; war with Russia over the Baltic states (which Russia is unlikely to attack); and, most worrying, to continued confrontation with Russia for no reason in particular.

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Preventing Civil War in the United States Reply

by • Activism, Culture Wars/Current Controversies, Fourth Generation Warfare, Left and Right, Secession, Strategy, Uncategorized • Tags:

Bill Lind has a proposal that is very similar to certain ATS positions.

By William S. Lind

Traditional Right

Low-level Fourth Generation war has been underway in the U.S. for some time, largely in the form of gang activities. That is likely to continue, as will occasional terrorist incidents. This low-level warfare is a problem, but it does not threaten the state.

However, the Left’s reaction to the election of Donald Trump as president points to a far more dangerous kind of 4GW on our own soil. Trump’s election signified, among other things, a direct rejection of the Left’s ideology of cultural Marxism, which condemns Whites, men, family-oriented women, conservative blacks, straights, etc. as inherently evil. Not surprisingly, those people finally rebelled against political correctness and elected someone who represents them.

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“Neo-Marxism” And “The New Middle East” Reply

by • Anti-Imperialism/Foreign Policy, Fourth Generation Warfare, Military

I agree with this analysis but disagree with its conclusions. Ultimately, our enemies are all states everywhere, and our greatest non-state rivals are the Wahhabist/Salafist renditions of Islam. I consider the struggles of the Kurds, particularly the PKK and allied tendencies, to essentially be the same as the struggles of ATS.

By Andrew Korybko

Oriental Review

One of the most curious quirks of recent history is that self-proclaimed followers of the Cold War-era ideology of Marxism are on the upswing two and a half decades after the dissolution of the Soviet Union, and interestingly enough, they’re making on-the-ground progress in the Mideast of all places. This may come as a surprise to casual observers who have been convinced by the Mainstream Media that the region is only awash with religious radicalism, which while certainly true, doesn’t fully encapsulate the whole picture of all the extremism that’s active there nowadays.

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The Fourth Generation vs. an Alliance of States Reply

by • Anti-Imperialism/Foreign Policy, Fourth Generation Warfare, Military, Uncategorized • Tags:

I generally agree with Bill’s analysis here, although I’m personally rooting for the Fourth Generation forces.

“…we need a new Triple Alliance or Quintuple Alliance, and here as so often in grand strategy context is important. It is, again, the need for all states to work together against Fourth Generation, non-state entities that wage war. The alliance is a means, not an end.

The end is that whenever 4GW manifests itself, wherever it does so, all states work together to defeat it. The power of Fourth Generation entities, or at least some of them, at the moral level of war is so great that, even with all the states in the world against them, beating them will not be easy. Let me say it once more: what is at stake in the 21st century is the state system itself. If events remain on their current course, by the year 2100 the state will probably be just a memory..”

By William S. Lind

Traditional Right

The election of Donald Trump opens the door to change and reform in many areas. The most important, in terms of our country’s future, is grand strategy and foreign policy (the latter, understood correctly, is a subset of the former). The United States needs a grand strategy aimed at preserving the state system.

Our present grand strategy was conceived in a world of states in conflict with each other. Its purpose is to make America dominant over all other states. The U.S. is not the first state to attempt this. Like its predecessors, it is failing. No state has ever been powerful enough to establish the “universal monarchy”, as it was once known. Attempts to do so have always resulted in overreach, then fall. Remember, Portugal once ruled half the world.

But the most important thing is not that we reduce our goals to match our power in the world of conflict between states. The most important thing is that we realize Fourth Generation war poses so serious a threat to the whole state system that conflict between states has become obsolete. We need an alliance of all states against Fourth Generation entities. If we and other Great Powers, especially Russia and China, continue to squabble among ourselves, the 21st century is likely to witness the end of the whole state system. Mere anarchy will be loosed upon the world.

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The Sniper Shooting in Dallas Was Both Murder and Blowback Reply

by • Fourth Generation Warfare, Uncategorized • Tags:

By Dan Sanchez

Foundation for Economic Education

ve police officers were killed and six were injured in Dallas yesterday when snipers opened fire during a protest of the recent police killings of Philando Castile and Alton Sterling. This mass shooting was a despicable act of murder.

It was also blowback.

The motor of this spinning cycle of reciprocal bloodshed is collectivism.

“Blowback” is a term generally reserved for foreign policy. It refers to the reverberating ill effects of foreign interventions. Ron Paul famously and persuasively characterized the 9/11 attacks as blowback from decades of US warfare and imperialism in the Greater Middle East.

In the 1980s, American support for the anti-Soviet Mujahideen in Afghanistan helped lay the groundwork for what would become Osama bin Laden’s jihadist network, Al Qaeda. And in the 1990s, further US interventions in the Middle East spurred the jihadis to turn on their former sponsors and to wage a terrorist war on the west that culminated in the attacks on September 11, 2001.

The outrage elicited by those attacks provided cover for a massive US-led war for the Greater Middle East that rages to this day. That Long War has only served to plummet the entire region into chaos and carnage, which has caused the number of jihadis and would-be terrorists to grow exponentially. As a result, western civilians continue to suffer blowback in the form of terror attacks in San Bernardino, Orlando, Paris, Brussels, etc. These attacks are fueling Islamophobia and driving calls for further violence and repression against Muslims.

Collective Punishment

The motor of this spinning cycle of reciprocal bloodshed is collectivism. Seeing fellows attacked prompts fear and anger. Fear and anger focused by the lens of reason pinpoints individual offenders for the delivery of justice. But refracted through the lens of collectivism and primal reaction, fear and anger disperses into indiscriminate terror and hate, which scatters to cover whole populations who are ascribed collective guilt and prescribed collective punishment.

Take the collectivism of “blue” tribalism and add, for some individuals, the collectivism of racial terror and you begin to understand the epidemic of police violence against American blacks.

This collective punishment of innocents then prompts fear and anger among the targeted population. If they too are afflicted with collectivism, some of them will also succumb to terror and hate, which will be expressed in retaliatory indiscriminate violence: blowback. This collectivist retaliation begets further collectivist retaliation, and the cycle of violence spins out of control.

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Cycle of Insurgency: The realities of “Martial Law” 3

by • Fourth Generation Warfare, Uncategorized • Tags:

By Justin King

TheFifthColumnNews.Com

Washington, DC (TFC) – The term “martial law” is thrown around so much that it seems to have lost its meaning. Martial law is military control of normal judicial functions. It doesn’t mean a curfew is in effect. It doesn’t mean the militarization of police. It requires military involvement. The threat of martial law is a cornerstone of many theories about designs for the United States.

Martial law will not occur in the United States. Period. The number of troops required to enact martial law is astronomical. In a recent article, the number of troops necessary to establish counter-insurgency operations in the United States was discussed.

“It took deployment numbers of 170,000 US troops to (fail to) pacify Iraq’s insurrection. That number doesn’t include coalition forces, allied Iraqi troops, or the massive number of military contractors that traveled to Iraq. Iraq has a population of about 33 million. The United States is almost 10 times that. If the Department of Defense deployed every single member of the Army and the Marines including the clerks, cooks, carpenters, truck drivers, and so on, it could only field about 750,000 troops. That’s about one million troops shy of the needed number to match the effectiveness of Iraq’s counter-insurgency operation.”

The number of troops necessary to maintain martial law would be exponentially larger. During counter-insurgency operations, the military merely has to target insurgents. Normal police functions are still conducted by civilian organizations. It’s impossible to provide a realistic estimation based on historical data because there has never been a martial law implementation on that scale. A best guess would be to simply add the number of current officers in the United States. That’s more than a million. So to attain a true martial law scenario in the United States, you’re talking about adding another million on top of the 1.7 million needed to control the inevitable insurgency. Almost three million boots on the ground. That’s about 400% of the total staff of the the Army and Marines. Even if the the military took every airman and sailor and used them on the ground, The needed numbers are double the entire manpower available to DOD. In short, martial law is simply not feasible with the current size of the US Military.

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Who the hell are ISIS, anyway? Reply

by • Fourth Generation Warfare, Uncategorized • Tags:

Spy Culture

WhotheHellareISIS

ISIS are a terrifying, devastating Sunni militia that emerged out of the Iraqi insurgency and the anti-Assad jihad … except they aren’t particularly religious! And their origin story makes no sense. And militarily speaking they are a joke who could be wiped out within weeks if NATO wanted that. In this episode I take a sideways look at the Islamic State, which isn’t very Islamic and isn’t a state, and ask what they really are, if anything. I focus in on two elements of their PR that have been particularly effective: the development of the Al Qaeda myth (of which ISIS are an offshoot) and the beheading videos of 2014. I wrap up by suggesting that ISIS are the first truly postmodern terrorist group, who exist almost entirely as a media entity.

http://www.spyculture.com/?powerpress_embed=2567-podcast&powerpress_player=mediaelement-audio

There is an obvious answer to this question and a string of less obvious answers. I am by no means an expert on ISIS, I’ve read a lot of the coverage, I’ve listened to a lot of the criticism of that coverage, I’m obviously familiar with the Defense Intelligence Agency report, and given that this whole ISIS thing evidently isn’t going anyway I thought it would be a good topic to bring up again and offer to you my ideas about this.

Obviously, ISIS are a Sunni militia operating in Syria and Iraq, who have their origins in the so called al Qaeda franchise group Al Qaeda in Iraq, run by Abu Musab Al Zarqawi. He died in 2006 when the US Air Force dropped two 500 pound bombs on a safe house in a village near Baqubah.

Between 2006 and 2014 no one spoke much about this group. Back when the Syrian conflict was all about supporting the jihadis against Assad Al Qaeda in Iraq, now under the command of Al Baghdadi, created a branch of themselves in Syria, the Al Nusra Front. They officially formed at the beginning of 2012, and by the end of that year they had been labelled a terrorist organisation due to their affiliation with Al Qaeda. Somewhere along the line for reasons I cannot find a clear explanation of, this all fell apart and those who splintered off from this Al Qaeda affiliate and created ISIS are now somehow at war with Al Qaeda.

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Blast from the Past: The Solution to the Prison-Industrial Complex? Reply

by • Fourth Generation Warfare, Uncategorized

An old United Press International Article from 1982. Did the Shining Path show the way 34 years ago? Black Lives Matter, take note.

By Carlos Milano

LIMA, Peru — Some 150 masked guerrillas attacked a Peruvian prison high in the Andes and freed 255 inmates by dynamiting a prison wall during a bloody five-hour gunbattle Wednesday that left 16 dead and 12 wounded, authorities said.

They said two columns of guerrillas struck just before midnight Tuesday, launching simultaneous attacks on police stations before assaulting the prison in the southeastern city of Ayacucho, 220 miles southeast of Lima.

President Fernando Belaunde Terry immediately declared a state of emergency and a 9 p.m. to 6 a.m. curfew in the Andean province of Ayacucho and sent the army into the city to restore order after the attack.

Authorities said 255 inmates — nearly half of the prison’s population — escaped after the guerrillas set off 60 charges of dynamite, toppling a wall of the Ayacucho prison.

The 150 guerrillas, who were said to be masked, opened fire with submachine guns on the prison as the inmates made their escape through the breach in the wall, the officials said. The fugitives included 80 jailed members of a Maoist guerrilla group.

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A Hello to Arms: A New Generation of Steely-Gazed Anarcho-Communists Head Off to Syria Reply

by • Fourth Generation Warfare, Left and Right, Military, Uncategorized • Tags:

By John Knefel

Village Voice

A Hello to Arms: A New Generation of Steely-Gazed Anarcho-Communists Head Off to Syria (3)

Illustration by Matt Mahurin

Billymark’s is the most working-class bar in Chelsea, if not all of Manhattan. On a Thursday afternoon in early March, union guys play darts as both TVs air a CBS report on the early days of Syria’s fragile cease-fire. A few minutes after five, Guy, 22, and Hristo, 23, walk in and we grab a booth next to a group of day-drunk FIT students. The minute we sit down, it’s clear something is different. The two men are vibrating with excitement.

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Is War by Assassination on its Way? Reply

by • Anti-Imperialism/Foreign Policy, Fourth Generation Warfare, Military, Uncategorized

By William S. Lind

Traditional Right

Russia intervened in Syria, did what it came to do–strengthen the position of the Assad government–and has partially withdrawn. Meanwhile, our war with ISIS continues its endless futility, an inevitable result of war by pinking.

War by plinking, using airstrikes that blow up an ammo dump here, an ISIS leader there, and wedding parties everywhere is largely a product of futility of thought. We think we have to do something, but our military leadership has few options to offer. We can invade, but as we have experienced in Iraq and Afghanistan, doing so merely increases the scope and cost of our defeat. We can carry out an aerial campaign of annihilation, but our civilian leadership’s ideology forbids it. It might also generate new enemies faster than we can kill them, no matter how many bombs we drop. Approaches that require both imagination and skill cannot make it through our leaden, elephantine military decision process (where the process is the product). So we plink.

Much of our plinking seems devoted to war by assassination. There is a reason states have generally avoided that. As I fear we may discover, it is a game two can play. In the end it devolves, as it has, to mere war of attrition. Wars of attrition are usually indecisive, continuing until one party or another, or both, are exhausted. we are likely to tire before ISIS does.

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In a Rebel Camp in Colombia, Marx and Free Love Reign Reply

by • Fourth Generation Warfare, Left and Right, Uncategorized • Tags:

By Nicholas Casey

New York Times

IN THE MOUNTAINS OF COLOMBIA — The rebel camp is a Communist time capsule. An old guerrilla fighter sings songs about Che Guevara on his guitar as a crowd leans in to listen, armed with rifles and grenades.

Salaries do not exist here, or even marriage. The fighters believe in free love, saying they are wed only to the revolution. They say life is still possible with Karl Marx in one hand and a Kalashnikov in the other.

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After Brussels Attack, Will Response Be More War or a Look at the Root Causes of Terrorism? Reply

by • Anti-Imperialism/Foreign Policy, Fourth Generation Warfare, Uncategorized • Tags:

To ask the question is to answer it. See this discussion at Democracy Now.

Western countries have looked the other way while their “allies” among the Gulf states have fueled Islamic extremists. At times, the West has directly or indirectly sought to fuel Islamic extremists as a weapon against independent secular nationalist regimes that repressed Islamic fundamentalist terrorism. The West has also propped up regional dictators that serve to create sympathy for radical Islamic movements. The West has also sought to topple regimes that were a bulwark against more extreme forms of Islamism. The West has consistently provided economic and military aid along with political and diplomatic support to Israel’s oppression of the Palestinians. Western military intervention in the region has escalated regional wars and created millions of casualties and dislocated refugees which in turn fuels Islamic extremism. Most of this is done for the purpose of monopolizing the petroleum trade, abetting Israeli expansionism, or exercising political hegemony. So, yes, much of the Islamic terrorism problem is a result of what intelligence specialists refer to as “blowback.“

Children of the PKK: The Growing Intensity of Turkey’s Civil War Reply

by • Anti-Imperialism/Foreign Policy, Fourth Generation Warfare, Uncategorized • Tags:

By By , Onur Burçak Belli and Emin Oezmen

Der Spiegel International

Photo Gallery: Young Kurds Fighting in Turkish Civil War

 It was midday on a Thursday at the end of December when Rozerin Çukur left her home, supposedly to pick up class notes from a friend. She never returned.
 Rozerin wandered through the narrow streets of Sur, the tangled old town neighborhood in Diyarbakir, a city of one million in southeastern Turkey.

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How Not to Do It Reply

by • American Decline, Fourth Generation Warfare, Uncategorized

By William S. Lind

Traditional Right

oregon

The protestors who took over the aptly-named Malheur National Wildlife Refuge in Burns, Oregon have garnered a fair amount of conservative empathy. Their issue, the Federal government’s ownership of vast tracts of western land, is a legitimate one. As a story in the January 29 New York Times, “And Then There Were Five, or Four, Occupiers”, put it, “the standoff did put into sharp relief a question raised time and again in American politics: Is the government us, or is it them?” Most conservatives know the answer is “them”.

None of that changes the fact that the occupiers offer a wonderful example of how not to fight the federal government. They blew it on every level: physical, mental, and moral.

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Required Reading on Military Organization in the 21st Century Reply

by • Fourth Generation Warfare, Military, Uncategorized

Bill Lind expounds on the canon. This is what all you anarchist out there who want to overthrow governments and corporations need to be reading.

By William S. Lind

Traditional Right

Santa Claus fights terrorists in Syria

The real Saint Nicholas was less famous for giving gifts than he was for coming back from the dead to beat somebody up. That’s my kind of saint. It is to that St. Nicholas I sent my Christmas list, viz.

  • All American military officers will read the canon, the list of seven books which, if read in the correct order, will take the reader from the first to fourth generation of modern war. Without the roadmap the canon provides, our officer corps will continue to stumble around in the dark, losing one fourth generation war after another.

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