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The Sling and the Stone: On War in the 21st Century

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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.

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

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.

4GW, Fourth Generation Warfare. The kind of war we will be fighting for the remainder of this Century is a way of warfare that most Americans will not find appealing. Hammes builds an excellent case about why we will lose these wars rather than win them if the DOD hews to current strategies. He also creates a game plan for picking our future fights and fighting 4GW enemies much more holistically instead of depending solely on our technological prowess to win. An excellent read to put Afganistan, Iraq, and thre global war on terror in perspective.

As a layman when it comes to military strategy and tactics, I found The Sling and the Stone to offer an accessible explanation of three key elements of 4th Generation Warfare. First, how the first three generations evolved, overlapped, and distinguished themselves from one another. Second, how 4GW has itself matured throughout the 20th and into the 21st centuries. And third, the practical implications of 4GW for our military planning and policy decisions today.

Published in 2004, before the Iraqui conflict had become as complex as it is today, Hammes' book is not a political manifesto on current policy. Rather, it takes aim at the higher-level question of how the evolution of military conflict has allowed rag-tag, largely civillian armies, to defeat vastly superior (in terms of training, equippage and technology) conventional forces. Furthermore, Hammes offers a convincing argument that such defeats have not been random events, but rather the outcome of careful planning by guerilla strategists and field tacticians who studied their own and others' successes and failures, not to mention their politically and militarily evolving opponents, and have relentlessly adapted accordingly.

The book's primary weakness is its uneven writing. Hammes first drafted sections of the book for academic courses at various military colleges over the prior 10 years. And certain sections feel exactly like Master's thesis prose. Despite a hostile reception from a handful of traditionalist military theorists, however, the strength of Hammes' concepts and his dogged determination to create clarity overcome those slightly clunky stretches.

Finally - in addition to the obvious contribution this book can make to any current debate about the right or wrong next steps for US military and foreign policy - there is an implication here that Hammes does not explore (as it's not part of his objective), but which fascinated me from early on in the book. The parallels of 4GW for business seem to me to be stark. Whereas traditional business- and market-planning assumed fairly concrete and repeatable forms during the 20th century, on that front, too, the world faces a shifting target. Small companies using unconventional strategies have emerged to strike fear into traditionalist giants (think of Google putting fear into Microsoft, or the worries that Skype raised for AT&T, for instance).

Additionally, and perhaps more immediately, the way that companies employ, train and engage workforces today largely follows an early- to mid-20th century script that 50 years ago applied specifically because there was little alternative to the traditional model: employment for life. Today, on the other hand, employees operate largely with a guerilla or free agency mentality, while most business still recruit, hire and train employees using extremely conventional tactics. For them, while they often acknowledge the frailty of their current approach, there is no 'next generation' model yet. That strikes me as an unsustainable situation.

While the military issues that Hammes raises have a life-and-death immediacy for the world today, the underlying parallels for the marketplace will be far reaching and significant, though they will unfold more slowly. Thus, in its layout of its basic concepts, The Sling and the Stone offers fodder for thought that should extend beyond its overt military topic.

This is a fascinating book that exposed me to a different type of author: the military intellectual. For many civilians this may represent an oxymoron. But, reading this lucid, analytical, visionary, and incredibly insightful book will convince you that it is not. There is intelligence in the military after all.

Sadly enough, the material of the book was mainly derived from two long internal essays the author generated within the military back in 1988 and 1994. So, the concepts that seemed new to me as a civilian at the end of 2004 were known within the military for over a decade. Thus, even though the author proposed a framework for restructuring the Department of Defense based around human skills able to deal with insurgent warfare instead of solely technological capabilities aimed at outdated State-to-State warfare, the DOD under Rumsfeld and his predecessors chose to go in exactly the wrong direction.

The author develops his analytical framework around its main theme: fourth generation warfare (4GW) in 17 very clearly written and sequentially developed short chapters. Near the beginning of the book, he gives his concept a broadbased historical foundation by suggesting that warfare evolves in parallel to society in general. So, just as our civilization has evolved from various disaggregated stages including: nomadic, agricultural, industrial, and finally information based; warfare has now also reached its fourth stage centered also on information and the dissemination of ideas.

Counterintuitively, the author demonstrates brilliantly that the U.S. DOD is at a huge disadvantage in this new information based warfare style. Yes, we have superior technology, we have the best weapons. But, because of our uncreative hierarchical monopolistic centralized organization we are totally incapable of exploiting our technology in a timely manner. The author takes the example of generating a surveillance request within the DOD. The turnaround for this information to be authorized and processed will be about a week. On the other hand, a terrorist group simply watching CNN and using cheap commercially available surveillance technology will have information on many of the enemies positions almost live.

The more perplexing challenge is that the U.S. with all its wealth and infrastructure and military personnel represents a huge set of targets. The insurgents in whatever shape or form are totally stealthy, mixed in within civilian populations, and often use explicitly civilians as either shields or supporting system for their warfare.

Another challenge is the battle of ideas. The 4GW combatants use the media effectively to wear down the political resolve of their enemies. This entails showing bloody civilian casualties as any result of U.S. offensive. This is also done by orchestrating spectacularly shocking beheadings of innocent civilians whose only crime were collaborating with the U.S.

The author proposes many detailed solutions to all the above challenges. They appear somewhat Herculean in the changes that the DOD will have to undertake to spend its $500 billion effectively so as to fight today's wars instead of yesterday's. The author makes an interesting comparison between IBM in the pre PC world and today. IBM was focused on mainframes where it had an unrivaled advantage. It did so for too long until mainframes became almost irrelevant. Today, the technology industry is more flexible, creative, and fast paced moving than IBM was capable of handling. But, the author feels that the DOD's obsession with developing superior but irrelevant technology at the detriment of developing the smart human skills necessary to deal with 4GW effectively is just as ineffective as IBM's former mainframe based strategy. What good is superior technology if it takes you five days to turnaround a surveillance request.

The most fascinating part of the book is his analysis of Vietnam and the Israeli-Palestinian conflicts (chapters 6 and 8) using his 4GW framework. These are the most insightful writings I have read on the subject.

I strongly recommend this book for how much knowledge it provides not only in military strategy but in the recent history of the most intractable conflicts. If you are interested in this subject, I also recommend Wesley Clark's "Winning Modern Wars"; Robert Kaplan's "The Coming Anarchy" and van Crevald's "The Transformation of War." All these books outline the changes of warfare, and complement nicely this book. But, this book serves as the core of the knowledge base regarding the evolution of warfare from a State-to-State phenomena to something completely different the DOD is ill equipped to deal with organizationally.

Col. Hammes has taken the original thesis of "we make war the way we make money" presented by the Toffler's in "War and Anti-War" and fleshed it out with real examples. He provides a useful background of he various "generations" of war or the evolutions that war has made as economy and cultures have changed, moves on to a description of Fourth Generation warfare (4GW) and then provides detailed examples including present date. It's important to understand that although this book is about 4GW or insurgency warfare, it is also about the direction warfare is taking. The United States must be ready for conflicts that span the spectrum from 2GW to what will become 5GW. 4GW is like any insurgency...it requires lots of human skill, good communications, and interagency support...and something that Americans are not known for....patience. If you are a soldier interested in insurgency and how it is evolving this is a MUST READ book. If you are a civilian you'd better read this book if you want to understand how the world is unfolding around you. This book gets Mike Barr's 6 Star Rating.

If you're both confused and annoyed by the endless cacophony since September 11, 2001 by politicians, pundits, columnists, and tv and radio talk show hosts proclaiming to be experts on modern warfare, then this book will come as a real relief. This is a level-headed, unbiased, rational, in-depth, and intellectual tour de force that takes a good hard look at the reality of modern warfare. Unlike so many other commentators on the subject who are so blinded by ideology that they are incapable of making an honest examination, Colonel Hammes sweeps all that aside and delivers a highly credible assessment of the nature of the enemies we face today, why our current military structure is incapable of dealing with it adequately, and what we need to do to correct that situation. I never once got the impression that he was rooting for any particular political party, philosophy, or ideology. Instead, he comes across as truly detached from political debates and concerned solely with doing what is necessary to prepare the United States to deal with the enemies of today and tomorrow.

Hammes begins with a solid (though perhaps too brief) examination of the history of fourth generation warfare (4GW), which I found to be highly enlightening. Not being a military history scholar myself, I learned a lot from that part of the book alone. That history lesson is a very good lead-in for his assessment of the current state of threats around the world, and then finally a discussion of what steps we must take to deal with those threats. What he calls for is nothing short of a revolution in the way our military is structured and the way it operates, from the lowest levels all the way up to the Dept. of Defense and indeed the entire federal government. It's not a simple solution by any means, but that's what makes Hammes' assessment even more credible. In an age when we are constantly inundated with simple-minded "solutions" to complex problems, this book, while quite sobering, is refreshing to read.

I did feel like Hammes probably goes a bit beyond his area of expertise toward the end of the book when he discusses several topics outside the realm of military affairs, but overall this is a solid performance that everyone would benefit from reading.

Very informative book by a former USMC officer. Provides insight into long term insurgent plans in the middle east, and reasons for the neccessity of continued persistence. Begins with a short review of the evolution of modern warfare into forth generation war, and the adaptation of 4GW in the twentieth century by various revolutionary groups. Also gives a brief but very good history of the Jewish and Palestinian conflict. If you think its time to just get out of the middle east this book might change your way of thinking. The book gets a little boggy toward the end, but overall an excellent read.

I was compelled to buy this book after hearing the author lecture at my school. He made excellent points and had great insight into future during that lecture, however the book that I purchased was somewhat lacking in many respects. The author does a good job at using historical examples, however many of these are somewhat undeveloped and it is hard to differentiate what he is saying of his own accord and what is actually based on historical fact. As the book gets more into the characteristics of Fourth Generation Warfare, the author also starts to get incessantly repetitive, making the same arguments over and over again. In the end, I found the book lacking in detail and energy, although most of the assertions put forth by the author were interesting and based on sound logic.