February 3, 2022 • 40 mins
The gang sit down and have some yuks about the concept of 4th generation warfare and the Kaiser-loving paleocon who invented it.
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Episode Transcript
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Speaker 1 (00:05):
It could happen. Here is the podcast that this is
about things falling apart and how to, how to, how
to maybe unfollowing apart. I'm Robert Evans. Your your your host,
and your other hosts are Christopher and Garrison and our
producers Sophie. How's everybody doing today? Great? How's every how's
(00:27):
everybody feel about war? Oh? Yeah? Now, if you were
to get us based on your knowledge of history, what
generation of war we're in right now? What would you? What?
What would y'all guess? I feel like war isn't it's
it's it's newer in relation to like human beings. Like
(00:50):
the idea of war, I'm guessing like there's been like battles,
but like the idea of like war, I feel like
isn't super old compared to how long has been humans
walking around. So I don't know this is maybe I mean,
I know the answer, but like it's it's like like
that's that's definitely We definitely passed through like at least
(01:11):
a couple of stages and were at least a couple Chris,
like gotta be at least twelve twelve least you are
way ahead of William s Lynd who spoilers is the
guy who came up with the concept of fourth generation war,
which is what this episode is about. Right. One of
the things when we talk about things falling apart is
um the unsettling growth of a number of different hybrid conflicts,
(01:36):
Ukraine being the most like blatant modern example, Syria being
the deadliest example in our lifetimes. But like these weird
hybrid conflicts that are a mix of shit happening on
the Internet and like disinformation going out all over the world.
You could even think to like what was happening in
Bolivia a year or so back, and like all those
weird accounts that were like based around Langley, Virginia claiming
(01:57):
to support the military coup, And you can look at,
like from the same this disinformation brought out by like
the Russian state that is usually as part of like
a conflict either you know, they have disinfo operations and
Syria disinfo operations around the conflict in Ukraine that are
kind of designed to muddy the issues and to detract
international support and also to like drum up support within
(02:21):
for like in the in the case of Ukraine, you
had like this media blitz against the legitimacy of the
Ukrainian state in favor of like a more UH like
traditionally Russian um UH style of government in the East,
and like that led to this breakaway republic that was
supported by the Russian government and like so these are
like hybrid conflicts is kind of how these are referred to.
(02:41):
And there was a guy named William S. Lynd who
in nineteen eighty nine wrote a book with a couple
of US military analysts, Like he was an analyst for
the military. He was not serving in the military. The
other guys he wrote this this thing with we're serving
at the time, and they wrote this this book kind
of trying to basically what Lynde was doing. He was
(03:03):
very influenced by our loss in Vietnam when I say,
are here, like the loss of the American state in Vietnam,
And he was trying to determine, like number one, kind
of like find a way to codify and explain the
changes that were happening to warfare in this period. Was
also influenced about what was happening in Afghanistan with the
Russians were experiencing um and find a way to like
(03:24):
move forward and allow the United states to win wars again, right,
Like that was William S. Lynd's goal, um, And so
he came up with this concept of four or he
and some other guys came up with what they called
fourth generation warfare UM, and first generation warfare is like
Napoleonic Arab warfare. So, like as Garrison was saying, you
may note that he kind of starts his that's pretty late.
(03:47):
That's pretty late we had before. Yeah, that's there's a
lot of stuff that leads up to like, yeah, if
I was gonna try to categorize different types of warfare,
that would not be the one I start with. Well,
like the reality of course, as we'll talk about, like
when you start looking at different kinds of warfares, there's
wars that look remarkably like the ship going on in
(04:07):
Afghanistan and Ukraine, that are occurring like several thousand years ago, um,
like like like in the same places to like, yeah,
it's just like if you wanted to if you wanted
to talk about like kind of the modern style of
wars that we saw on that we've seen really in
the last like hundred and fifty years, they're not all
that dissimilar. In a lot of ways from like the
kind of conflicts you saw between Rome and Carthage um,
(04:28):
which are these really like big nation state style conflicts
and and have a lot of similarities. But but William S.
Lynn described the first generation of warfare is beginning after
the Peace of Westphalia in sixty eight that ended the
Thirty Years War um. And it's the kind of warfare
where you have these like big, tightly ordered groups of
men marching towards each other and like firing very inaccurate
weapons and mass together. Right. Uh. This is ended by
(04:51):
the era of the machine gun and the semi automatic
rifle um or on the bolt reaction rifle, I should say,
And that leads us to second generation warfare, which is
linear fire and movement with heavy reliance on indirect fires.
That's still huge groups of guys charging, but they're not
marching in close order, they're not like firing in volleys um,
and they're supported by heavy artillery like World War one
(05:12):
kind of ship right. Um. Really we start to see
this in eighteen seventy and then World War One is
kind of the height of this kind of warfare, and
over the course of World War One we more merge
in again This is William S. Len's way we emerge
from second generation to third generation warfare, which is where
you've got infiltration tactics to bypass enemy defensive lines and
collapse it, which is kind of the Germans and their
(05:33):
outrgs tactic and stormtrooper tactics are really kind of uh
pioneering that you've got the idea of defense in depth
um and so this need to bypass the enemy and
like this leads to blitzkrieg and leads to all sorts
of ship um and then that kind of starts to
collapse and Len's estimation around Vietnam, and you get what's
called fourth generation warfare. Fourth generation. I'm actually just going
(05:56):
to read a quote from a military history wiki that
I thought had any good description of all of this.
Fourth generation warfare is normally characterized by a violent non
state actor fighting a state. This fighting can be physically done,
such as by modern examples Hezblah or the liberation Tigers
of Tamil illam Um. In this realm, the v n essay.
These violent nonstate actors use all three levels of fourth
(06:18):
generation warfare. These are the physical actual combat, which is
considered the least important mental the will to fight, belief
in victory, etcetera. And the moral, which is the most important,
Lynd says, and includes cultural norms, etcetera. Um, So obviously
I think that this is kind of nonsense. There's a
lot of people, So there's a lot of folks, the
people who buy into this, and it's very popular on
(06:39):
the right. Well, we'll look at like what's happening in
Ukraine is a perfect example of fourth generation warfare because
you have Russia flooding the zone using spot Nick and
a bunch of other kind of media organizations to drum
up um discord and like anger between East and West
in Ukraine and support for potential Russian action at the
same time as you have them backing this dictator um,
(07:00):
and then you have like the West sort of supporting
the people protesting against those dictators and like so you've
got like this this digital conflict, this information conflict that
eventually leads to fighting on the ground. One of the
areas in which I think Lynda is really off is
talking about like the physical as the least important, especially
if you're going to consider Ukraine an example of fourth
(07:20):
generation warfare, because if the Russian military had not intervened,
there would not still be a conflict in Ukraine, the
Separatists would not still hold land, and in fact, the
Separatis were on the edge of getting completely wiped out
by the Ukrainian military because they were a bunch of
nonstate actors with minimal support and minimal weaponry before the
Russians moved in brigades of active duty combat troops in
(07:41):
armor um, including like gigantic fucking missile launchers which they
used to shoot down that Malaysian airlines flight like that.
It's it's just not I I don't think that that.
What what Linda is saying is very um, very well
describes what's actually going on in the world. But it
is important to understand the concept of fourth generay and
warfare and fifth generation warfare, which we'll talk about in
(08:02):
a bit um because it is so useful in the
way in which particularly guys like Steve Bannon um conceive
of conflict. Because that you will hear the term fourth
generation warfare constantly, and it's also something that has used
a lot within our military establishment. Now a lot of
people hate it, and within you can find a lot
of papers buy dudes writing like analysts who are working
(08:24):
for the Defense Department for the army actively like shipping
on lynd and talking about how he's at best is
kind of like reinvented ideas that existed in warfare for
thousands of years, and he's kind of summarized things in
a way that that is needlessly flattening, and like some
people will say, you basically like ripped up like added
the internet to klauswitz uh and pretended that you'd invented
(08:46):
a new style of conor that you defined a new
style of conflict. Anyway, that's like an introduction to the
idea of fourth generation warfare, right. And there's a lot
of things that he gets again like if you're if
you're a history a military has story wong, which Lynde
pretends to be a lot of ship that he gets wrong. Um.
So one of the things that he says, like one
(09:07):
of his famous phrases that every military eventually craps in
its own mess kit um, the idea that like every
military that that is great eventually like has a gigantic
funk up because they get too used to doing the
same thing, which is true um. And he describes it
as like um, the Prussians did in eighteen oh six,
after which they designed and put into service a much
more improved model mesh Kit mess Kit through the Sharonhorst
(09:29):
military reforms. The French did in eighteen seventy, after which
they took down from the shelf and old model mess
ket the mass draft Army of the First Republic and
put it back into service. The Japanese did it in
five after which they threw their mesket away, swearing they
would never eat again. And we did it in Korea,
in Vietnam, and now in four new wars so far
we've only we've had the only military that's just kept
on eating. And that's a really dumb statement. That's all
(09:51):
really historically and accurate. So, for example, it's true that
like the Prussians had a great military which then got
its butt kicked by Napoleon and they had to completely
redesign it, and by the time eighteen seventy came around,
they were extremely dominant on the battlefield be against the French.
Number One, he's crediting the military reforms of like tactics
and strategy and ignoring things like Krupp inventing an entirely
(10:12):
new kind of cannon that was utterly dominant on the battlefield. Um.
He's also ignoring the fact that this Prussian army. Um,
he's saying, like the US is the only army that
does the same thing over and over again and fails
and keeps on eating. Well, the Prussian Army is the
army the Germans took into battle in World War One
and two and spoilers, they didn't learn enough from either
of those wars. Um. He also talks about how like
(10:35):
the French had their you know, crapping in the mess
hit moment in eighteen seventy after the Franco Prussian War,
and they changed their army and it was much better. Like, well,
they didn't win World War One, like they were on
the side that one, but if it had been them
against Germany, they would have gotten fucking steamrolled. Like it
was not going well for them for quite a while,
and they lost a whole generation of young men. So
(10:55):
maybe and and again this is like what he's saying
is basically, we because we're using so constantly. The reason
that we're losing is not because we are picking bad conflicts.
It's not because we're picking to engage in conflicts when
we shouldn't at all be engaging in conflicts. It is
not because we use military force in like a fundamentally
venal and corrupt way in order to benefit a small
(11:16):
cabal of military industrial corporations. It's because we we don't
have good battle doctrine, and that's why we're not winning
in these conflicts, which ignores everything about the reality of
the conflicts that like he's talking about, Like, the problem
is not a lack of combat dominance, which is is
what you were seeing with like the Prussians fighting Napoleon.
It's what you were seeing with the French fighting the
(11:38):
Germans in eighteen seventy, right, Like in those cases, the
Prussians had a massive failure of combat dominance against the French,
and the French had a massive failure in combat against
the Germans. Their doctrine was just worse. Um Us soldiers
are great at getting into gunfights and great at winning
gun fights. The problem is not a lack of combat ability.
The problem is that they're no way to win the
(12:01):
conflicts that we're getting into. They are unwinnable wars that
were never things that like, no amount of change in
doctrine would have made Afghanistan a success because it was
a stupid war. Like it's like if if that were true,
like coin would have worked and co Yeah no, like
Colt yeah yeah, just complete total and utter failure, like
(12:25):
enormous numbers of people dead, enormous numbers of like people
traumatized for generations, and the U S still just lost
both wars, yeah, and and and and if you really
dig into Lynd and others like him, what they're actually
saying when they say that, like we need to reform
like the way the military works with new battle doctorments.
We need to be killing even more people. We just
(12:45):
didn't kill enough in Vietnam, like the five million we
bombed or so that wasn't enough people like that. That's
the reform that he's really talking about. UM. And Lynd
one of those people who like rants about the like
the the the El Salvadorian option. UM, I'm sure he does.
I don't know exactly what he said about Al Salvador.
He's a fascinating kind of fascist. Um. He is absolutely
(13:08):
a fascist. He was the director of the Center for
Cultural Conservatism at the Free Congress Foundation UM. He wrote
a or he helped to popularize a Declaration of Cultural
Independence by Cultural Conservatives UM, which is like these there's
a lot of the seeds of the ship that we're
seeing today, right that like American culture institutions are being
(13:28):
collapsed because of like liberal decadence and conservatives. Cultural conservatives
should separate themselves and like set up parallel institutions where
Bannon comes in. And that's where Bannon comes in. That
where like fucking Andrew Torba and gab come and they
all advocate this ship. Yeah, because they're all they all
adhere to that kind of uh yeah, like politics has
(13:49):
culture and there's downstream. Yeah, And there's some weird differences
with Lynd Like he's a huge mass transit and urban
rail advocate, which I guess I agree with him. Fine,
once in a while, a bad person does have a
good opinion. He loves he loves him some fucking city
trains and stuff. Um, but he's also he was a
major factor. He was one of the earliest, like prominent
(14:10):
conservatives who was like yelling about cultural Marxism and kind
of the modern political period. I mean that makes sense
because he was really into it. Sounds like he's real
into metapolitics. So yeah, that's super in the metapolis. Yeah,
So like all of this stuff makes a whole lot
of sense if you're yeah, if you're if you know what,
if you know what meta politics are, it's also kind
of explains how he developed the different generations of warfare
(14:32):
using it through a framework of metal politics actually really
makes that fit if you believe, like Breitbart famously stated
that like politics is downstream from culture, and if you
also believe what Claus I think it was class Wits
that said that, like war is politics by other means
than like you can make cultural can cause wars, and like, yeah,
like that's a lot like kind of I think the
thought process behind n Yeah, because this this really defines
(14:55):
what he means by fourth generation warfare of war being
handed out typically by the culture, instead of having it
be abstracted to be like people marching towards each other
with guns. Because he's, he's, he's, he's putting the he's
putting the culture kind of back into it. Yeah, and
he and he's and he's and and obviously culture was
never not a factor, of course, not like every single
(15:16):
war is, but a major factor, like all of this
ship he talks about is being characters to go. Fourth
generation warfare has been happening in one way or another
for thousands of years. But it's it's not that these
things are done in like temporal succession. It's like because
because like a lot of the stuff that makes up
fourth generation warfare, like the more like guerrilla warfare aspects,
come way before, people with guns marching towards each other,
(15:39):
Africans doing that to Alexander, the goddamn group for the
Birth of Christ. A lot of a lot of this
fourth gend stuff is actually like kind of more similar
to what original warfare probably would have been. Like yeah,
which I think, yeah, I think to to his credit,
I think he does actually recognize that at some point
in his writing now and and and the thing about
(15:59):
this is is, well, we can pick at it, and
I think there's a lot that's ridiculous in his attitude.
It's it's close enough to the way that reality works
that if you're going, if you're thinking about conflict in
this framework, you can be very successful. It's not like
an It's inaccurate in some ways because he's he is
wrongly describing why certain things work. I think is a
lot of what he's doing. And he's wrong about winning wars.
(16:20):
I'll say that, um, if if the American military were
to make the fucking lend the Secretary of Defense and
give him total power, like he would keep on losing
wars as hard as we've been losing wars for everyone
listening to this is lifetime um. But in a cultural sense,
the kind of culture jamming, which is a term we'll
talk about more in the future, and but the kind
(16:41):
of like the propaganda arms and stuff in order to
the the the the media warfare in order to either
insight or justify real conflict or or and this is
one of the areas in which they have been really
effective to alter the dimension, to alter how internationally a
conflict is responded to. One of the big successes of
(17:01):
people like this has been effectively eliminating any kind of
left wing support for liberatory movements in the Middle East, UM,
for liberatory movements or for like just like what's happening
in Ukraine. It's kind of like reflexive. Well, if there's uh,
if there's a movement for liberation among the people of
(17:22):
a country, it's probably the c I a like like
carrying out some sort of op um. That's Lynda and
his people UM and people influenced by him have been
a big part of pushing that. Um, it's why Steve
Bannon is in and is so friendly with like some
guys on like chunks that they call themselves the left
and whatnot. It's because, um, there's there's a lot of uh,
(17:44):
there's a lot of ties there, and that is an
area in which they've been successful because international support really matters. Um,
you know, it's it's it's uh. And I think like
the death of internationalism is one of the bigger successes
that like these these thinkers have kind of had. But yeah,
I don't know. That's that's that's that's a chunk of
what I had to say. You guys want to know
(18:14):
more about William S. Lynn because he's I certainly want
to learn more about William William S Lynd cultural conservative,
right big on the traditional Christian values of America. You
want to guess who he considers his ideal leader? Uh
jfk No, the House of Hogan's all learned. He's a
(18:35):
Prussian monarchist. Wait oh yeah, okay, everything I said politics,
he's certainly int hegel and he thinks that the Prussian
the Prussian monarchy was the best government there ever was
and was like unfairly crushed by the rest of the
world and like should have won World War One and
(18:57):
everything would like he's he's and so he's he's very
much like a conservative monarchist um and a weird kind
because like, my god, dude, if you're looking at like
monarchs who were like the Hogan's allern has had like
in the modern era, like the first Kaiser Wilhelm was
broadly competent, but like it went to ship as soon
(19:20):
as the second and he blames all of World War
One on the fucking Tsars, like it's it's very silly,
Like his ideas of history are like very stupid. I
have an incredibly silly theory of history based on Hagel,
which is that like every everything Hagel. Briefly, for the
listeners I know, do not, this is this is you know,
(19:44):
this is this is the thing. Okay, okay, this this
is this is. This is my crank theory of history
based on Hagel, which is that every about forty years
someone attempts to apply Hagel. Someone like takes charge of
an incredibly large state and tries to use Hagel to
run it, and every single time time they don't understand
the dialectic and it doesn't work. So this for example,
like if if you can take this as a very
(20:06):
granul level, right you have Mao, Mao has no idea
what a dialectic is. You can you can read Mao's work.
He has no clue, Like he just doesn't he like
he doesn't he doesn't get it. He thinks that a
dialectic is when one person with a bat hits the
other hits the other side, and then when you destroy
the other side, the dialectic is resolved. Right like that
That's not what it is, right maw Like because of this,
(20:27):
the entire Chinese revolution just implodes. Everyone dies, it returns
to capitalism. Is a complete failure, right you know. And
and like a lot of the Nazis are very much
into Hagel. They have again incredibly similar failures the other group.
People like Lynda think is part of this is that
all of the people who planned the Iraq War were
like enormous Sigillian's right, but they've gotten to Hagel through
(20:49):
this weird like they they've been doing this, they've been
doing these kind of insurgency stuff and so but they're
kind of insurgeny stuff was they read Mao, and you know,
so that they're so they're they're they're reading Hagel, but
then they're also reading Hagel through Mao and now doesn't
understand what's going on either. And so when they try
to apply the Hegelian dialectic and they're like, Okay, well,
the end of the end of the end of history,
the end of the Hegelian dialectic is the United States.
We're just going to impose this on a rock and
(21:11):
catastrophic failure. So the war listening is, do not attempt
to apply Hagel. You will completely annihilate your entire political movement,
like every every everything, everything you love and dream of, everything,
like every ideology you've ever had. Uh, it will, it
will crumble beneath you. And yeah, you will watch your
cities and you watch your cities and armies burn. That's
(21:33):
that's fine, because the last time my resistance movement, we're
just gonna be postcanty and object oriented. On ontologist guys.
You throw a bunch of names and I'm gonna get
like eight percent of people are just what the funk
am I hearing about? These dead people? The thing I
actually wanted to to bring up on this is like
how fourth and fifth gen are The idea of the
(21:53):
fourth and fifth gen get applied onto like more insurrection
based um, like a revolts groups. Right, you can see
like groups like the Earth Liberation Fund and Animal Liberation
Front kind of pick and shoes. Elements of the fourth
and fifth generation were fair to kind of to see
how their groups formed or were operated. Um. And even
(22:15):
you could argue that like Ted Kazinski was like a
fIF fifth generation warfare because he was completely autonomous and
the actions. Let's let's introduce the idea of fifth generation
because we just talked about fourth generation warfare, which was
Lynn's idea. Fifth generation warfare is a concept that has
come up I believe Daniel Abbott is his name, um.
And the idea was that like it's a new type
(22:38):
of warfare that like characterizes a lot of conflicts in
the modern era where almost everything is non kinetic um,
but it is still military action UM, so military social engineering,
misinformation sorry, or attacks not just like decentralized, but like
states actually using um organized and often fighting non state
actors who are using kind of the same thing. Yeah. Yeah,
and this in a lot of this would involve artificial intelligence,
(23:01):
fully autonomous systems, systems not just botan nets, but like
algorithms that can like handle a lot of the quote
unquote fighting. Um william S Lynd hates the idea of
fourth generation, fifth generation warfare because he's a narcissist and
he doesn't like anyone using the idea every head of
the dialectic it keeps going. So what I was what
(23:22):
I was thinking, is like, is like a lot of
you can apply fifth generation warfare to like these types
of groups who are mostly like they do some they
do some fourth gent tactics in terms of like terrorism, right,
Like they try to make political statements through terrorism and
have terrorism an influential thing, but they're demands like you
(23:44):
rarely like fifth generation stuff has not been around a
long enough and no one's really been super successful at
it in the past enough time for us like to
like recognize that, right, because you can look at a
lot of a lot of like an instructionary type stuff
around like the Again, I'm just gonna use the Earth
Liberation Front as an example of like a group that
(24:05):
attempted kind of these types of tactics, Um, and they
may have succeeded in the physical sense, but they did
not succeed in like the cultural sense. Really, um so
trying to like look at these types of things and
how they relate to like specific you know, if you're
gonna use like the take Kazinski example, same thing, except
he's not a group. He's just one person, which is
(24:26):
kind of more of a fifth gen thinks he's like
fully autonomous, whereas I think, um, you know, stuff like
the e l F tried to have that kind of
militant group dynamic that is more similar to fourth generation warfare.
So it's like this picking and choosing of like trying
to trying to do physical action than trying to do
cultural action, and it's it's not like the things that
have succeeded. Let's take for instance, some the defend the
(24:52):
Cascadian forest thing who just got just got um this
is the specific action they were working on to protect
a specific chunk of forest. H The Judge of approved
their approve their motion because they were they actually were
successful because they did not form this militant thing right now,
they were just doing the cultural and it actually really succeeded.
(25:13):
Um as opposed to just you know, burning down buildings
and stuff to try to get your action forward. So
just trying to look at like examples of when when
like the goal is kind of the same and certain
times succeed, certain certain types don't. How that might influence
like organizing and how to selectively use like insurrection, but
(25:33):
have it not be like a default mode for like
always your group is better if it's in surrectorary m Yeah,
And I one of the things that does characterize that
I think is useful if we're because again I have
my criticisms of the value of any of these like
phrases as kind of discreete concepts. But one of the
(25:54):
things that I think is useful about the concept of
fifth generation warfare that does talk about something that is
legitimately new to conflict that has not really existed before
before the Internet is omnipresence um that that the conflicts
are not limited in geographical space or in time, and
in fact is like a constant factor all around you
at all times because of the way the information sphere
(26:15):
kind of actually functions. Um. You know, you can look
at kind of like the mix of street fights and
information warfare, doxing and whatnot between fascists and anti fascist
for the last few years. It's omnipresent, it's always going
on UM, and the battle space is kind of potentially everywhere,
even though it's fairly rarely kinetic or physical UM. And
(26:37):
I do think that that's an area in which, UM,
it is really worth having a new term, in kind
of defining a new term, because that's one of the
few things I think that has legitimately changed. The Internet
has made all of this stuff that's been happening for
thousands of years faster UM. But the thing that it's
really created that was not present before is this the
this omnipresence UM. So I do think that that's really
(26:59):
useful when Yeah, because like I would like to how
conflict is different. I would like to kind of like
think about like January six, within these frameworks, right of
how of how disinformation and information was used relatively successfully
to get a lot of people to actually move towards
the more um you know, kind of backed by half
the state, backed you know, not backed by well the
(27:22):
larger majority. And yeah, how like it's a it's like
a synthesis of the fourth generation of fifth generation ideas,
which is why you know, there's a lot of overlap
with these terms specifically, Um, but seeing how like one
leads to another and it's not they're not necessarily inclusion exclusionary. Yeah,
I mean it's like the result is whether they win
or lose. Right, that's that's like that that's what makes
(27:44):
it a war. Is is the is the is like
you decide afterwards based on the result. Yeah, I mean
it kind of. Yeah, that's certainly like how more modern
wars happened, Like with Afghanistan, it wasn't so much like
a clear like World War One, there's an armistice and
like negotiated end of the war or in a certain
date at all ends. It was a lots we haven't
done that since. We haven't done that for the state,
(28:05):
Like you know, I've never known the States to do
that for a month. Because if you don't do that,
you don't have to admit you lost exactly right, if
you just kind of like leave and ship gets real
fucked up. Um, you can just be like for one thing,
you can say like if we'd stayed and spent more
money on that war, we could have we could have
pulled it out. Um, which is one of my like
there's a lot of great criticisms of how the Biden
(28:26):
administration handled things in Afghanistan last year, a thousand of them.
But at the end of the day, it's like it
was never going to be good, like it was always
it was this horrible war. We were killing way too
many people. Um, we weren't achieving anything. And that fact
was made really clear by the fact that as soon
as we pulled out our guns, um, everything collapsed. And
(28:48):
that was always going to happen. And you can needle
around the edges of how we could have, you know,
better taken care of people who we had made promises
to or whatever. At the end of the day, it
was always going to be fucked because it was a
thing we never should have done. And that's that like
this idea that Lynd has that like, no, if we
fix our doctrine, we have better tactical doctrine, we have
better like we have. One of his big ideas is UM.
(29:10):
He came up with this concept called movement warfare that's
been hugely influential in the way the Marine Corps functions. UM.
And the idea behind movement warfare is like, you should
always have a bias towards action, and Lynda is very consciously, UM,
trying to make this basically the evolution of of a
German tactic called alf drugs tactic, which is like individual
unit tactics basically. So it's like midway through World War One,
(29:32):
the Germans start to realize, like, all these mass wave
human charges aren't working great, um, and we should probably
like figure out a way to get around these defenses.
So they start training what are kind of the prototype
of special forces, these like stormtroopers whose job is to
like sneak in and not be seen and jump into
the trenches and like you know, fucking axes and clubs
(29:53):
and automatic handguns and um, fight in a way that
like soldiers had not really fought in a long time.
A lot of it was like may l a. It
was this really and there were a lot of technical things,
how to get around barbed wire, how to not be seen,
how to like deal with machine gun nests, um. And
one of the keys to it was like the German
started to retrain their soldiers to were like you have
to have like these individual units of five and ten
(30:15):
men have to have like total autonomy, and then unit
commanders have to have autonomy and they need to be
will able to like we'll tell them we need you
to be in this this place at this point in time.
But it's up to you to figure out how to
do that, because if you're if you've got this one
guy who's three miles back giving the commands, everyone's just
gonna get mowed down by machine gun fire. Needs to
be more nimble UM. And that's part of why in
(30:35):
World War One, in in World War Two, because the
rest of the people fighting the Germans, like even the US,
had not caught up to this kind of battle doctrine
by the time World War Two was over um to
the extent that the Germans had, And it's part of
why there's such a lopsided casualty ratio in favor of
the Germans in that war is they had what is
very close to because all modern combat tactics are based
(30:55):
on what the Germans started doing at the end of
World War One UM and had really like nailed down
to a science in World War two. UM And Lynda
is saying that, like we need to extend that and
like that's the thing we've gotten too far away from
and we need to have You need to have like
this bias towards movement and this the like officers need
to be super aggressive and like always pursuing these kind
(31:16):
of kinetic options. And again, as the Marine Corps battle
record will show, this is very effective when you were
getting into gunfights. But when was the last time the
Marine Corps was on the side of a winning war? Like, again,
it doesn't we can all needle about how to make
our troops better at like killing people, but at the
end of the day, we're losing wars because we're getting
(31:37):
into wars that are not winnable and that's not something
you're going to fix with battle doctrine. And Lynn doesn't
understand that because he's a fascist. And I think it's
just like this, this is the real like weakness of
their politics, which is that was like, yeah, well, like
it it's they're they're they're trying. It's like they can't
tell the difference between war and like they don't think
(31:57):
there's a difference between war and politics, right, and that
means that they think that there's a military solution to
every political problem and it's like, no, there's not, and
like this is this is how this is what is
how they keep destroying themselves, right, is that they you know,
like like this is what happened to the neo cons.
I mean, the neo cons is sort of held on
in this kind of rump shell. But it's like neo
conservatism and the project. Yeah, but but it's like, you know,
(32:19):
like they don't they don't have like like even the
people who used to be their base, like aren't there
base anymore? Like those those people are all moving yeah
yeah yeah, And it's it's it's like maybe they could
have maintained it if they hadn't just like literally blown
it apart, like trying to conquer a rock. And it's
like they all do this. They all eventually are like, well, okay,
(32:39):
well we'll find a military solution to this, and it
blows up in their face because it turns out that, no,
you can't actually do this. I mean, I think all
this indicates a general progression into the more metapolitics idea
and culture as politics ideas that we're trying to solve
all these political problems, like at least like locally within us.
You know, we're trying to be trying to do them
called trually and choosing them in selectively in other countries. Right,
(33:03):
Because the more kind of the idea of like let's
just keep entering wars, which we're also doing at the
same time, only for a very very very like like
very specific regions. But I mean the trend of like
verst you know, like Trump's not necessarily and like Trump's
not really can anio con He preferred the cultural jamming
like that was, that was his preferred method, and I
got him relatively far in four years. And there there's
(33:25):
an argument that Lynde is a big person who that
he learned a lot from Lynda, even though I don't
think he ever read his books. All the people he
surrounded him with where fans of Lynn. There's a picture
of Trump and Lend together and like a copy of
or at least Trump together with a copy of his book, UM,
which is titled, uh the Next Conservatism UM. And I'm
(33:45):
gonna read in a quote at this point from The
American Conservative, which Lynde has written for, that describes this
book because it's it's uh useful. Um The Next Conservatism
offers a comprehensive agenda of what Lyndon way Rich, who's
his co author on this call a cultural called cultural conservatism.
While the book aims higher than mere policy, the specifics
mentioned are Trumpian reductions in legal and illegal immigration in America,
(34:08):
first trade policy, and robust investments and domestic infrastructure, particularly
street cars and trains in a less Trumpi in Vain.
It also promotes homeschooling and incorporates some ideas of from
the New Urbanism as part of a broader program called
retro Culture. Of its connection with Trump, lynd says the
book runs parallel to what he has been saying, but
he doubts the billionaire's familiarity with its more philosophical ideas.
(34:30):
Now here's the part that is going to be really unsettling,
and this, I think is what lynd may actually be
going for, rather than any kind of reform in the
military to improve its ability to win foreign wars. Quote.
In nineteen four an article appeared in the Marine Corps
Gazette by Lynde and two of the authors of the
nineteen eighty nine piece, where he introduced the concept of
fourth generation warfare. It ended on a dire note. The
(34:51):
point is not merely that America's armed forces will find
themselves facing non nation state conflicts and forces overseas. The
point is that the same conflicts are coming year the
next real war we fight is likely to be on
American soil. So that's what's going on here, Like, and
that's the thing where biased towards action and increased killing power.
(35:14):
If all you're really trying to do is murder everyone
who disagrees with you using the military very quickly, well
that might work for you. People should know about this.
He has a fucking fiction book called Victoria, which actually
(35:35):
if you go to like TV tropes, um, the there's
a TV it's not just TV tropes anymore, but like
there's a trope page from my book After the Revolution,
and it's directly compared to Victoria, as like they're the
opposites of each other, because Victoria is like a book
about a civil war in the US that these like
weird fascist uh like anarchists win, and like it's, uh,
(36:04):
it's pretty fucked up. Like the problem is that like
like like all of these like the Northwest is controlled
by like environmentalists like leaders who get like eaten by
these animals like wolves that they reintroduced to the to
the society, and like California is so feminist that it's
illegal to have sex and make babies, um, and the
South fails because it's it's too multicultural, um And yeah,
(36:26):
like it's it's all so the person who wins the
war is like the governor of Maine who's a retro
culture practitioner um and considers himself a subject of the kaiser.
I maybe getting a couple of details wrong, but not
(36:48):
that part I know. But it's it's a fucking nuts
nuts So I've only read like little bits of it.
Maybe one day I'll get through the whole thing. But
it's that's that's the thing with all with all of
these like cultural gamers, Like they try to put on
like war aesthetics, but all of them are the nerdiest
fuckers he'll ever. He's so stupid and I like he's
(37:12):
wi all these guys are so they're so nerdy, all
of them. Yeah, and like lynd everything about him makes
sense when you understand that his primary guiding directive is
anger over the fact that there's no longer a kaiser Um.
He's a little but also like again, he was not
lying about there's a picture of like Trump of this
(37:33):
fucking book. He's not lying that Like fucking everybody who
was like pilled in that White House knew about Lynn's
ideas and have been He's been hugely influential, and not
just among like the American right. His books have been
found in like al Qaeda hideouts and ship like. He
makes sense though that that that that like all of
all of that really tracks is because yeah, like the
(37:55):
barrier between like terrorist action as a part of fourth
generation and in some ways fifth generation warfare and then
the type of like culture jamming, those things go hand
in hand like that is like that is the goal
of it is to make it work that way. So
that doesn't surprise me that those types of terrorist groups
would be reading its books for advice so or for
like to like figure out how the other side thinks. Alright, well,
(38:19):
that's probably enough talking about william S lind for today
and and cultural and the fourth generation, we'll talk. There's
a lot to dig into about how these ideas have
influenced chunks of the right, and now they're currently still
being used for like these omnipresent conflicts that are going
on right now. And again I do think particularly the
idea of omnipresence is really useful for understanding modern conflict.
(38:40):
I would I would go as far as to say,
like crucial um so this is necessary background information to
people to have, for people to have for like some
of the other ship. We're going to be continuing to
talk in this about in this series as we you know,
as we talk more about kind of kinetic conflicts or
at least building towards kinetic conflicts. Um. But yeah, I
(39:01):
think this is this is a useful kind of grounding.
And now I'm going to send Chris and Garrison off
to write an episode explaining who Hegel is and everything
he believed. I Yeah, it's gonna be great. You're gonna
You're gonna hear you. You will watch me go mad
in real time. It's gonna be great. Yeah. The other
option is I can just read the Wikipedia page for
(39:22):
Hegel with like a really offensive German accent. That's better
than that, Actually better. I'm gonna go to I promise
you one thing, which is that I will wind up
either Russian or Australian by the end. I can't stop
that drift when I whenever I start doing you know,
I am a good German. Yeah, my name is Mr Hegel.
(39:44):
The absolute that happen Cool Zone Media. We're gonna stop
that right now. I probably should. It could Happen Here
is a production of cool zone Media. More podcasts from
cool Zone Media, visit our website cool zone media dot com,
or check us out on the I Heart Radio app,
(40:05):
Apple Podcasts, or wherever you listen to podcasts. You can
find sources for It could happen here, updated monthly at
cool zone media dot com slash sources. Thanks for listening.
It could happen. Here is the podcast that this is
about things falling apart and how to, how to, how
to maybe unfollowing apart. I'm Robert Evans. Your your your host,
and your other hosts are Christopher and Garrison and our
producers Sophie. How's everybody doing today? Great? How's every how's
(00:27):
everybody feel about war? Oh? Yeah? Now, if you were
to get us based on your knowledge of history, what
generation of war we're in right now? What would you? What?
What would y'all guess? I feel like war isn't it's
it's it's newer in relation to like human beings. Like
(00:50):
the idea of war, I'm guessing like there's been like battles,
but like the idea of like war, I feel like
isn't super old compared to how long has been humans
walking around. So I don't know this is maybe I mean,
I know the answer, but like it's it's like like
that's that's definitely We definitely passed through like at least
(01:11):
a couple of stages and were at least a couple Chris,
like gotta be at least twelve twelve least you are
way ahead of William s Lynd who spoilers is the
guy who came up with the concept of fourth generation war,
which is what this episode is about. Right. One of
the things when we talk about things falling apart is
um the unsettling growth of a number of different hybrid conflicts,
(01:36):
Ukraine being the most like blatant modern example, Syria being
the deadliest example in our lifetimes. But like these weird
hybrid conflicts that are a mix of shit happening on
the Internet and like disinformation going out all over the world.
You could even think to like what was happening in
Bolivia a year or so back, and like all those
weird accounts that were like based around Langley, Virginia claiming
(01:57):
to support the military coup, And you can look at,
like from the same this disinformation brought out by like
the Russian state that is usually as part of like
a conflict either you know, they have disinfo operations and
Syria disinfo operations around the conflict in Ukraine that are
kind of designed to muddy the issues and to detract
international support and also to like drum up support within
(02:21):
for like in the in the case of Ukraine, you
had like this media blitz against the legitimacy of the
Ukrainian state in favor of like a more UH like
traditionally Russian um UH style of government in the East,
and like that led to this breakaway republic that was
supported by the Russian government and like so these are
like hybrid conflicts is kind of how these are referred to.
(02:41):
And there was a guy named William S. Lynd who
in nineteen eighty nine wrote a book with a couple
of US military analysts, Like he was an analyst for
the military. He was not serving in the military. The
other guys he wrote this this thing with we're serving
at the time, and they wrote this this book kind
of trying to basically what Lynde was doing. He was
(03:03):
very influenced by our loss in Vietnam when I say,
are here, like the loss of the American state in Vietnam,
And he was trying to determine, like number one, kind
of like find a way to codify and explain the
changes that were happening to warfare in this period. Was
also influenced about what was happening in Afghanistan with the
Russians were experiencing um and find a way to like
(03:24):
move forward and allow the United states to win wars again, right,
Like that was William S. Lynd's goal, um, And so
he came up with this concept of four or he
and some other guys came up with what they called
fourth generation warfare UM, and first generation warfare is like
Napoleonic Arab warfare. So, like as Garrison was saying, you
may note that he kind of starts his that's pretty late.
(03:47):
That's pretty late we had before. Yeah, that's there's a
lot of stuff that leads up to like, yeah, if
I was gonna try to categorize different types of warfare,
that would not be the one I start with. Well,
like the reality of course, as we'll talk about, like
when you start looking at different kinds of warfares, there's
wars that look remarkably like the ship going on in
(04:07):
Afghanistan and Ukraine, that are occurring like several thousand years ago, um,
like like like in the same places to like, yeah,
it's just like if you wanted to if you wanted
to talk about like kind of the modern style of
wars that we saw on that we've seen really in
the last like hundred and fifty years, they're not all
that dissimilar. In a lot of ways from like the
kind of conflicts you saw between Rome and Carthage um,
(04:28):
which are these really like big nation state style conflicts
and and have a lot of similarities. But but William S.
Lynn described the first generation of warfare is beginning after
the Peace of Westphalia in sixty eight that ended the
Thirty Years War um. And it's the kind of warfare
where you have these like big, tightly ordered groups of
men marching towards each other and like firing very inaccurate
weapons and mass together. Right. Uh. This is ended by
(04:51):
the era of the machine gun and the semi automatic
rifle um or on the bolt reaction rifle, I should say,
And that leads us to second generation warfare, which is
linear fire and movement with heavy reliance on indirect fires.
That's still huge groups of guys charging, but they're not
marching in close order, they're not like firing in volleys um,
and they're supported by heavy artillery like World War one
(05:12):
kind of ship right. Um. Really we start to see
this in eighteen seventy and then World War One is
kind of the height of this kind of warfare, and
over the course of World War One we more merge
in again This is William S. Len's way we emerge
from second generation to third generation warfare, which is where
you've got infiltration tactics to bypass enemy defensive lines and
collapse it, which is kind of the Germans and their
(05:33):
outrgs tactic and stormtrooper tactics are really kind of uh
pioneering that you've got the idea of defense in depth
um and so this need to bypass the enemy and
like this leads to blitzkrieg and leads to all sorts
of ship um and then that kind of starts to
collapse and Len's estimation around Vietnam, and you get what's
called fourth generation warfare. Fourth generation. I'm actually just going
(05:56):
to read a quote from a military history wiki that
I thought had any good description of all of this.
Fourth generation warfare is normally characterized by a violent non
state actor fighting a state. This fighting can be physically done,
such as by modern examples Hezblah or the liberation Tigers
of Tamil illam Um. In this realm, the v n essay.
These violent nonstate actors use all three levels of fourth
(06:18):
generation warfare. These are the physical actual combat, which is
considered the least important mental the will to fight, belief
in victory, etcetera. And the moral, which is the most important,
Lynd says, and includes cultural norms, etcetera. Um, So obviously
I think that this is kind of nonsense. There's a
lot of people, So there's a lot of folks, the
people who buy into this, and it's very popular on
(06:39):
the right. Well, we'll look at like what's happening in
Ukraine is a perfect example of fourth generation warfare because
you have Russia flooding the zone using spot Nick and
a bunch of other kind of media organizations to drum
up um discord and like anger between East and West
in Ukraine and support for potential Russian action at the
same time as you have them backing this dictator um,
(07:00):
and then you have like the West sort of supporting
the people protesting against those dictators and like so you've
got like this this digital conflict, this information conflict that
eventually leads to fighting on the ground. One of the
areas in which I think Lynda is really off is
talking about like the physical as the least important, especially
if you're going to consider Ukraine an example of fourth
(07:20):
generation warfare, because if the Russian military had not intervened,
there would not still be a conflict in Ukraine, the
Separatists would not still hold land, and in fact, the
Separatis were on the edge of getting completely wiped out
by the Ukrainian military because they were a bunch of
nonstate actors with minimal support and minimal weaponry before the
Russians moved in brigades of active duty combat troops in
(07:41):
armor um, including like gigantic fucking missile launchers which they
used to shoot down that Malaysian airlines flight like that.
It's it's just not I I don't think that that.
What what Linda is saying is very um, very well
describes what's actually going on in the world. But it
is important to understand the concept of fourth generay and
warfare and fifth generation warfare, which we'll talk about in
(08:02):
a bit um because it is so useful in the
way in which particularly guys like Steve Bannon um conceive
of conflict. Because that you will hear the term fourth
generation warfare constantly, and it's also something that has used
a lot within our military establishment. Now a lot of
people hate it, and within you can find a lot
of papers buy dudes writing like analysts who are working
(08:24):
for the Defense Department for the army actively like shipping
on lynd and talking about how he's at best is
kind of like reinvented ideas that existed in warfare for
thousands of years, and he's kind of summarized things in
a way that that is needlessly flattening, and like some
people will say, you basically like ripped up like added
the internet to klauswitz uh and pretended that you'd invented
(08:46):
a new style of conor that you defined a new
style of conflict. Anyway, that's like an introduction to the
idea of fourth generation warfare, right. And there's a lot
of things that he gets again like if you're if
you're a history a military has story wong, which Lynde
pretends to be a lot of ship that he gets wrong. Um.
So one of the things that he says, like one
(09:07):
of his famous phrases that every military eventually craps in
its own mess kit um, the idea that like every
military that that is great eventually like has a gigantic
funk up because they get too used to doing the
same thing, which is true um. And he describes it
as like um, the Prussians did in eighteen oh six,
after which they designed and put into service a much
more improved model mesh Kit mess Kit through the Sharonhorst
(09:29):
military reforms. The French did in eighteen seventy, after which
they took down from the shelf and old model mess
ket the mass draft Army of the First Republic and
put it back into service. The Japanese did it in
five after which they threw their mesket away, swearing they
would never eat again. And we did it in Korea,
in Vietnam, and now in four new wars so far
we've only we've had the only military that's just kept
on eating. And that's a really dumb statement. That's all
(09:51):
really historically and accurate. So, for example, it's true that
like the Prussians had a great military which then got
its butt kicked by Napoleon and they had to completely
redesign it, and by the time eighteen seventy came around,
they were extremely dominant on the battlefield be against the French.
Number One, he's crediting the military reforms of like tactics
and strategy and ignoring things like Krupp inventing an entirely
(10:12):
new kind of cannon that was utterly dominant on the battlefield. Um.
He's also ignoring the fact that this Prussian army. Um,
he's saying, like the US is the only army that
does the same thing over and over again and fails
and keeps on eating. Well, the Prussian Army is the
army the Germans took into battle in World War One
and two and spoilers, they didn't learn enough from either
of those wars. Um. He also talks about how like
(10:35):
the French had their you know, crapping in the mess
hit moment in eighteen seventy after the Franco Prussian War,
and they changed their army and it was much better. Like, well,
they didn't win World War One, like they were on
the side that one, but if it had been them
against Germany, they would have gotten fucking steamrolled. Like it
was not going well for them for quite a while,
and they lost a whole generation of young men. So
(10:55):
maybe and and again this is like what he's saying
is basically, we because we're using so constantly. The reason
that we're losing is not because we are picking bad conflicts.
It's not because we're picking to engage in conflicts when
we shouldn't at all be engaging in conflicts. It is
not because we use military force in like a fundamentally
venal and corrupt way in order to benefit a small
(11:16):
cabal of military industrial corporations. It's because we we don't
have good battle doctrine, and that's why we're not winning
in these conflicts, which ignores everything about the reality of
the conflicts that like he's talking about, Like, the problem
is not a lack of combat dominance, which is is
what you were seeing with like the Prussians fighting Napoleon.
It's what you were seeing with the French fighting the
(11:38):
Germans in eighteen seventy, right, Like in those cases, the
Prussians had a massive failure of combat dominance against the French,
and the French had a massive failure in combat against
the Germans. Their doctrine was just worse. Um Us soldiers
are great at getting into gunfights and great at winning
gun fights. The problem is not a lack of combat ability.
The problem is that they're no way to win the
(12:01):
conflicts that we're getting into. They are unwinnable wars that
were never things that like, no amount of change in
doctrine would have made Afghanistan a success because it was
a stupid war. Like it's like if if that were true,
like coin would have worked and co Yeah no, like
Colt yeah yeah, just complete total and utter failure, like
(12:25):
enormous numbers of people dead, enormous numbers of like people
traumatized for generations, and the U S still just lost
both wars, yeah, and and and and if you really
dig into Lynd and others like him, what they're actually
saying when they say that, like we need to reform
like the way the military works with new battle doctorments.
We need to be killing even more people. We just
(12:45):
didn't kill enough in Vietnam, like the five million we
bombed or so that wasn't enough people like that. That's
the reform that he's really talking about. UM. And Lynd
one of those people who like rants about the like
the the the El Salvadorian option. UM, I'm sure he does.
I don't know exactly what he said about Al Salvador.
He's a fascinating kind of fascist. Um. He is absolutely
(13:08):
a fascist. He was the director of the Center for
Cultural Conservatism at the Free Congress Foundation UM. He wrote
a or he helped to popularize a Declaration of Cultural
Independence by Cultural Conservatives UM, which is like these there's
a lot of the seeds of the ship that we're
seeing today, right that like American culture institutions are being
(13:28):
collapsed because of like liberal decadence and conservatives. Cultural conservatives
should separate themselves and like set up parallel institutions where
Bannon comes in. And that's where Bannon comes in. That
where like fucking Andrew Torba and gab come and they
all advocate this ship. Yeah, because they're all they all
adhere to that kind of uh yeah, like politics has
(13:49):
culture and there's downstream. Yeah, And there's some weird differences
with Lynd Like he's a huge mass transit and urban
rail advocate, which I guess I agree with him. Fine,
once in a while, a bad person does have a
good opinion. He loves he loves him some fucking city
trains and stuff. Um, but he's also he was a
major factor. He was one of the earliest, like prominent
(14:10):
conservatives who was like yelling about cultural Marxism and kind
of the modern political period. I mean that makes sense
because he was really into it. Sounds like he's real
into metapolitics. So yeah, that's super in the metapolis. Yeah,
So like all of this stuff makes a whole lot
of sense if you're yeah, if you're if you know what,
if you know what meta politics are, it's also kind
of explains how he developed the different generations of warfare
(14:32):
using it through a framework of metal politics actually really
makes that fit if you believe, like Breitbart famously stated
that like politics is downstream from culture, and if you
also believe what Claus I think it was class Wits
that said that, like war is politics by other means
than like you can make cultural can cause wars, and like, yeah,
like that's a lot like kind of I think the
thought process behind n Yeah, because this this really defines
(14:55):
what he means by fourth generation warfare of war being
handed out typically by the culture, instead of having it
be abstracted to be like people marching towards each other
with guns. Because he's, he's, he's, he's putting the he's
putting the culture kind of back into it. Yeah, and
he and he's and he's and and obviously culture was
never not a factor, of course, not like every single
(15:16):
war is, but a major factor, like all of this
ship he talks about is being characters to go. Fourth
generation warfare has been happening in one way or another
for thousands of years. But it's it's not that these
things are done in like temporal succession. It's like because
because like a lot of the stuff that makes up
fourth generation warfare, like the more like guerrilla warfare aspects,
come way before, people with guns marching towards each other,
(15:39):
Africans doing that to Alexander, the goddamn group for the
Birth of Christ. A lot of a lot of this
fourth gend stuff is actually like kind of more similar
to what original warfare probably would have been. Like yeah,
which I think, yeah, I think to to his credit,
I think he does actually recognize that at some point
in his writing now and and and the thing about
(15:59):
this is is, well, we can pick at it, and
I think there's a lot that's ridiculous in his attitude.
It's it's close enough to the way that reality works
that if you're going, if you're thinking about conflict in
this framework, you can be very successful. It's not like
an It's inaccurate in some ways because he's he is
wrongly describing why certain things work. I think is a
lot of what he's doing. And he's wrong about winning wars.
(16:20):
I'll say that, um, if if the American military were
to make the fucking lend the Secretary of Defense and
give him total power, like he would keep on losing
wars as hard as we've been losing wars for everyone
listening to this is lifetime um. But in a cultural sense,
the kind of culture jamming, which is a term we'll
talk about more in the future, and but the kind
(16:41):
of like the propaganda arms and stuff in order to
the the the the media warfare in order to either
insight or justify real conflict or or and this is
one of the areas in which they have been really
effective to alter the dimension, to alter how internationally a
conflict is responded to. One of the big successes of
(17:01):
people like this has been effectively eliminating any kind of
left wing support for liberatory movements in the Middle East, UM,
for liberatory movements or for like just like what's happening
in Ukraine. It's kind of like reflexive. Well, if there's uh,
if there's a movement for liberation among the people of
(17:22):
a country, it's probably the c I a like like
carrying out some sort of op um. That's Lynda and
his people UM and people influenced by him have been
a big part of pushing that. Um, it's why Steve
Bannon is in and is so friendly with like some
guys on like chunks that they call themselves the left
and whatnot. It's because, um, there's there's a lot of uh,
(17:44):
there's a lot of ties there, and that is an
area in which they've been successful because international support really matters. Um,
you know, it's it's it's uh. And I think like
the death of internationalism is one of the bigger successes
that like these these thinkers have kind of had. But yeah,
I don't know. That's that's that's that's a chunk of
what I had to say. You guys want to know
(18:14):
more about William S. Lynn because he's I certainly want
to learn more about William William S Lynd cultural conservative,
right big on the traditional Christian values of America. You
want to guess who he considers his ideal leader? Uh
jfk No, the House of Hogan's all learned. He's a
(18:35):
Prussian monarchist. Wait oh yeah, okay, everything I said politics,
he's certainly int hegel and he thinks that the Prussian
the Prussian monarchy was the best government there ever was
and was like unfairly crushed by the rest of the
world and like should have won World War One and
(18:57):
everything would like he's he's and so he's he's very
much like a conservative monarchist um and a weird kind
because like, my god, dude, if you're looking at like
monarchs who were like the Hogan's allern has had like
in the modern era, like the first Kaiser Wilhelm was
broadly competent, but like it went to ship as soon
(19:20):
as the second and he blames all of World War
One on the fucking Tsars, like it's it's very silly,
Like his ideas of history are like very stupid. I
have an incredibly silly theory of history based on Hagel,
which is that like every everything Hagel. Briefly, for the
listeners I know, do not, this is this is you know,
(19:44):
this is this is the thing. Okay, okay, this this
is this is. This is my crank theory of history
based on Hagel, which is that every about forty years
someone attempts to apply Hagel. Someone like takes charge of
an incredibly large state and tries to use Hagel to
run it, and every single time time they don't understand
the dialectic and it doesn't work. So this for example,
like if if you can take this as a very
(20:06):
granul level, right you have Mao, Mao has no idea
what a dialectic is. You can you can read Mao's work.
He has no clue, Like he just doesn't he like
he doesn't he doesn't get it. He thinks that a
dialectic is when one person with a bat hits the
other hits the other side, and then when you destroy
the other side, the dialectic is resolved. Right like that
That's not what it is, right maw Like because of this,
(20:27):
the entire Chinese revolution just implodes. Everyone dies, it returns
to capitalism. Is a complete failure, right you know. And
and like a lot of the Nazis are very much
into Hagel. They have again incredibly similar failures the other group.
People like Lynda think is part of this is that
all of the people who planned the Iraq War were
like enormous Sigillian's right, but they've gotten to Hagel through
(20:49):
this weird like they they've been doing this, they've been
doing these kind of insurgency stuff and so but they're
kind of insurgeny stuff was they read Mao, and you know,
so that they're so they're they're they're reading Hagel, but
then they're also reading Hagel through Mao and now doesn't
understand what's going on either. And so when they try
to apply the Hegelian dialectic and they're like, Okay, well,
the end of the end of the end of history,
the end of the Hegelian dialectic is the United States.
We're just going to impose this on a rock and
(21:11):
catastrophic failure. So the war listening is, do not attempt
to apply Hagel. You will completely annihilate your entire political movement,
like every every everything, everything you love and dream of, everything,
like every ideology you've ever had. Uh, it will, it
will crumble beneath you. And yeah, you will watch your
cities and you watch your cities and armies burn. That's
(21:33):
that's fine, because the last time my resistance movement, we're
just gonna be postcanty and object oriented. On ontologist guys.
You throw a bunch of names and I'm gonna get
like eight percent of people are just what the funk
am I hearing about? These dead people? The thing I
actually wanted to to bring up on this is like
how fourth and fifth gen are The idea of the
(21:53):
fourth and fifth gen get applied onto like more insurrection
based um, like a revolts groups. Right, you can see
like groups like the Earth Liberation Fund and Animal Liberation
Front kind of pick and shoes. Elements of the fourth
and fifth generation were fair to kind of to see
how their groups formed or were operated. Um. And even
(22:15):
you could argue that like Ted Kazinski was like a
fIF fifth generation warfare because he was completely autonomous and
the actions. Let's let's introduce the idea of fifth generation
because we just talked about fourth generation warfare, which was
Lynn's idea. Fifth generation warfare is a concept that has
come up I believe Daniel Abbott is his name, um.
And the idea was that like it's a new type
(22:38):
of warfare that like characterizes a lot of conflicts in
the modern era where almost everything is non kinetic um,
but it is still military action UM, so military social engineering,
misinformation sorry, or attacks not just like decentralized, but like
states actually using um organized and often fighting non state
actors who are using kind of the same thing. Yeah. Yeah,
and this in a lot of this would involve artificial intelligence,
(23:01):
fully autonomous systems, systems not just botan nets, but like
algorithms that can like handle a lot of the quote
unquote fighting. Um william S Lynd hates the idea of
fourth generation, fifth generation warfare because he's a narcissist and
he doesn't like anyone using the idea every head of
the dialectic it keeps going. So what I was what
(23:22):
I was thinking, is like, is like a lot of
you can apply fifth generation warfare to like these types
of groups who are mostly like they do some they
do some fourth gent tactics in terms of like terrorism, right,
Like they try to make political statements through terrorism and
have terrorism an influential thing, but they're demands like you
(23:44):
rarely like fifth generation stuff has not been around a
long enough and no one's really been super successful at
it in the past enough time for us like to
like recognize that, right, because you can look at a
lot of a lot of like an instructionary type stuff
around like the Again, I'm just gonna use the Earth
Liberation Front as an example of like a group that
(24:05):
attempted kind of these types of tactics, Um, and they
may have succeeded in the physical sense, but they did
not succeed in like the cultural sense. Really, um so
trying to like look at these types of things and
how they relate to like specific you know, if you're
gonna use like the take Kazinski example, same thing, except
he's not a group. He's just one person, which is
(24:26):
kind of more of a fifth gen thinks he's like
fully autonomous, whereas I think, um, you know, stuff like
the e l F tried to have that kind of
militant group dynamic that is more similar to fourth generation warfare.
So it's like this picking and choosing of like trying
to trying to do physical action than trying to do
cultural action, and it's it's not like the things that
have succeeded. Let's take for instance, some the defend the
(24:52):
Cascadian forest thing who just got just got um this
is the specific action they were working on to protect
a specific chunk of forest. H The Judge of approved
their approve their motion because they were they actually were
successful because they did not form this militant thing right now,
they were just doing the cultural and it actually really succeeded.
(25:13):
Um as opposed to just you know, burning down buildings
and stuff to try to get your action forward. So
just trying to look at like examples of when when
like the goal is kind of the same and certain
times succeed, certain certain types don't. How that might influence
like organizing and how to selectively use like insurrection, but
(25:33):
have it not be like a default mode for like
always your group is better if it's in surrectorary m Yeah,
And I one of the things that does characterize that
I think is useful if we're because again I have
my criticisms of the value of any of these like
phrases as kind of discreete concepts. But one of the
(25:54):
things that I think is useful about the concept of
fifth generation warfare that does talk about something that is
legitimately new to conflict that has not really existed before
before the Internet is omnipresence um that that the conflicts
are not limited in geographical space or in time, and
in fact is like a constant factor all around you
at all times because of the way the information sphere
(26:15):
kind of actually functions. Um. You know, you can look
at kind of like the mix of street fights and
information warfare, doxing and whatnot between fascists and anti fascist
for the last few years. It's omnipresent, it's always going
on UM, and the battle space is kind of potentially everywhere,
even though it's fairly rarely kinetic or physical UM. And
(26:37):
I do think that that's an area in which, UM,
it is really worth having a new term, in kind
of defining a new term, because that's one of the
few things I think that has legitimately changed. The Internet
has made all of this stuff that's been happening for
thousands of years faster UM. But the thing that it's
really created that was not present before is this the
this omnipresence UM. So I do think that that's really
(26:59):
useful when Yeah, because like I would like to how
conflict is different. I would like to kind of like
think about like January six, within these frameworks, right of
how of how disinformation and information was used relatively successfully
to get a lot of people to actually move towards
the more um you know, kind of backed by half
the state, backed you know, not backed by well the
(27:22):
larger majority. And yeah, how like it's a it's like
a synthesis of the fourth generation of fifth generation ideas,
which is why you know, there's a lot of overlap
with these terms specifically, Um, but seeing how like one
leads to another and it's not they're not necessarily inclusion exclusionary. Yeah,
I mean it's like the result is whether they win
or lose. Right, that's that's like that that's what makes
(27:44):
it a war. Is is the is the is like
you decide afterwards based on the result. Yeah, I mean
it kind of. Yeah, that's certainly like how more modern
wars happened, Like with Afghanistan, it wasn't so much like
a clear like World War One, there's an armistice and
like negotiated end of the war or in a certain
date at all ends. It was a lots we haven't
done that since. We haven't done that for the state,
(28:05):
Like you know, I've never known the States to do
that for a month. Because if you don't do that,
you don't have to admit you lost exactly right, if
you just kind of like leave and ship gets real
fucked up. Um, you can just be like for one thing,
you can say like if we'd stayed and spent more
money on that war, we could have we could have
pulled it out. Um, which is one of my like
there's a lot of great criticisms of how the Biden
(28:26):
administration handled things in Afghanistan last year, a thousand of them.
But at the end of the day, it's like it
was never going to be good, like it was always
it was this horrible war. We were killing way too
many people. Um, we weren't achieving anything. And that fact
was made really clear by the fact that as soon
as we pulled out our guns, um, everything collapsed. And
(28:48):
that was always going to happen. And you can needle
around the edges of how we could have, you know,
better taken care of people who we had made promises
to or whatever. At the end of the day, it
was always going to be fucked because it was a
thing we never should have done. And that's that like
this idea that Lynd has that like, no, if we
fix our doctrine, we have better tactical doctrine, we have
better like we have. One of his big ideas is UM.
(29:10):
He came up with this concept called movement warfare that's
been hugely influential in the way the Marine Corps functions. UM.
And the idea behind movement warfare is like, you should
always have a bias towards action, and Lynda is very consciously, UM,
trying to make this basically the evolution of of a
German tactic called alf drugs tactic, which is like individual
unit tactics basically. So it's like midway through World War One,
(29:32):
the Germans start to realize, like, all these mass wave
human charges aren't working great, um, and we should probably
like figure out a way to get around these defenses.
So they start training what are kind of the prototype
of special forces, these like stormtroopers whose job is to
like sneak in and not be seen and jump into
the trenches and like you know, fucking axes and clubs
(29:53):
and automatic handguns and um, fight in a way that
like soldiers had not really fought in a long time.
A lot of it was like may l a. It
was this really and there were a lot of technical things,
how to get around barbed wire, how to not be seen,
how to like deal with machine gun nests, um. And
one of the keys to it was like the German
started to retrain their soldiers to were like you have
to have like these individual units of five and ten
(30:15):
men have to have like total autonomy, and then unit
commanders have to have autonomy and they need to be
will able to like we'll tell them we need you
to be in this this place at this point in time.
But it's up to you to figure out how to
do that, because if you're if you've got this one
guy who's three miles back giving the commands, everyone's just
gonna get mowed down by machine gun fire. Needs to
be more nimble UM. And that's part of why in
(30:35):
World War One, in in World War Two, because the
rest of the people fighting the Germans, like even the US,
had not caught up to this kind of battle doctrine
by the time World War Two was over um to
the extent that the Germans had, And it's part of
why there's such a lopsided casualty ratio in favor of
the Germans in that war is they had what is
very close to because all modern combat tactics are based
(30:55):
on what the Germans started doing at the end of
World War One UM and had really like nailed down
to a science in World War two. UM And Lynda
is saying that, like we need to extend that and
like that's the thing we've gotten too far away from
and we need to have You need to have like
this bias towards movement and this the like officers need
to be super aggressive and like always pursuing these kind
(31:16):
of kinetic options. And again, as the Marine Corps battle
record will show, this is very effective when you were
getting into gunfights. But when was the last time the
Marine Corps was on the side of a winning war? Like, again,
it doesn't we can all needle about how to make
our troops better at like killing people, but at the
end of the day, we're losing wars because we're getting
(31:37):
into wars that are not winnable and that's not something
you're going to fix with battle doctrine. And Lynn doesn't
understand that because he's a fascist. And I think it's
just like this, this is the real like weakness of
their politics, which is that was like, yeah, well, like
it it's they're they're they're trying. It's like they can't
tell the difference between war and like they don't think
(31:57):
there's a difference between war and politics, right, and that
means that they think that there's a military solution to
every political problem and it's like, no, there's not, and
like this is this is how this is what is
how they keep destroying themselves, right, is that they you know,
like like this is what happened to the neo cons.
I mean, the neo cons is sort of held on
in this kind of rump shell. But it's like neo
conservatism and the project. Yeah, but but it's like, you know,
(32:19):
like they don't they don't have like like even the
people who used to be their base, like aren't there
base anymore? Like those those people are all moving yeah
yeah yeah, And it's it's it's like maybe they could
have maintained it if they hadn't just like literally blown
it apart, like trying to conquer a rock. And it's
like they all do this. They all eventually are like, well, okay,
(32:39):
well we'll find a military solution to this, and it
blows up in their face because it turns out that, no,
you can't actually do this. I mean, I think all
this indicates a general progression into the more metapolitics idea
and culture as politics ideas that we're trying to solve
all these political problems, like at least like locally within us.
You know, we're trying to be trying to do them
called trually and choosing them in selectively in other countries. Right,
(33:03):
Because the more kind of the idea of like let's
just keep entering wars, which we're also doing at the
same time, only for a very very very like like
very specific regions. But I mean the trend of like
verst you know, like Trump's not necessarily and like Trump's
not really can anio con He preferred the cultural jamming
like that was, that was his preferred method, and I
got him relatively far in four years. And there there's
(33:25):
an argument that Lynde is a big person who that
he learned a lot from Lynda, even though I don't
think he ever read his books. All the people he
surrounded him with where fans of Lynn. There's a picture
of Trump and Lend together and like a copy of
or at least Trump together with a copy of his book, UM,
which is titled, uh the Next Conservatism UM. And I'm
(33:45):
gonna read in a quote at this point from The
American Conservative, which Lynde has written for, that describes this
book because it's it's uh useful. Um The Next Conservatism
offers a comprehensive agenda of what Lyndon way Rich, who's
his co author on this call a cultural called cultural conservatism.
While the book aims higher than mere policy, the specifics
mentioned are Trumpian reductions in legal and illegal immigration in America,
(34:08):
first trade policy, and robust investments and domestic infrastructure, particularly
street cars and trains in a less Trumpi in Vain.
It also promotes homeschooling and incorporates some ideas of from
the New Urbanism as part of a broader program called
retro Culture. Of its connection with Trump, lynd says the
book runs parallel to what he has been saying, but
he doubts the billionaire's familiarity with its more philosophical ideas.
(34:30):
Now here's the part that is going to be really unsettling,
and this, I think is what lynd may actually be
going for, rather than any kind of reform in the
military to improve its ability to win foreign wars. Quote.
In nineteen four an article appeared in the Marine Corps
Gazette by Lynde and two of the authors of the
nineteen eighty nine piece, where he introduced the concept of
fourth generation warfare. It ended on a dire note. The
(34:51):
point is not merely that America's armed forces will find
themselves facing non nation state conflicts and forces overseas. The
point is that the same conflicts are coming year the
next real war we fight is likely to be on
American soil. So that's what's going on here, Like, and
that's the thing where biased towards action and increased killing power.
(35:14):
If all you're really trying to do is murder everyone
who disagrees with you using the military very quickly, well
that might work for you. People should know about this.
He has a fucking fiction book called Victoria, which actually
(35:35):
if you go to like TV tropes, um, the there's
a TV it's not just TV tropes anymore, but like
there's a trope page from my book After the Revolution,
and it's directly compared to Victoria, as like they're the
opposites of each other, because Victoria is like a book
about a civil war in the US that these like
weird fascist uh like anarchists win, and like it's, uh,
(36:04):
it's pretty fucked up. Like the problem is that like
like like all of these like the Northwest is controlled
by like environmentalists like leaders who get like eaten by
these animals like wolves that they reintroduced to the to
the society, and like California is so feminist that it's
illegal to have sex and make babies, um, and the
South fails because it's it's too multicultural, um And yeah,
(36:26):
like it's it's all so the person who wins the
war is like the governor of Maine who's a retro
culture practitioner um and considers himself a subject of the kaiser.
I maybe getting a couple of details wrong, but not
(36:48):
that part I know. But it's it's a fucking nuts
nuts So I've only read like little bits of it.
Maybe one day I'll get through the whole thing. But
it's that's that's the thing with all with all of
these like cultural gamers, Like they try to put on
like war aesthetics, but all of them are the nerdiest
fuckers he'll ever. He's so stupid and I like he's
(37:12):
wi all these guys are so they're so nerdy, all
of them. Yeah, and like lynd everything about him makes
sense when you understand that his primary guiding directive is
anger over the fact that there's no longer a kaiser Um.
He's a little but also like again, he was not
lying about there's a picture of like Trump of this
(37:33):
fucking book. He's not lying that Like fucking everybody who
was like pilled in that White House knew about Lynn's
ideas and have been He's been hugely influential, and not
just among like the American right. His books have been
found in like al Qaeda hideouts and ship like. He
makes sense though that that that that like all of
all of that really tracks is because yeah, like the
(37:55):
barrier between like terrorist action as a part of fourth
generation and in some ways fifth generation warfare and then
the type of like culture jamming, those things go hand
in hand like that is like that is the goal
of it is to make it work that way. So
that doesn't surprise me that those types of terrorist groups
would be reading its books for advice so or for
like to like figure out how the other side thinks. Alright, well,
(38:19):
that's probably enough talking about william S lind for today
and and cultural and the fourth generation, we'll talk. There's
a lot to dig into about how these ideas have
influenced chunks of the right, and now they're currently still
being used for like these omnipresent conflicts that are going
on right now. And again I do think particularly the
idea of omnipresence is really useful for understanding modern conflict.
(38:40):
I would I would go as far as to say,
like crucial um so this is necessary background information to
people to have, for people to have for like some
of the other ship. We're going to be continuing to
talk in this about in this series as we you know,
as we talk more about kind of kinetic conflicts or
at least building towards kinetic conflicts. Um. But yeah, I
(39:01):
think this is this is a useful kind of grounding.
And now I'm going to send Chris and Garrison off
to write an episode explaining who Hegel is and everything
he believed. I Yeah, it's gonna be great. You're gonna
You're gonna hear you. You will watch me go mad
in real time. It's gonna be great. Yeah. The other
option is I can just read the Wikipedia page for
(39:22):
Hegel with like a really offensive German accent. That's better
than that, Actually better. I'm gonna go to I promise
you one thing, which is that I will wind up
either Russian or Australian by the end. I can't stop
that drift when I whenever I start doing you know,
I am a good German. Yeah, my name is Mr Hegel.
(39:44):
The absolute that happen Cool Zone Media. We're gonna stop
that right now. I probably should. It could Happen Here
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