Fifth-Generation War: Warfare versus the nonstate by LtCol Stanton S. Coerr, USMCR

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he United States is what Niall Ferguson calls an“empire-State,”1 depending upon grand strategyin projecting both force and ideas. American ex-port of force has been based on planning for a

conflict that will be big, kinetic, morally crisp, statist, andwinnable—the World Wars I and II (WWI and II) model ofwars. In reality, our next conflict could well be small, morallyconfusing, and idea centered, and could end in an ambigu-ous stalemate, combining all of the worst ends of Saigon,Mogadishu, 11 September 2001 (9/11), and Baghdad. Atthe upper bound of conflict, Americans know how to winair-land-sea battles with large conventional forces. At thelower bound of conflict, counterinsurgency and irregularwarfare experts2 deftly explain small, discrete revolutions inthe jungle or the urban wasteland; put causes to the reasonsmen rebel; and think about how to stop the next Marxist orIslamic irregulars.

Yet as the primacy of other “states” recedes, and we standnearly alone, into the vacuum will step irrational actors,united by a radical core belief in Islam. We are prepared atthe top and bottom of conflict, but not in the seam betweenthem. It is this seam in which the next actors will grow. Therising global jihad, the insurgency that is the “vehicle of thecoward,”3 presents the first such set of actors, and the oldrules of warfare will not apply.

First, America’s fifth-generation warfare (5GW) irregularopponent will not have a traditional great man leader (whocould be killed) or a field army (which could be destroyed)

as its center of gravity. It will not have even the centers ofgravity, such as pride or religious fervor, that theorist WilliamS. Lind describes. As radical Islam fractures—and becomesmore dangerous—similar, associated, or even dispassionatefellow traveler movements will observe and exploit al-Qaeda’ssuccess in becoming more powerful by losing mass. Thisenemy will not have centers of gravity at all.

Second, the accelerating chaos of the Third and FourthWorlds, shifting transnational alliances, and the increasinginterest of transnational actors in fomenting and supportingchaos will lead to the end of the state as prime mover and re-dresser of grievance, putting paid to Lind’s “crisis of legiti-

Warfare versus the nonstateby LtCol Stanton S. Coerr, USMCR

T

>LtCol Coerr is a Cobra pilot and forwardair controller. He has deployed with a Ma-rine attack squadron, a rifle battalion, andan air/naval gunfire liaison company (AN-GLICO). LtCol Coerr was a liaison to the 1Royal Irish Battle Group during OIF I. He iscurrently assigned to the Aviation Depart-ment, HQMC. LtCol Coerr assumes com-mand of 4th ANGLICO in January.

Photo: We must ensure that our unit leaders are capable of dealing with the conflicts that fall between major theater war and counterin-surgency. (Photo by Cpl Daniel J. Redding.)

Read more about Lind 4GW at www.mca-marines.org/gazette/5GW.

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macy of the State.”4 Islam has nostate and is the stronger for it.America is the ultimate expressionof the state,5 and as 4GW movesto 5GW, we may be the weakerforce.

Third, and because of reasonsone and two, success in this typeof warfare will vary inversely withmilitary force. As the state de-clines, unitary actors will be lesspowerful as they use military an-swers to political questions. Wewill not be able to kill our way tovictory.

Radical Islam is not a problemthat can be solved. It is not a thingthat can be destroyed. It is not anarmy that can be outmaneuvered.5GW fighters will win by stale-mate, because ideological or mili-tary stalemate, such as that on thestreets of Baghdad or in themadrasas in Peshawar or in theslums outside Paris, points up theimpotence of secular militarymight. A rifle is no match for anidea. These fighters win by not losing, while we lose by notwinning.

Fighting this opponent requires us, as Marines, to do twothings:

• Prepare for 5GW.6• Think of conflict itself in a different way, not by comingup with different answers but by reframing the questions.

Our new model will be QTW—the Quantum Theory ofWar.

The Model: Quantum MechanicsIn the early- to mid-1900s, groundbreaking research on

the structure of the atom yielded quantum theory,8 (see Fig-ure 1) which discarded linear thinking based on empiricismalone. Giants of science—Werner Heisenberg, Niels Bohr,Albert Einstein, Erwin Schrodinger, Kurt Godel—were deal-ing with issues so complex that they invented not just newanswers but new questions. Quantum physics asserts that theatom is almost an idea rather than an object, and that within

that atom are electrons, orbiting around a nucleus, that donot have positions but probabilities of positions. Thoughbound by a force, they move through valences, closer to andfarther away from that center, depending on energy states.The electrons closer in have more energy, and as they loseenergy they move farther away into empty atomic space. Inone stroke, quantum mechanics married the observable withthe unknowable, the measurable with the imagined, and thetraditional, rational, and observed with the bizarre, unimag-ined, and unprovable.

5GW: BackgroundThe first generation of war arose from the first generation

of the state as the coherent governing entity and describes anarc of regimented, linear combat beginning from the Romansat Cannae and Zama, pausing at the formalizing of the statein the 1648 Treaty of Westphalia, and accelerating the killingup to and through the horrors of the American Civil War.9The second, attritionist generation of war, began as man re-alized what the state, massed and determined, could do—the horrors of World War I trench warfare and a stubbornPrussian insistence on demanding an orderly battlefield im-posed on chaos. If battle wasn’t organized, armies could be.(See Figure 2.)

The third generation of war began at the point where theBritish Empire’s fall intersected10 with America’s rise frompower to empire and corresponds directly with a rise in themechanization of war. Conflict moved from up-close murderto distant engagements with hardware, and the raw violence

“Real revolutions . . . don’t just pro-vide a new answer, they change thevery questions being asked.”

—Caitlin Flanagan7

Figure 1.

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of war decreased in direct proportion to the beyond-visual-range externalization of violence. With its roots in WorldWar I, this generation carried Western armies throughDESERT STORM, emerging from German staff officers’ clear-eyed views of the chaotic battlefield and a concomitant will-ingness to embrace chaos and substitute maneuver for menmarching into the bullets. This third generation, with its em-phasis on surfaces and gaps and on speed, tempo, shock, andthe independent action of young officers, is the cradle of mil-itary thinking from which today’s American officers wereraised.11 This set of ideas meshed nicely with Huntington’sideas on the progression of war—from an emperor’s acting toexpand kingdoms to states’ acting in raw national interest.As the state grew more nimble, so did its backbone of mili-tary leadership.

In the midst of this third generation, and himself a prod-uct of it, arose Air Force theorist Col John Boyd, a startlinglyoriginal thinker on war and vectors of force. Boyd was tan-gential to the stepwise, progressive, chronological views ofeveryone else, and his ideas crosscut these generations, di-viding war into Napoleonic attrition (a bin into which helumps big wars, everything from WW I to nuclear conflict);maneuver warfare focused on speed, shock, and tempo (fromthe Mongols to Stonewall Jackson to GEN Hans Guderian);and ending with moral war, starting with Sun Tzu and arc-ing to modern insurgency.12 Boyd viewed military force,though interesting, as simply one node (a physical one),which along with mental and moral nodes, creates a web ofpower centers that must be interwoven, exploited by Amer-ican forces, and denied to opponents.13 Samuel Huntington

looms above both Boyd and Lindand applies such operational the-ory to the state level. Now statesdo not fight for land and treasure,but rather small groups fight forideas.14

Operation IRAQI FREEDOM(OIF) was the warfighting segueinto 4GW, which intersects withPosen’s view of America’s fourthnew phase of national policy, ad-justing from our orientation, tofull-scale war with the Soviets.The 4GW, the generation inwhich we are now, is a dynamic,frightening, freewheeling type of360-degree violence, with centersof gravity unlike any to which theAmerican military has trained. Itis driven by and motivated by therise of radical Islam as an ideolog-ical counterweight to what retiredMarine and professor Dr. Macku-bin Owens calls American“benevolent primacy.”

5GW: The FightWhile Americans focus on winning battles, our opponent

will be focused on winning wars. The threats he will presentwill be “the marriage of instability and initiative,” not stand-ing and fighting but in projecting “the smallest force at thequickest time at the farthest place.”15 Such a place will notbe a battlefield of our choosing; such a force will not be aninfantry squad, or an airplane, or a ship. The weapon willnot be a club but a stiletto. The battlefield will be somethingstrange—cyberspace, or the Cleveland water supply, or WallStreet’s banking systems, or YouTube. The mission will beinstilling fear, and it will succeed.

The lessons of the last two theater wars in Iraq are thewrong ones. Our next opponent will have watched and qui-etly learned the lessons of both Osama bin Laden and SaddamHussein (the “only jerk stupid enough to go toe-to-toe withus”16) and will not strike into the teeth of the behemoth em-pire-state with conventional force. It will strike where we areweakest, remain in the shadows, and promote chaos. We willbe attacked not with a club but with a stiletto. (See Figure 3.)

Centers of Gravity in the Forever WarThe Third and Fourth Worlds, those countries far from

the means of commerce and which Dr. Jeffrey Sachs definesas the most likely to slip,17 create a matrix in which the 5GWwill grow. These “nonintegrating”18 regions are characterizedby shifting (or ignored) borders, diaspora of the dispossessed,growing poverty, lack of state control, and unrelieved depri-vation of the common man. The emerging enemy does notneed the support of one population. He is what LtCol Frank

Figure 2.



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G. Hoffman, USMCR(Ret) callsa “transdimensional actor”19—notlocal but global, not tribal buttransnational or supranational,not focused on near-term successbut on long-term victory. Theworld is not necessarily movingtoward al-Qaeda but toward theidea of al-Qaeda and away fromthe United States and her ideals.This is a distinction without a dif-ference. There is now somewherefor the angry, alienated underclass,anywhere in the world, to turn.Radical Islam is a unifying forcefor 5GW violence.

Military action is traditionallypredicated upon defining, attack-ing, and overwhelming an enemycenter of gravity, and protectingone’s own. Traditional thinking,formed around “European-stylearmed forces of the IndustrialAge”20 placed such centers of grav-ity in the place a rational actorwould have it—a physical place, ageneral, a military force in thefield. Destroy that thing, and you destroy the force. Dr. MilanVego of the Naval War College describes the center of gravityas a “source of massed strength” which “provides a locus to-ward which all sources of power should be directed.”21

Under QTW, for precisely Vego’s reasons, the 5GWenemy will have no center of gravity. He will not mass, willnot present a locus, and will not draw strength from a sourceof nonmilitary power. To do so would give the American mil-itary machine something to shoot at. Indeed, to him, the“[American] military will simply be irrelevant”22 as he looksfor other weaknesses. His followers will not be an organizedmilitary force but will float freely around a belief or an idea—those with the most energy the closest to the center, thosemore disinterested farther away, gaining or shedding energyas they move.23 His approach may be nihilist, irrational, fun-damentally bizarre, militarily unsound, or transparently self-defeating. He will kill his own people, use children tomurder, strap explosives to the mentally retarded, destroy hisown “state” inside a border, remain immune to military de-feat, and accept his own death.

Loss of Monopoly on First Loyalty:24 The Decline of theState

The fundamental characteristic of a state is a monopoly onlethal force. However, the state as a concept lasts only as longas governing forces can answer grievances of the populace.The war in Iraq and the rise of the global jihad has intro-duced the nonstate actors to the arena—ad hoc groups linkedto one another through webs of religion, tribe, race, family,

and ideology that Americans cannot penetrate. Under QTW,the 5GW irregular forces, such as those we will face, revolvearound the central belief of an irregular actor, bound by thegoals of a unifying belief that we cannot see, and floatingfreely and without apparent pattern, without regard to namesand lines on a map.

“Only three percent of the 550 mil-lion small arms and light weapons,worldwide, are in the hands of gov-ernment, military or police.”

—Moises Naim25

“We keep killing these guys, andthey just keep coming.”

—LTC Michael Fenzel, USA,Commander, 1/503d (Airborne),

Afghanistan,February 2008

Figure 3.

*OP TELIC is the British name for OIF.



The fifth-generation force, currently nucleated aroundradical Islam, is growing. The war in Iraq has placed beforesuch a protean enemy sharp targets, in the form of Americansoldiers and Marines.

Bin laden has now set the world on the course to 5GW, notby entering the conventional military contest in which hewould be outmatched, but because he has set up a counter toWestern secular thought. His is the alternative ideological sys-tem. Yet, as states cleave along the lines of ethnicity, tribe, andreligion, “the people may not be the prize,”27 thereby upend-ing all modern theories about fighting these types of war—in-surgency, guerrilla campaign, revolution, irregular war—againsta formless foe. We want to promote American ideas overseas,but the “common man is apolitical and is impervious to suchabstract ideals as democracy and representative government.”28

The common man is not, however, impervious to suffer-ing and poverty, and it is here that the insurgencies that willcharacterize 5GW will rise. As groups of people—whethernations, states, polities, tribes, or clans—see their capabili-ties and their expectations diverging, their frustration willgrow. The driver of anger which the Fourth World must suf-fer is not only the raw, grinding deprivation that horrifiesAmericans, it is a relative deprivation in which people seeothers leaving them behind and in which their values of wel-fare, power, and interpersonal pride are thwarted or ignored.(See Figure 4.)

This is why insurgencies do not grow in places like Cal-cutta, Darfur, Cite Soleil, or Abidjan, despite their grindinghand-to-mouth poverty, but rise strongly in (relatively) af-fluent places like Watts or San Salvador or Cape Town. Thereis a larger, wealthier group at whom the desperately poor di-rect anger. In such places will 5GW flourish, as the state fadesas a competent entity for delivering political goods to its peo-ple. In its place will grow “big man” leaders, finding a seam;retaining a monopoly on lethal force; providing a resonantnarrative of anger at the previous government as the agencyof final disappointment; mobilizing anger; uniting those oth-erwise separated by religion, class, race, or tribe into an in-surgent vector; and fomenting internal war.29

The QTW, therefore, applies. Radical Islam is not a Com-munist pole, a Marxist line in the sand, a Meadian node, orone of Boyd’s power centers, but rather it is scattered enti-ties—boys, gangs, militias, soldiers, clerics—floating inco-herently around an idea. Radical Islam is not an organizedhierarchy. It is a clearinghouse for violence.30 (See Figure 5.)

S = 1/Ve: Success Will Vary In-versely to Exported Violence

The American focus on mili-tary technology, winning bykilling, creates a fundamentalproblem: precisely the same tech-nology that wins conventionalwars loses unconventional ones. Acounterterrorism framework per-petuates U.S. vulnerabilities overthe long term, as U.S. methodswill have to become more violentto achieve continued success inkilling and capturing terrorists.31

Using our military strengthagainst us, Osama bin Ladendestabilized the entire Westernworld, drove us into spendingwhat could end up as over $3 tril-lion,32 turned both the angryworld underclass and the educatedEuropean elite against the veryidea of American power, groundworld financial markets to a halt,and ignited a two-front war. ForFigure 4.

“We finished the fight, and we hada few prisoners. I sent out the troopsto clean up, and I grabbed the guywho looked most senior. I finallyasked him straight up: ‘Why are youfighting us? What is it you want?’ Hesaid, ‘I don’t want anything. I’m justhere to kill Americans.’”

—Marine infantry officer, Iraq26



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the 5GW fighter, such terror is an inexpensive tool of insta-bility:

[T]errorist attacks themselves do tend to be relatively cheap.The 9/11 attacks cost between $300,000 and $500,000, andaccording to UN estimates no other al-Qaeda-related attack,including the Bali, London, Madrid and East Africa embassybombings, has cost more than $50,000, and most have cost asmall fraction of that.33

America reacted to 9/11 precisely as Bin Laden knew wewould and hoped we would: with a huge, public, angry, uni-lateral, military lashing out in Muslim lands. In doing so, weallowed Bin Laden to become the voice for the Muslimworld, to point out the presence of armed Christian armieson Muslim holy land, and to become the cave-dwelling ArabMuslim authentic in the face of First World mechanizedoverkill. It is as if Bin Laden had read Boyd, who seems tohave foreseen the American military overreaction to the 9/11attacks when he explains:

[You must] repeatedly and unexpectedly tie-up, divert, stretch-out, or drain-away adversary attention and strength in orderto expose vulnerabilities and weaknesses, and (thereby) keeppressure on and continually force adversary to adapt to manyabrupt and irregular changes when the adversary is strung-out,or disconnected. Pull adversary apart by causing him to gen-erate or project mental images that agree neither with thefaster tempo nor rhythm nor with the transient maneuver pat-terns he must compete against. Enmesh adversary in a worldof uncertainty, doubt, mistrust, confusion, disorder, fear, panic[and] chaos.34

America, in the end, does havethat preponderance of militarypower that the Powell Doctrine35

prescribes. But as the 5GWdawns, radical Islam is providing acentral idea—a unifying force—to which those angry at Americanpreeminence are drawn. Theyaren’t a coherent army and give usnothing to shoot at. In the 5GW,that may be enough to win.

Notes1. Ferguson, Niall, The War of theWorld, Penguin Group, New York, 2006,title of Part II, beginning p. 189.

2. Chief among these are Kitson, Galula,Vann, Halberstam, Boot, Nagl, and Fer-tig. These men are all experts in insur-gencies and small wars, though mostlywars of Maoist bent and Asian and LatinAmerican foci. They all, however, standin the shadow of Dr. Bernard Fall, thepreeminent thinker on small wars, whowas killed while on patrol with theMarines on the Street Without Joy inVietnam in 1967.

3. Chisholm, Dr. Donald, Naval War College, Joint Military Operationsfaculty, discussion with author, 9 January 2008.

4. Lind, William S., Fleet Marine Force Manual 1A (FMFM 1A), FourthGeneration War: The Austro-Hungarian Marine Corps, Marine CorpsCombat Development Command, Quantico, June 2007.

5. Ullman, Richard, “Redefining Security,” International Security, Vol. 8,Summer 1983, p. 129. Ullman insists:

Defining national security merely, or even primarily, in military terms conveysa profoundly false image of reality. [Such definition] causes States to concen-trate on military threats and to ignore other, and perhaps more harmful dan-gers.

6. Several scholars and thinkers have made stabs at defining 5GW. This isbecause 5GW will itself be almost undefinable. William Lind provided adefinition in 2004 with a blog entitled “5GW?” See note 17 for furtherdiscussion of Lind. Next came Tom Barnett on his weblog entitled, “MyOwn Personal 5GW Dream,” available at www.thomaspmbarnett.com,16 October 2006.

7. Flanagan, Caitlin, “A Woman’s Place,” Atlantic Monthly, January 2008,p. 118.

8. See Figure 1. It is critically important to understand that though theBohr atom presented, and the QTW next to it, appear neat and orderly, likestars orbiting a planet, they are not. The depictions created are a way for theWestern mind to organize the idea of entities’ gaining or losing energy asthey move closer to or farther from a center and are acted upon by a force.These diagrams don’t show the position of objects; they show the proba-bility that an object will be in a locus at a given moment. For discussion ofquantum theory, see Palle Yourgrau, A World Without Time (Basic Books,

Figure 5.

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2004); Gary Zukav, The Dancing Wu Li Masters (Morrow, 1979); and BillBryson, A Short History of Nearly Everything (Broadway, 2003).

9. Numerous works cover this topic, from the time (and works) of Cicero tothe work of Shelby Foote and Douglas Southall Freeman. Niall Ferguson andMax Boot have looked at such first-generation war from the state perspective.

10. See Figure 3 on empire-states.

11. Ideas on the generations of warfare come from several sources, mostnotably William Lind, who has published a draft of FMFM 1A. Lind wasa favorite of Marine Commandant Alfred M. Gray, and Lind’s ideas havepermeated all Marine Corps professional education for 20 years; as thenumber “1” would suggest, these manuals are the bedrock on which Ma-rine officer instruction is based. See also Walter Russell Mead’s discussionsof hard and sharp power in Chapter Two, Power, Terror, Peace and War,Alfred A. Knopf, New York, 2004, and Frank Hoffman, Parameters, Sum-mer 2007, who delineates crisply the debate between the classical schoolof rational actor-driven war and this uncomfortable fourth generation inwhich we find ourselves.

12. Boyd, Col John, USAF, Patterns of Conflict, 1986 (no copyright), p.111. Boyd is particularly interested in how to “pull an opponent apart.”Such action need not be, and properly expressed, often is not, military oreven kinetic. Just like Sun Tzu, Boyd would rather win without fighting.His ideas correlate directly with those of Osama bin Laden.

13. Lind, FMFM 1A. These ideas permeate the book. See also Boyd.

14. Huntington, Samuel, The Clash of Civilizations, Simon and Schuster,New York, 1986. Huntington takes a hard-eyed, realist view of the world,insisting that the West and the “non-West” are rising in concert and in-sisting that one cannot understand conflict without understanding cul-ture. Huntington is academic, dour, and contrarian—and invariably right.

15. Boyd, pp. 64 and 107.

16. Zinni, Gen Anthony C., USMC(Ret), breakfast meeting with author, Uni-versity of San Diego (USD), April 2004. The discussion has been transcribed,recorded, and published by USD’s Kroc Institute for Peace and Justice.

17. Sachs, Jeffrey, “The Geography of Economic Development,” Strategyand Foreign Policy, Naval War College Press, Newport, RI, 2006, p. 272.

18. Barnett, Thomas P.M., The Pentagon’s New Map, Putnam, New York,2004. This idea permeates the book.

19. Hoffman, LtCol Frank G., USMCR(Ret), “Neo-Classical Coun-terinsurgency,” Parameters, U.S. Army War College, Carlisle, PA, Sum-mer 2007, p. 78.

20. Department of Defense, Irregular Warfare Joint Operating Concept,11 September 2007, p. 7.

21. Vego, Milan, Operational Warfare, United States Naval War College,Newport, RI, Lesson 1004, p. 309.

22. Lind, FMFM 1A.

23. See Figure 1. Bohr atom versus QTW model.

24. Lind, 5GW blog.

25. Naim, Moises, “The Five Wars of Globalization,” Foreign Policy, Jan-uary-February 2003, p. 30.

26. Boyce, Maj Giles “Russ,” Operations Officer, 3d Battalion, 4thMarines, and commander of forces in Haditha, Iraq. Interview with au-thor, February 2005.

27. Hoffman, p. 80.

28. Fertig, LTC Randall, USA, Symposium on Counterinsurgency,RAND Corporation, 1963, p. 80.

29. The ideas of drives being frustrated, of the agency of final disappoint-ment, and of the power of crowd dynamics comes from Ted Robert Gurr,Why Men Rebel, Princeton University Press, Princeton, NJ, 1970. Gurris a sociologist but truly understands crowds and violence. See Figure 5that was created to illustrate these points.

30. David Kilcullen is a former Australian Army infantry officer and an ex-pert in counterinsurgency and was, until fall of 2007, senior counterin-surgency advisor to GEN David Petraeus, USA. To Kilcullen goes thecredit for the idea of al-Qaeda as the “clearinghouse” for the global jihad.He points out that the jihad is not what the insurgency is; it is what theinsurgency does. Nonetheless, the global jihad and the global insurgencyare right now one and the same.

31. Johnson III, COL James, USA, Joint Military Operations final paper,Naval War College, Newport, RI, November 2007, p. 9.

32. See Linda J. Bilmes and Joseph E. Stiglitz, The Three Trillion DollarWar: The True Cost of the Iraq Conflict, W.W. Norton, New York, March2008. These researchers used econometrics to figure out how much thewar, in and of itself and separated from normal military spending, willcost.

33. Bennett, Drake, “Small Change: why we can’t fight terrorists by cut-ting off their money,” (sic) The Boston Globe, 20 January 2008, p. K2.

34. Boyd, pp. 155, 177.

35. Marine officers are seasoned on the Powell Doctrine, but such insis-tence on overwhelming force draws from the underpinning provided byBG Fox Connor, USA, the little-known mentor to both GENs George C.Marshall and Dwight D. Eisenhower. See Mark Perry, Partners in Com-mand, (Penguin Books, 2007). Secretary of Defense, Robert Gates, in hisarticle, “Reflections on Leadership,” in the Summer 2008 issue of Param-eters, provides an interesting analysis of this intellectual thread. Connor’sthree rules of war are never fight unless you have to, never fight alone, andnever fight for long.

>Editor’s Note: The author holds a master’s degree from Harvard’sJohn F. Kennedy School of Government and graduated with high-est distinction from the Naval War College in 2008. While at theNaval War College, his thesis, “Don’t Trust the Big Man,” delvedfurther into the ideas explored in this article, using Africa below theSahel as the case study on which this article is based. His thesis isavailable at the Defense Technical Information Center website.

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