A comprehensive fourth-generation warfare analysis of the present situation from a paleoconservative perspective.

By William S. Lind

Chronicles

Mobs loot, burn, and vandalize while politicians advocate defunding the police. A commune was established in Seattle and turned into Lord of the Flies while government did nothing. Blacks demand equal treatment from police despite a violent crime rate many times greater than that of whites, and mainstream media will not report honestly the differences in crime rates. “Wokeness” spreads among idle youth who flunked English 101. What is going on?

What is going on, right here on American soil, is war; a new kind of war that is also very old, waged by entities other than states. I call it Fourth Generation War and, to paraphrase Leon Trotsky, you may not be interested in Fourth Generation War—but it is interested in you.

In the 1980s, when working with the Marine Corps, I came up with an intellectual framework I call the Four Generations of Modern War. Military historian Martin van Creveld’s books The Rise and Decline of the State and The Transformation of War are foundational works in my framework, which flows from one of the defining elements of the modern age, the rise of the state.

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