This is another weekend classic drawn from the archives of the FM website. This was originally posted on 6 March 2008.
One of the baleful influences on the 4GW analysis is the science of Psychohistory developed by Hari Seldon, capable of accurately predicting history (as described in the Foundation novels of Isaac Asimov). Social science “laws” in the real world are just heuristics, generalities not to be confused with the Laws of Thermodynamics. This is especially true in military theory. For example, Clausewitz’s On War opens with some general rules (e.g., the relationship between offense and defense), which he then elaborates with great detail but no certainty (having experience at war, he knew the limits of military theory).
This is important, as progress in understanding 4GW requires distilling out more of these general relationships from the mass of 20th century history. For example, in January 2007 I postulated that insurgencies come in two flavors, depending on the role of foreigners. Chet Richards refined this differentialtion of insurgency types into …
(1) Classical insurgency: a revolution, in other words, in which a sizable fraction of the population opposes what they consider to be an illegitimate or oppressive government, as the American colonies did in 1776-1781. The goal of the insurgent groups may be either to take control of the central government or to achieve independence for a portion of the population.
(2) War of national liberation: in which a sizable fraction of the people in a country throws out an occupying foreign power, as Vietnam did to us in 1965-1975.
— From the Introduction to If We Can Keep It (IWCKI)
This has been criticised as dividing insurgencies into rigid categories — black and white, not accounting for the shades of grey found in all human experiences. That is both true and a good thing. All rules of thumb are arbitrary, in some sense, but useful for practitioners who know their limitations. Even the exceptions to this “rule” about insurgencies, and I believe they are quite few, tell us something new. For example, the Malayan Emergency shows the importance of having a legitimate local government to do the heavy lifting (even though the COIN literature tend to follow the Brits’ view, considering it “their” win — not that of the locals).
The value of these kinds of insights was well expressed by a post Opposed Systems Design (4 March 2008):
