4GW: A solution of the third kind

Solutions of the first kind… new things (i.e., robots, autonomous flying vehicles,
software to help us understand and manipulate foreign societies).

Solutions of the second kind… new ideas about tactics and strategy.

Solutions of the third kind… new ways to shape our institutions
– aka politics — usually by altering how they recruit, train, and promote people. 

Don Vandergriff (Major, US Army, retired) is one of the very few actually implementing 4GW solutions of the third kind, with his work for the Army on new methods of training leaders.  He now has a blog here, writing as an expert on leader development, personnel management and fourth generation warfare.

I strongly recommend visiting his blog for a look at the cutting edge of 4GW (at least, work on our side about 4GW).  For links to his online articles and list of his books, see The Essential 4GW reading list: Chapter Two, Donald Vandergriff.

Please share your comments by posting below (brief and relevant, please) — especially with suggestions about links worth adding — or email me at fabmaximus at hotmail dot com (note the spam-protected spelling).

Previous posts in this series

1. Arrows in the Eagle’s claw — solutions to 4GW, chapter I
2. Arrows in the Eagle’s claw — Chapter II, about 4GW analysts
3. A solution to 4GW — the introduction
4. How to get the study of 4GW in gear
5. 4GW: A solution of the second kind – Shawn Brimley has provided an example of a solution of the second kind with “A Grand Strategy of Sustainment”.  It is good, but solutions of the second kind do us little good.
6. 4GW: A solution of the third kind – Don Vandergriff is one of the very few today implementing solutions of the third kind.

Recommendation to read: “Is Warfighting Enough” by Richards and Vandergriff

“Is Warfighting Enough?” by Chet Richards (Colonel, USAF, retired) and Don Vandergriff (Major, USA, retired) — now available online in the February 2008 edition of the Marine Corps Gazette.

The shelves of many libraries groan under the weight of articles calling for new ways of analyzing geopolitical and military issues.  In four pages this article shows how the theories of John Boyd can provide this, which we desperately need.  Instead of yet another analysis of 4GW, this sketches out solutions – practical methods for building forces capable of fighting 4GW’s, and how to use them.

Another valuable aspect of this article:  both Richards and Vandergriff are excellent writers, able to express complex reasoning in a clear and brief fashion.

About the The Marine Corps Gazette

There are many good periodicals about modern warfare.  I consider The Marine Corps Gazette to be one of the best.  Since the publication in 1989 of the Lind et al article Into the Fourth Generation it has been in the forefront of coverage of and discussion about the paradoxes and challenges of 4GW.  The Gazette is available to members and subscribers only.  If you’re eligible, join!  If you’re not, subscribe!  Click here for details.

For more on this subject

• For more about the Adaptive Leaders Course:  Recommended reading: transforming the Army, the hard way
• The Adaptive Leadership Symposium will be held on 19 March 2008 at Greenville SC.  Download the conference brochure here (234 kb PDF).
• For a links to the online works of Donald Vandergriff:  The Essential 4GW reading list: Chapter Two, Donald Vandergriff.
• For links to the online works of John Boyd see the DNI archive page, which also lists books about Boyd and his thinking.
• Boyd’s theories are explained in more detail in Chet Richard’s book Certain to Win.

The Army is losing good people. That is only a symptom of a more serious problem.

Yet again the public has discovered that our Army has difficulty retaining good people.  A big story, but only in the sense that Columbus discovering America was a big story.  In both cases, the thing discovered was already there for a long time, had been repeatedly “discovered” – and the discovery was only one incident in an important and larger process.

• “High-Profile Officer Nagl to Leave Army, Join Think Tank“, Washington Post (16 Jan)
• “Why is the Army losing so many talented midlevel officers?“, Fred Kaplan, Slate (16 Jan)
• “John Nagl has left the building“, Philip Carter, Intel Dump (16 Jan)
• LTC John Nagl to retire, Abu Muqawama (16 Jan)

(new)  Army Effort to Retain Captains Falls Short of Goal, Wall Street Journal (26 January)  (subscription-only site): 

“The program persuaded 11,933 captains to commit to additional Army service, short of the 14,184 goal. The military will pay out more than $349 million in bonuses to the officers who took the incentives.  All told, 67.6% of those eligible for the program — which offered officers cash bonuses of as much as $35,000, the ability to choose their next assignment or military-funded graduate school — agreed to serve another one to three years in the Army.”

LTC Nagl leaving is a loss to the army.  The departure of so many of the Army’s top COIN experts is bad.  But these represent only the surface of a serious problem.  Zenpundit digs to find a more serious issue in his post Canaries in the mineshaft:

Nagl is merely the well-known face of an ominous trend. When an institution - be it military, educational, corporate, civic, religious - reaches a point where it is merely a farm team that regularly sends it’s best and it’s brightest elsewhere then it is an institution on it’s way out.

Even this does not go to the core:  the Army’s senior leadership has known of this critical weakness for over a decade and still not seriously addressed it.  Only a very sick institution does not respond to serious problems after their discovery.  In The Army’s greatest crisis I give links to seven major reports over three years (2000 - 2001) about this.  Nor were these the first, as the issue was well-known in the late 1990’s, and probably before that.

Unfortunately these recurring waves of articles, like today’s about LTC Nagl, seldom place the problem in context as a long-standing one resulting from deep structural causes.  Hence no easy fixes.

Other posts in this series

• The Army’s greatest crisis
• An Army near the breaking point, chapter 3

For descriptions of causes and possible solutions I suggest reading Donald Vandergriff’s many articles and books:

• The Essential 4GW reading list, chapter Two:  Donald Vandergriff

Recommended reading: transforming the Army, the hard way

ARMY magazine has posted part two of Donald Vandergriff’s (Major, US Army, retired) article about the Adaptive Leaders Course.  This describes one path to organizational transformation.  The difficult way, building from the foundation up — building something that outlasts all the hot intellectual fads, and can evolve over generations.  The senior Army leadership’s attention to Vandergriff is important good news.

Old Dogs Teaching New Tricks: the Adaptive Leaders Course — Part I, ARMY (November 2007)

Old Dogs Teaching New Tricks: the Adaptive Leaders Course — Part II, ARMY (December 2007)

People, Ideas, and Hardware. “In that order!” the late Col John R. Boyd, USAF, would thunder at his audiences. 

What historical transformations resemble that needed to adapt the US military for an age in which 4GW is the dominate form of war?  The early 19th century Prussian Army experience, of course.  Perhaps the re-casting of the US Army into a French mold during WWI.  Or we can look back to the beginning.  The founders of the American army (Washington, Lafayette, Steuben, et al) built almost from scratch.  They drew on two models…

• frontier militia, fighting against the French and American Indians, 
• conventional European armies, mercenary soldiers with aristocratic officers.

From this they built something quite different.  For a well-written account of this for a general audience, see “Washington & Lafayette” in the September 2007 issue of Smithsonian magazine.  Their experience might hold lessons for us, facing a similar challenge – building an American Army to defend against new enemies, learning new ways to fight in a post-Constitutional era.

For more on these topics

To see Vandergriff’s other works, including links to his many online articles:  The Essential 4GW reading list: Chapter Two, Donald Vandergriff.

To help understand the nature of the Army’s difficulty in retaining its best people, see The Army’s greatest crisis.

For an overview of the various solutions to 4GW, see

• Arrows in the Eagle’s claw — solutions to 4GW, chapter I
• Arrows in the Eagle’s claw — Chapter II, about 4GW analysts

The Army’s greatest crisis

(update of my article of August 2007)  We spend more on defense (broadly defined) than the rest of the world combined.  Nobody has military technology as advanced and powerful as ours.  American military journals assure us that our doctrines range from adequate to awesome.  None of this matters if we cannot attract and retain quality people in sufficient quantities.

 People, Ideas, and Hardware. “In that order!” the late Col John R. Boyd, USAF, would thunder at his audiences.

The US military’s personnel system is deeply dysfunctional.  The problem seems worst in the Army.  That is unfortunate for us, as modern warfare increasingly means close contract land combat.  Two recent articles discuss this crisis at length.

• Challenging the Generals, Fred Kaplan, New York Times Magazine (26 August 2007)
• The Army’s Other Crisis:  Why the best and brightest young officers are leaving (Andrew Tilghman, Washington Monthly, December 2007)

Kaplan describes symptoms of a long illness deeply established in our military, and his article describes several ways in which the Iraq War has exacerbated these internal systemic flaws.  Tilghman describes the conflict between military service and the needs of young officers in America’s Army.

This problem is neither new nor does it result solely from the Iraq War.  Kaplan and Tilghman have discovered it, in the sense that Christopher Columbus discovered Madrid.  They ignore the large literature describing its causes and possible remedies in favor of a dramatic story focused on bad guys and heroes.  As parents learn when telling bedtime stories, this is the format most easily understood by children.

This also illustrates the mainstream media’s almost amnesiac ability to discover the same phenomenon over and over again. These problems were earnestly described in the 1999-2000 news cycle, grave fodder for many articles - only to be quickly forgotten, as those articles in turn had ignored similar stories from the previous cycle in the late 1970’s.

The following list gives only a smattering of high-quality studies on this problem, focused on the last cycle, which ended with the post-9/11 and Iraq War mobilizations.

Arrows in the Eagle’s claw - solutions to 4GW

This series describes the various types of solutions to modern warfare, herein called fourth generation warfare (4GW).  It will attempt to show their relationship to one another and their relative potential.  4GW appears to be the dominant form of warfare in the 21st century, so mastery of it might prove necessary for America’s prosperity or even survival.  This is a topology, a wide perspective view of writings about 4GW.  Future chapters will examine these divisions in more detail.

Analysts – the foundation of the pyramid

This first class of work provides analysis, drawing on a diverse range of resources including history, military theory, and the social sciences.  This is foundational to the development of solutions, for nothing can be done except by luck without a deep understanding of

• our situation (strengths, weaknesses, goals, etc),
• the other players on the world stage (both state and non-state actors),
• and the almost infinite range of scenarios possible in the near and far future. 

Since everyone working with 4GW does some combination of analysis and recommendations, I include in this group those whose work focuses on more on description than prescription.  Applied to individuals, any simple categorization is somewhat arbitrary.

Readers of journals in this field — such as  DNI, Parameters, or the Marine Corps Gazette — will see that this category of work is by far the largest both in volume and number of writers.  It includes, just to name a few,  Martin van Creveld, David Kilcullen, Chet Richards, and John Robb.

Visionaries — another important component of the foundation

The Essential 4GW reading list: Donald Vandergriff

In the world of military theory today there are many people on the cutting edge deserving our attention. Historians like Martin van Creveld, analysts like John Robb and Chet Richards, visionaries like Thomas Barnett, some crossing these categories like William Lind … but very few developing solutions that can be implemented today. By solutions, I mean large-scale programs (not incremental improvements) requiring no substantial political or institutional changes. Not a surprise, as this is a high bar!

One of the best known on this short list is Donald E. Vandergriff. Major, US Army. Retired 2005, now a consultant to the Army. Go here for a full biography.

He identified a powerful point of leverage to change our massive military apparatus: its personnel system. For example, the army’s individual replacement system affects not just soldiers, down to the newest recruit, but the quality of units — especially cohesion . Even more critical is the process by which a service recruits, trains, and promotes its officers. Change this and the effects ripple outward through the entire organization over time, as the nature and behavior of its leaders evolve. And the Army is making changes in both these areas, responding to the ideas of Vandergriff and others. This success means that Vandergriff is on the cutting edge of America’s 4GW sword.

4GW appears to be the dominant form of war in this century. Our history since the Korean War — especially Vietnam, 9-11, and Iraq — suggest that we have not yet learned 4GW, either defensively or offensively. Doing so might be one of our critical national tasks, perhaps necessary for survival.

Vandergriff’s online sites

His blog.

His website.

Here are links to his shorter available on the internet   

Please send links for anything not listed to fabmaximus at hotmail dot com {this is the spam-protected form of the address, to fool bots}.

How to accurately forecast trends of the Iraq War

Part VIII of a series about America’s new Long War

The word that one hears again and again here, but is so rare in the domestic political debate, is “complex.” The war is changing at least every six months, and every area of the country — even every neighborhood in Baghdad — has a different dynamic

Rich Lowry, “The Lonely War,” National Review Online, 9 October 2007

Two of the most common adjectives used to describe the Iraq War are “unique” and “complex”, which imply that it is difficult to analyze and forecast. Is this true?

I’m often asked how “experts” (a label Boyd despised) in fourth generation war (4GW) are able to forecast so accurately the course of this war. The answer is simple. This is a typical fourth generation war (4GW) of the post-WWII “locals vs. foreign occupiers” type (the other “type” is civil war, with neither side led by foreigners). The Iraq War is unique, just as every war is unique. So is every person unique. We use stereotypes to evaluate people because they usually work. They work because our similarities are often more important than our differences. So it with wars.