Two More Wins for 4GW
Before diving into the subject of this week’s column I have a small announcement to make. Following last week’s Presidential debate, a number of TR’s readers (the exact number must remain classified) told me I should run. Never wishing to disappoint, I am therefore now announcing my candidacy for President of the United States. I am running on the Monarchist ticket, mine is a write-in campaign, and my sole campaign promise is that if I am elected, you will never again have to suffer through anybody’s campaign. No I will not become king; I am not born to a royal house. Rather, I will serve as regent, preparing the way for an Austrian Habsburg to assume the American throne. They are accustomed to ruling (and ruling quite well) over ramshackle, polyglot, decaying empires, so they are a natural fit for what America has become. And the Habsburgs always have an archduke to spare.
Now to the fire swelling all around us as Washington fiddles. Fourth Generation, non-state forces are in the process of winning two wars, one highly important but no surprise, the other of small importance but a shocker.
The first is Hamas vs. Israel. In a front-page story, the June 12 Wall Street Journal quoted Hamas’s commander in Gaza, Yahya Sinwar as saying, “We have the Israelis right where we want them.” Unfortunately, he’s right.
Militarily, Israel has physically destroyed Gaza and plunged its population into misery, but it has failed and will continue to fail in gaining its stated strategic objectives of destroying Hamas as both a military and political entity. Why has it failed? Because it set objectives even the IDF, one of the world’s best conventional armies, could not attain.
Having failed at John Boyd’s physical level of war, it is now failing at the mental level because the Israeli government cannot come up with an end-state. What happens in Gaza when most of the shooting stops? Israel cannot accept a Hamas government, the Palestine Authority is useless and also unacceptable to Israel, and no Arab state or local grouping can accept anything Israel wants. So mentally, it’s a deadlock.
On the moral level, not only has Israel made itself into an international pariah, it is coming apart internally. The latter is the war’s most important outcome to date. To grasp it, we have to drop back to the IDF’s founding. It was modeled on the Wehrmacht. Why? Because Jews read books, and study correctly convinced them the Prussian/German Army was the best in the world for almost 80 years, 1866-1945. They maintained the culture of that Prussian/German Army up through the 1967 war; after that, as their R&D and procurement department grew, it was gradually displaced by the managerial/bureaucratic culture of most current state militaries. But one thing the IDF retained from the Wehrmacht was that it needed to win quickly; the longer the war, the more likely its defeat. In Gaza, Israel finds itself bogged down in a long war – again, one in which the Israeli government cannot define an attainable war aim, which is the only war out of the bog.
So the moral strain is dissolving the bonds of Israeli society. Because Israel’s is a mobilization army, keeping large numbers of men in uniform inflicts severe economic damage, up to 30% of GDP so far by some estimates. The manpower shortage can be mitigated by something Israel’s Supreme Court has just ordered: drafting ultra-Orthodox men. The exemption from Israel’s universal draft because they are studying Torah is no longer acceptable to secular Israelis who must now serve in a long war. But the ultra-Orthodox turn violent when they don’t get what they want. In their losing arguments before the Supreme Court, the Netanyahu government’s lawyers said drafting the ultra-Orthodox would tear Israeli society apart. Indeed.
Now add in a Prime Minister who puts his career before his country, a coalition where he needs the votes of ultra-Orthodox parties to stay in power, and the strong hostages’ movement taking to the streets. Hamas bungled its initial attack of October 7 on the moral level by killing and raping instead of just taking hostages, but at this point Natanyahu has made such a colossal mess of the war that, regrettably, Yahya Sinwar is right. He has the Israelis right where he wants them.
The other win by 4GW forces, in this case a tribe, the Houthis, is of far less importance but a real jaw-dropper in kind: a 4GW entity is defeating the U.S. Navy at sea. Let me repeat that: a tribe is defeating the U.S. Navy at sea.
Wow. I did not expect that. How is this happening? Because, just as we have seen in the Black Sea, the rule that established itself in land warfare by the end of 1914 now applies at sea as well: anything that can be seen will be killed.
The basic story is simple. The Houthis, who are Shiites backed by Shiite Iran, have been fighting a civil war in Yemen for years against a Sunni faction backed by the Gulf States. On land, it’s largely a stalemate, but the Houthis, who developed land-attack rockets to shoot at the Saudis who were bombing them, now have anti-ship missiles and drones too. They have used them in a sea denial role in the Red Sea by attacking merchant ships. Their stated purpose is to help the Palestinians in Gaza, which they do by cutting Egypt’s Suez Canal earnings to almost nothing (Egypt has long worked with Israel to keep the Palestinians in Gaza).
The U.S. Navy, backed by several others, went into the Red Sea to open it back up – and failed. As usual, we bomb, and as usual, the bombing does not accomplish our objectives. Now we are putting U.S. Navy destroyers in the region shoot the Houthis’ missiles down, but that hasn’t worked either, because the Houthis still his merchant ships (thankfully, so far, none of our warships, though not for lack of trying). They don’t have to hit many to send marine insurance rates so high the Suez Canal route is unusable. So a tribe’s sea-denial is beating our efforts at sea control. And every state military in the world continues to ignore Fourth Generation war.