Instead of reviewing 4th Generation Warfare Handbook, CQW has chosen to apply what he learned from it to the current war with the Islamic State:
The 4GW War in the West
However western governments choose to handle migration, the governments need to look like they are in control of the situation. This certainly hasn’t been the case in Europe.
Flat out refusal, and the repatriation and dispersal of potential enemy elements already in country is the simplest and most likely method to succeed, but the political viability of this remains uncertain for now.
Whatever number of refugees Western governments choose to accept, it needs to be in a distributed, non permanent way. Any migrants need to be spread thin throughout the country. And there has to be a plan for sending them home as the conflict ends.
Preventing and breaking up enclaves is key. If you expect any sort of assimilation, it will only happen outside of ethnic and religious conclaves.
In lieu of trying to integrate refugees into the country or to turn them away, they could simply be sent to a third party. Paying countries to take in and support the refugees is one way to handle things and still look good. You reduce the potential for Paris-style attacks in your own country. You also don’t look like a horrible villain to the bleeding hearts. It works on a tactical and moral level. This of course takes lots of money, but as Lind states, money is one of the state’s most powerful 4th generation assets.
Fighting ISIS in the Middle East
While Lind touches on fighting 4th Generation war in western countries, the main focus of the book is on fighting wars in the Middle East, or wherever non-state actors are likely to come into play.
The first question that has to be asked are what are our goals in fighting ISIS in the Middle East. These are the ones I identify:
- Elimination of ISIS control over state functions over large parts of the Middle East.
- Establishment of peace across Syria and Iraq
- Establishment of stability across Syria and Iraq through state power.
Currently, ISIS wants to operate like a state that uses traditional warfare to accomplish its military goals. When ISIS tries to take an area, it rolls in with force and asserts control. In many ways they function like a 3rd Generation force, because they are highly mobile but lack the communications to have the overarching control of Western army commanders. Of course they lack training and skills to exercise precision and tactical excellence like well-trained Western armies. Their advantage is their adaptability.
Also, make no mistake, ISIS’s plan is likely to fall back into a 4th Generation insurgency model should the West come to occupy the areas now held by ISIS.
Unlike the resort to airstrikes, his plan has the benefit of not being guaranteed to fail. However, given the increasing number of U.S. state governors who are rejecting the Obama administration’s demand that they take in more refugees, to say nothing of the total rejection of the Hungarian and Polish governments, I think the refusal-and-repatriation option is much more politically viable than most Western governments want to admit.
It is, in fact, so politically viable that every government that claims it is not is going to be removed from power within the next five years. Even the mainstream media is beginning to understand that.
Isil and its death cult stablemates will never be defeated until we get to grips with the concept that this has nothing to do with anything except the fact that we exist. It is that, and that alone, which offends them and which they seek to destroy.
So, unless we are all happy to sign up to radical Islam right now, with every heretic and infidel executed on sight, every man forced to take up arms, every woman enslaved, every homosexual stoned to death and every nine-year-old girl at risk of rape, in a terrifying return to the Dark Ages, we have a choice to make.
That choice is stark: kill or be killed. So which one is it going to be?
The single most important thing to understand is that ISIS can’t be defeated over there before it is defeated over here. Until the Reconquista 2.0 begins, the Western politicians are doing little more than trying to buy time until retirement.