4GW is what you end up with when you do SysAdmin badly
■"In Iraq, Less Can Be More: We should focus on better training for fewer troops," op-ed by Peter Khalil, New York Times, 20 December 2004, p. A29.■"Local Heroes: A Vietnam strategy is working in Iraq," op-ed by Andrew Borene, New York Times, 20 December 2004, p. A29.
■"Disquiet in Iceland That Its Peacekeepers Dress for War," by Sarah Lyall, New York Times, 20 December 2004, p. A4.
There is an idiotic argument in the Fourth Generation Warfare literature (descriptive of the intifada-like guerrilla war we now face in Iraq) that says the snafu-ed occupation proves that the Network-Centric Operations that won the war ultimately proved illusory. Nothing is further from the truth. The NCO-driven warfighting phase of the takedown would have set up a positive occupation, save for the fact that we didn't pursue that follow-on phase in anything close to a truly comprehensive, SysAdmin fashion. That we now end up with a 4GW-like insurgency situation does not negate the takedown, it negates the poor follow-on effort that should have prevented that conflict's emergence.
Let me clue you in on this struggle: NCO is the language of the air guys, whereas 4GW is the lingo of the ground guys. The ground guys feared that Kosovo + Afghanistan + the Iraq takedown was making it look like we no longer needed a ground force, and so they argue against the utility and validity of NCO. Conversely, the air guys have used that experience to argue against 4GW, although few are making that case now except to say we should withdraw—in Powell Doctrine fashion—as soon as we run out of traditional targets to bomb.
The real answer, of course, is—in effect—to split the difference. Do NCO right and there's no rogue government we can't take down, but if we can't prevent the probable follow-on 4GW response, there's not much sense in toppling any regime. Plus, on some level, we need to fight transnational terrorism throughout the Gap in a 4GW fashion, although most of that will be done by Special Ops guys, not Marines and Army. So if we restrict ourselves to the regime-change argument, we can say the two functions are intimately linked: dominance in NCO means 4GW is all that's left for opponents to employ in their resistance to our state-by-state effort to shrink the Gap by targeting rogue regimes.
Is that a bad thing? Being so good in NCO that no one's really willing to fight us in that realm? Hardly. That just describes the dominance of our Leviathan force. But clearly, once we get into any occupation, even with the best of SysAdmin efforts, we need to maintain and field a small warfighting capacity that can come into the postconflict stabilization arena and kick ass as required.
We know how to do this: it's called fighting side-by-side with the locals and training them as we go along, building up their skills. This is not capital-intensive, but personnel-intensive. And it requires that sometimes our SysAdmin cops will have to act like soldiers, something that will be shocking for those coalition partners (like an Iceland) that believe such peacekeeping will only occur in truly peaceful areas.
Will this relegate the SysAdmin function and its embedded capacity for 4GW into some sort of "clean up" role, operating always in the wake of the Leviathan? Only in truly big cases, where the takedown of the regime is required. But by and large that SysAdmin function will be out there working the Gap on a daily basis, whereas the Leviathan spends the vast majority of its days back at base inside the Core.
In this way not only does our unparalleled capacity for NCO enable a new focus on 4GW, but a strong 4GW capacity enables the SysAdmin's successful functioning by making clear that we're just as tough in the second half as we are in the first half.