Speaker 1: It could happen. Here is the podcast that this is
Speaker 1: about things falling apart and how to, how to, how
Speaker 1: to maybe unfollowing apart. I'm Robert Evans. Your your your host,
Speaker 1: and your other hosts are Christopher and Garrison and our
Speaker 1: producers Sophie. How's everybody doing today? Great? How's every how's
Speaker 1: everybody feel about war? Oh? Yeah? Now, if you were
Speaker 1: to get us based on your knowledge of history, what
Speaker 1: generation of war we're in right now? What would you? What?
Speaker 1: What would y'all guess? I feel like war isn't it's
Speaker 1: it's it's newer in relation to like human beings. Like
Speaker 1: the idea of war, I'm guessing like there's been like battles,
Speaker 1: but like the idea of like war, I feel like
Speaker 1: isn't super old compared to how long has been humans
Speaker 1: walking around. So I don't know this is maybe I mean,
Speaker 1: I know the answer, but like it's it's like like
Speaker 1: that's that's definitely We definitely passed through like at least
Speaker 1: a couple of stages and were at least a couple Chris,
Speaker 1: like gotta be at least twelve twelve least you are
Speaker 1: way ahead of William s Lynd who spoilers is the
Speaker 1: guy who came up with the concept of fourth generation war,
Speaker 1: which is what this episode is about. Right. One of
Speaker 1: the things when we talk about things falling apart is
Speaker 1: um the unsettling growth of a number of different hybrid conflicts,
Speaker 1: Ukraine being the most like blatant modern example, Syria being
Speaker 1: the deadliest example in our lifetimes. But like these weird
Speaker 1: hybrid conflicts that are a mix of shit happening on
Speaker 1: the Internet and like disinformation going out all over the world.
Speaker 1: You could even think to like what was happening in
Speaker 1: Bolivia a year or so back, and like all those
Speaker 1: weird accounts that were like based around Langley, Virginia claiming
Speaker 1: to support the military coup, And you can look at,
Speaker 1: like from the same this disinformation brought out by like
Speaker 1: the Russian state that is usually as part of like
Speaker 1: a conflict either you know, they have disinfo operations and
Speaker 1: Syria disinfo operations around the conflict in Ukraine that are
Speaker 1: kind of designed to muddy the issues and to detract
Speaker 1: international support and also to like drum up support within
Speaker 1: for like in the in the case of Ukraine, you
Speaker 1: had like this media blitz against the legitimacy of the
Speaker 1: Ukrainian state in favor of like a more UH like
Speaker 1: traditionally Russian um UH style of government in the East,
Speaker 1: and like that led to this breakaway republic that was
Speaker 1: supported by the Russian government and like so these are
Speaker 1: like hybrid conflicts is kind of how these are referred to.
Speaker 1: And there was a guy named William S. Lynd who
Speaker 1: in nineteen eighty nine wrote a book with a couple
Speaker 1: of US military analysts, Like he was an analyst for
Speaker 1: the military. He was not serving in the military. The
Speaker 1: other guys he wrote this this thing with we're serving
Speaker 1: at the time, and they wrote this this book kind
Speaker 1: of trying to basically what Lynde was doing. He was
Speaker 1: very influenced by our loss in Vietnam when I say,
Speaker 1: are here, like the loss of the American state in Vietnam,
Speaker 1: And he was trying to determine, like number one, kind
Speaker 1: of like find a way to codify and explain the
Speaker 1: changes that were happening to warfare in this period. Was
Speaker 1: also influenced about what was happening in Afghanistan with the
Speaker 1: Russians were experiencing um and find a way to like
Speaker 1: move forward and allow the United states to win wars again, right,
Speaker 1: Like that was William S. Lynd's goal, um, And so
Speaker 1: he came up with this concept of four or he
Speaker 1: and some other guys came up with what they called
Speaker 1: fourth generation warfare UM, and first generation warfare is like
Speaker 1: Napoleonic Arab warfare. So, like as Garrison was saying, you
Speaker 1: may note that he kind of starts his that's pretty late.
Speaker 1: That's pretty late we had before. Yeah, that's there's a
Speaker 1: lot of stuff that leads up to like, yeah, if
Speaker 1: I was gonna try to categorize different types of warfare,
Speaker 1: that would not be the one I start with. Well,
Speaker 1: like the reality of course, as we'll talk about, like
Speaker 1: when you start looking at different kinds of warfares, there's
Speaker 1: wars that look remarkably like the ship going on in
Speaker 1: Afghanistan and Ukraine, that are occurring like several thousand years ago, um,
Speaker 1: like like like in the same places to like, yeah,
Speaker 1: it's just like if you wanted to if you wanted
Speaker 1: to talk about like kind of the modern style of
Speaker 1: wars that we saw on that we've seen really in
Speaker 1: the last like hundred and fifty years, they're not all
Speaker 1: that dissimilar. In a lot of ways from like the
Speaker 1: kind of conflicts you saw between Rome and Carthage um,
Speaker 1: which are these really like big nation state style conflicts
Speaker 1: and and have a lot of similarities. But but William S.
Speaker 1: Lynn described the first generation of warfare is beginning after
Speaker 1: the Peace of Westphalia in sixty eight that ended the
Speaker 1: Thirty Years War um. And it's the kind of warfare
Speaker 1: where you have these like big, tightly ordered groups of
Speaker 1: men marching towards each other and like firing very inaccurate
Speaker 1: weapons and mass together. Right. Uh. This is ended by
Speaker 1: the era of the machine gun and the semi automatic
Speaker 1: rifle um or on the bolt reaction rifle, I should say,
Speaker 1: And that leads us to second generation warfare, which is
Speaker 1: linear fire and movement with heavy reliance on indirect fires.
Speaker 1: That's still huge groups of guys charging, but they're not
Speaker 1: marching in close order, they're not like firing in volleys um,
Speaker 1: and they're supported by heavy artillery like World War one
Speaker 1: kind of ship right. Um. Really we start to see
Speaker 1: this in eighteen seventy and then World War One is
Speaker 1: kind of the height of this kind of warfare, and
Speaker 1: over the course of World War One we more merge
Speaker 1: in again This is William S. Len's way we emerge
Speaker 1: from second generation to third generation warfare, which is where
Speaker 1: you've got infiltration tactics to bypass enemy defensive lines and
Speaker 1: collapse it, which is kind of the Germans and their
Speaker 1: outrgs tactic and stormtrooper tactics are really kind of uh
Speaker 1: pioneering that you've got the idea of defense in depth
Speaker 1: um and so this need to bypass the enemy and
Speaker 1: like this leads to blitzkrieg and leads to all sorts
Speaker 1: of ship um and then that kind of starts to
Speaker 1: collapse and Len's estimation around Vietnam, and you get what's
Speaker 1: called fourth generation warfare. Fourth generation. I'm actually just going
Speaker 1: to read a quote from a military history wiki that
Speaker 1: I thought had any good description of all of this.
Speaker 1: Fourth generation warfare is normally characterized by a violent non
Speaker 1: state actor fighting a state. This fighting can be physically done,
Speaker 1: such as by modern examples Hezblah or the liberation Tigers
Speaker 1: of Tamil illam Um. In this realm, the v n essay.
Speaker 1: These violent nonstate actors use all three levels of fourth
Speaker 1: generation warfare. These are the physical actual combat, which is
Speaker 1: considered the least important mental the will to fight, belief
Speaker 1: in victory, etcetera. And the moral, which is the most important,
Speaker 1: Lynd says, and includes cultural norms, etcetera. Um, So obviously
Speaker 1: I think that this is kind of nonsense. There's a
Speaker 1: lot of people, So there's a lot of folks, the
Speaker 1: people who buy into this, and it's very popular on
Speaker 1: the right. Well, we'll look at like what's happening in
Speaker 1: Ukraine is a perfect example of fourth generation warfare because
Speaker 1: you have Russia flooding the zone using spot Nick and
Speaker 1: a bunch of other kind of media organizations to drum
Speaker 1: up um discord and like anger between East and West
Speaker 1: in Ukraine and support for potential Russian action at the
Speaker 1: same time as you have them backing this dictator um,
Speaker 1: and then you have like the West sort of supporting
Speaker 1: the people protesting against those dictators and like so you've
Speaker 1: got like this this digital conflict, this information conflict that
Speaker 1: eventually leads to fighting on the ground. One of the
Speaker 1: areas in which I think Lynda is really off is
Speaker 1: talking about like the physical as the least important, especially
Speaker 1: if you're going to consider Ukraine an example of fourth
Speaker 1: generation warfare, because if the Russian military had not intervened,
Speaker 1: there would not still be a conflict in Ukraine, the
Speaker 1: Separatists would not still hold land, and in fact, the
Speaker 1: Separatis were on the edge of getting completely wiped out
Speaker 1: by the Ukrainian military because they were a bunch of
Speaker 1: nonstate actors with minimal support and minimal weaponry before the
Speaker 1: Russians moved in brigades of active duty combat troops in
Speaker 1: armor um, including like gigantic fucking missile launchers which they
Speaker 1: used to shoot down that Malaysian airlines flight like that.
Speaker 1: It's it's just not I I don't think that that.
Speaker 1: What what Linda is saying is very um, very well
Speaker 1: describes what's actually going on in the world. But it
Speaker 1: is important to understand the concept of fourth generay and
Speaker 1: warfare and fifth generation warfare, which we'll talk about in
Speaker 1: a bit um because it is so useful in the
Speaker 1: way in which particularly guys like Steve Bannon um conceive
Speaker 1: of conflict. Because that you will hear the term fourth
Speaker 1: generation warfare constantly, and it's also something that has used
Speaker 1: a lot within our military establishment. Now a lot of
Speaker 1: people hate it, and within you can find a lot
Speaker 1: of papers buy dudes writing like analysts who are working
Speaker 1: for the Defense Department for the army actively like shipping
Speaker 1: on lynd and talking about how he's at best is
Speaker 1: kind of like reinvented ideas that existed in warfare for
Speaker 1: thousands of years, and he's kind of summarized things in
Speaker 1: a way that that is needlessly flattening, and like some
Speaker 1: people will say, you basically like ripped up like added
Speaker 1: the internet to klauswitz uh and pretended that you'd invented
Speaker 1: a new style of conor that you defined a new
Speaker 1: style of conflict. Anyway, that's like an introduction to the
Speaker 1: idea of fourth generation warfare, right. And there's a lot
Speaker 1: of things that he gets again like if you're if
Speaker 1: you're a history a military has story wong, which Lynde
Speaker 1: pretends to be a lot of ship that he gets wrong. Um.
Speaker 1: So one of the things that he says, like one
Speaker 1: of his famous phrases that every military eventually craps in
Speaker 1: its own mess kit um, the idea that like every
Speaker 1: military that that is great eventually like has a gigantic
Speaker 1: funk up because they get too used to doing the
Speaker 1: same thing, which is true um. And he describes it
Speaker 1: as like um, the Prussians did in eighteen oh six,
Speaker 1: after which they designed and put into service a much
Speaker 1: more improved model mesh Kit mess Kit through the Sharonhorst
Speaker 1: military reforms. The French did in eighteen seventy, after which
Speaker 1: they took down from the shelf and old model mess
Speaker 1: ket the mass draft Army of the First Republic and
Speaker 1: put it back into service. The Japanese did it in
Speaker 1: five after which they threw their mesket away, swearing they
Speaker 1: would never eat again. And we did it in Korea,
Speaker 1: in Vietnam, and now in four new wars so far
Speaker 1: we've only we've had the only military that's just kept
Speaker 1: on eating. And that's a really dumb statement. That's all
Speaker 1: really historically and accurate. So, for example, it's true that
Speaker 1: like the Prussians had a great military which then got
Speaker 1: its butt kicked by Napoleon and they had to completely
Speaker 1: redesign it, and by the time eighteen seventy came around,
Speaker 1: they were extremely dominant on the battlefield be against the French.
Speaker 1: Number One, he's crediting the military reforms of like tactics
Speaker 1: and strategy and ignoring things like Krupp inventing an entirely
Speaker 1: new kind of cannon that was utterly dominant on the battlefield. Um.
Speaker 1: He's also ignoring the fact that this Prussian army. Um,
Speaker 1: he's saying, like the US is the only army that
Speaker 1: does the same thing over and over again and fails
Speaker 1: and keeps on eating. Well, the Prussian Army is the
Speaker 1: army the Germans took into battle in World War One
Speaker 1: and two and spoilers, they didn't learn enough from either
Speaker 1: of those wars. Um. He also talks about how like
Speaker 1: the French had their you know, crapping in the mess
Speaker 1: hit moment in eighteen seventy after the Franco Prussian War,
Speaker 1: and they changed their army and it was much better. Like, well,
Speaker 1: they didn't win World War One, like they were on
Speaker 1: the side that one, but if it had been them
Speaker 1: against Germany, they would have gotten fucking steamrolled. Like it
Speaker 1: was not going well for them for quite a while,
Speaker 1: and they lost a whole generation of young men. So
Speaker 1: maybe and and again this is like what he's saying
Speaker 1: is basically, we because we're using so constantly. The reason
Speaker 1: that we're losing is not because we are picking bad conflicts.
Speaker 1: It's not because we're picking to engage in conflicts when
Speaker 1: we shouldn't at all be engaging in conflicts. It is
Speaker 1: not because we use military force in like a fundamentally
Speaker 1: venal and corrupt way in order to benefit a small
Speaker 1: cabal of military industrial corporations. It's because we we don't
Speaker 1: have good battle doctrine, and that's why we're not winning
Speaker 1: in these conflicts, which ignores everything about the reality of
Speaker 1: the conflicts that like he's talking about, Like, the problem
Speaker 1: is not a lack of combat dominance, which is is
Speaker 1: what you were seeing with like the Prussians fighting Napoleon.
Speaker 1: It's what you were seeing with the French fighting the
Speaker 1: Germans in eighteen seventy, right, Like in those cases, the
Speaker 1: Prussians had a massive failure of combat dominance against the French,
Speaker 1: and the French had a massive failure in combat against
Speaker 1: the Germans. Their doctrine was just worse. Um Us soldiers
Speaker 1: are great at getting into gunfights and great at winning
Speaker 1: gun fights. The problem is not a lack of combat ability.
Speaker 1: The problem is that they're no way to win the
Speaker 1: conflicts that we're getting into. They are unwinnable wars that
Speaker 1: were never things that like, no amount of change in
Speaker 1: doctrine would have made Afghanistan a success because it was
Speaker 1: a stupid war. Like it's like if if that were true,
Speaker 1: like coin would have worked and co Yeah no, like
Speaker 1: Colt yeah yeah, just complete total and utter failure, like
Speaker 1: enormous numbers of people dead, enormous numbers of like people
Speaker 1: traumatized for generations, and the U S still just lost
Speaker 1: both wars, yeah, and and and and if you really
Speaker 1: dig into Lynd and others like him, what they're actually
Speaker 1: saying when they say that, like we need to reform
Speaker 1: like the way the military works with new battle doctorments.
Speaker 1: We need to be killing even more people. We just
Speaker 1: didn't kill enough in Vietnam, like the five million we
Speaker 1: bombed or so that wasn't enough people like that. That's
Speaker 1: the reform that he's really talking about. UM. And Lynd
Speaker 1: one of those people who like rants about the like
Speaker 1: the the the El Salvadorian option. UM, I'm sure he does.
Speaker 1: I don't know exactly what he said about Al Salvador.
Speaker 1: He's a fascinating kind of fascist. Um. He is absolutely
Speaker 1: a fascist. He was the director of the Center for
Speaker 1: Cultural Conservatism at the Free Congress Foundation UM. He wrote
Speaker 1: a or he helped to popularize a Declaration of Cultural
Speaker 1: Independence by Cultural Conservatives UM, which is like these there's
Speaker 1: a lot of the seeds of the ship that we're
Speaker 1: seeing today, right that like American culture institutions are being
Speaker 1: collapsed because of like liberal decadence and conservatives. Cultural conservatives
Speaker 1: should separate themselves and like set up parallel institutions where
Speaker 1: Bannon comes in. And that's where Bannon comes in. That
Speaker 1: where like fucking Andrew Torba and gab come and they
Speaker 1: all advocate this ship. Yeah, because they're all they all
Speaker 1: adhere to that kind of uh yeah, like politics has
Speaker 1: culture and there's downstream. Yeah, And there's some weird differences
Speaker 1: with Lynd Like he's a huge mass transit and urban
Speaker 1: rail advocate, which I guess I agree with him. Fine,
Speaker 1: once in a while, a bad person does have a
Speaker 1: good opinion. He loves he loves him some fucking city
Speaker 1: trains and stuff. Um, but he's also he was a
Speaker 1: major factor. He was one of the earliest, like prominent
Speaker 1: conservatives who was like yelling about cultural Marxism and kind
Speaker 1: of the modern political period. I mean that makes sense
Speaker 1: because he was really into it. Sounds like he's real
Speaker 1: into metapolitics. So yeah, that's super in the metapolis. Yeah,
Speaker 1: So like all of this stuff makes a whole lot
Speaker 1: of sense if you're yeah, if you're if you know what,
Speaker 1: if you know what meta politics are, it's also kind
Speaker 1: of explains how he developed the different generations of warfare
Speaker 1: using it through a framework of metal politics actually really
Speaker 1: makes that fit if you believe, like Breitbart famously stated
Speaker 1: that like politics is downstream from culture, and if you
Speaker 1: also believe what Claus I think it was class Wits
Speaker 1: that said that, like war is politics by other means
Speaker 1: than like you can make cultural can cause wars, and like, yeah,
Speaker 1: like that's a lot like kind of I think the
Speaker 1: thought process behind n Yeah, because this this really defines
Speaker 1: what he means by fourth generation warfare of war being
Speaker 1: handed out typically by the culture, instead of having it
Speaker 1: be abstracted to be like people marching towards each other
Speaker 1: with guns. Because he's, he's, he's, he's putting the he's
Speaker 1: putting the culture kind of back into it. Yeah, and
Speaker 1: he and he's and he's and and obviously culture was
Speaker 1: never not a factor, of course, not like every single
Speaker 1: war is, but a major factor, like all of this
Speaker 1: ship he talks about is being characters to go. Fourth
Speaker 1: generation warfare has been happening in one way or another
Speaker 1: for thousands of years. But it's it's not that these
Speaker 1: things are done in like temporal succession. It's like because
Speaker 1: because like a lot of the stuff that makes up
Speaker 1: fourth generation warfare, like the more like guerrilla warfare aspects,
Speaker 1: come way before, people with guns marching towards each other,
Speaker 1: Africans doing that to Alexander, the goddamn group for the
Speaker 1: Birth of Christ. A lot of a lot of this
Speaker 1: fourth gend stuff is actually like kind of more similar
Speaker 1: to what original warfare probably would have been. Like yeah,
Speaker 1: which I think, yeah, I think to to his credit,
Speaker 1: I think he does actually recognize that at some point
Speaker 1: in his writing now and and and the thing about
Speaker 1: this is is, well, we can pick at it, and
Speaker 1: I think there's a lot that's ridiculous in his attitude.
Speaker 1: It's it's close enough to the way that reality works
Speaker 1: that if you're going, if you're thinking about conflict in
Speaker 1: this framework, you can be very successful. It's not like
Speaker 1: an It's inaccurate in some ways because he's he is
Speaker 1: wrongly describing why certain things work. I think is a
Speaker 1: lot of what he's doing. And he's wrong about winning wars.
Speaker 1: I'll say that, um, if if the American military were
Speaker 1: to make the fucking lend the Secretary of Defense and
Speaker 1: give him total power, like he would keep on losing
Speaker 1: wars as hard as we've been losing wars for everyone
Speaker 1: listening to this is lifetime um. But in a cultural sense,
Speaker 1: the kind of culture jamming, which is a term we'll
Speaker 1: talk about more in the future, and but the kind
Speaker 1: of like the propaganda arms and stuff in order to
Speaker 1: the the the the media warfare in order to either
Speaker 1: insight or justify real conflict or or and this is
Speaker 1: one of the areas in which they have been really
Speaker 1: effective to alter the dimension, to alter how internationally a
Speaker 1: conflict is responded to. One of the big successes of
Speaker 1: people like this has been effectively eliminating any kind of
Speaker 1: left wing support for liberatory movements in the Middle East, UM,
Speaker 1: for liberatory movements or for like just like what's happening
Speaker 1: in Ukraine. It's kind of like reflexive. Well, if there's uh,
Speaker 1: if there's a movement for liberation among the people of
Speaker 1: a country, it's probably the c I a like like
Speaker 1: carrying out some sort of op um. That's Lynda and
Speaker 1: his people UM and people influenced by him have been
Speaker 1: a big part of pushing that. Um, it's why Steve
Speaker 1: Bannon is in and is so friendly with like some
Speaker 1: guys on like chunks that they call themselves the left
Speaker 1: and whatnot. It's because, um, there's there's a lot of uh,
Speaker 1: there's a lot of ties there, and that is an
Speaker 1: area in which they've been successful because international support really matters. Um,
Speaker 1: you know, it's it's it's uh. And I think like
Speaker 1: the death of internationalism is one of the bigger successes
Speaker 1: that like these these thinkers have kind of had. But yeah,
Speaker 1: I don't know. That's that's that's that's a chunk of
Speaker 1: what I had to say. You guys want to know
Speaker 1: more about William S. Lynn because he's I certainly want
Speaker 1: to learn more about William William S Lynd cultural conservative,
Speaker 1: right big on the traditional Christian values of America. You
Speaker 1: want to guess who he considers his ideal leader? Uh
Speaker 1: jfk No, the House of Hogan's all learned. He's a
Speaker 1: Prussian monarchist. Wait oh yeah, okay, everything I said politics,
Speaker 1: he's certainly int hegel and he thinks that the Prussian
Speaker 1: the Prussian monarchy was the best government there ever was
Speaker 1: and was like unfairly crushed by the rest of the
Speaker 1: world and like should have won World War One and
Speaker 1: everything would like he's he's and so he's he's very
Speaker 1: much like a conservative monarchist um and a weird kind
Speaker 1: because like, my god, dude, if you're looking at like
Speaker 1: monarchs who were like the Hogan's allern has had like
Speaker 1: in the modern era, like the first Kaiser Wilhelm was
Speaker 1: broadly competent, but like it went to ship as soon
Speaker 1: as the second and he blames all of World War
Speaker 1: One on the fucking Tsars, like it's it's very silly,
Speaker 1: Like his ideas of history are like very stupid. I
Speaker 1: have an incredibly silly theory of history based on Hagel,
Speaker 1: which is that like every everything Hagel. Briefly, for the
Speaker 1: listeners I know, do not, this is this is you know,
Speaker 1: this is this is the thing. Okay, okay, this this
Speaker 1: is this is. This is my crank theory of history
Speaker 1: based on Hagel, which is that every about forty years
Speaker 1: someone attempts to apply Hagel. Someone like takes charge of
Speaker 1: an incredibly large state and tries to use Hagel to
Speaker 1: run it, and every single time time they don't understand
Speaker 1: the dialectic and it doesn't work. So this for example,
Speaker 1: like if if you can take this as a very
Speaker 1: granul level, right you have Mao, Mao has no idea
Speaker 1: what a dialectic is. You can you can read Mao's work.
Speaker 1: He has no clue, Like he just doesn't he like
Speaker 1: he doesn't he doesn't get it. He thinks that a
Speaker 1: dialectic is when one person with a bat hits the
Speaker 1: other hits the other side, and then when you destroy
Speaker 1: the other side, the dialectic is resolved. Right like that
Speaker 1: That's not what it is, right maw Like because of this,
Speaker 1: the entire Chinese revolution just implodes. Everyone dies, it returns
Speaker 1: to capitalism. Is a complete failure, right you know. And
Speaker 1: and like a lot of the Nazis are very much
Speaker 1: into Hagel. They have again incredibly similar failures the other group.
Speaker 1: People like Lynda think is part of this is that
Speaker 1: all of the people who planned the Iraq War were
Speaker 1: like enormous Sigillian's right, but they've gotten to Hagel through
Speaker 1: this weird like they they've been doing this, they've been
Speaker 1: doing these kind of insurgency stuff and so but they're
Speaker 1: kind of insurgeny stuff was they read Mao, and you know,
Speaker 1: so that they're so they're they're they're reading Hagel, but
Speaker 1: then they're also reading Hagel through Mao and now doesn't
Speaker 1: understand what's going on either. And so when they try
Speaker 1: to apply the Hegelian dialectic and they're like, Okay, well,
Speaker 1: the end of the end of the end of history,
Speaker 1: the end of the Hegelian dialectic is the United States.
Speaker 1: We're just going to impose this on a rock and
Speaker 1: catastrophic failure. So the war listening is, do not attempt
Speaker 1: to apply Hagel. You will completely annihilate your entire political movement,
Speaker 1: like every every everything, everything you love and dream of, everything,
Speaker 1: like every ideology you've ever had. Uh, it will, it
Speaker 1: will crumble beneath you. And yeah, you will watch your
Speaker 1: cities and you watch your cities and armies burn. That's
Speaker 1: that's fine, because the last time my resistance movement, we're
Speaker 1: just gonna be postcanty and object oriented. On ontologist guys.
Speaker 1: You throw a bunch of names and I'm gonna get
Speaker 1: like eight percent of people are just what the funk
Speaker 1: am I hearing about? These dead people? The thing I
Speaker 1: actually wanted to to bring up on this is like
Speaker 1: how fourth and fifth gen are The idea of the
Speaker 1: fourth and fifth gen get applied onto like more insurrection
Speaker 1: based um, like a revolts groups. Right, you can see
Speaker 1: like groups like the Earth Liberation Fund and Animal Liberation
Speaker 1: Front kind of pick and shoes. Elements of the fourth
Speaker 1: and fifth generation were fair to kind of to see
Speaker 1: how their groups formed or were operated. Um. And even
Speaker 1: you could argue that like Ted Kazinski was like a
Speaker 1: fIF fifth generation warfare because he was completely autonomous and
Speaker 1: the actions. Let's let's introduce the idea of fifth generation
Speaker 1: because we just talked about fourth generation warfare, which was
Speaker 1: Lynn's idea. Fifth generation warfare is a concept that has
Speaker 1: come up I believe Daniel Abbott is his name, um.
Speaker 1: And the idea was that like it's a new type
Speaker 1: of warfare that like characterizes a lot of conflicts in
Speaker 1: the modern era where almost everything is non kinetic um,
Speaker 1: but it is still military action UM, so military social engineering,
Speaker 1: misinformation sorry, or attacks not just like decentralized, but like
Speaker 1: states actually using um organized and often fighting non state
Speaker 1: actors who are using kind of the same thing. Yeah. Yeah,
Speaker 1: and this in a lot of this would involve artificial intelligence,
Speaker 1: fully autonomous systems, systems not just botan nets, but like
Speaker 1: algorithms that can like handle a lot of the quote
Speaker 1: unquote fighting. Um william S Lynd hates the idea of
Speaker 1: fourth generation, fifth generation warfare because he's a narcissist and
Speaker 1: he doesn't like anyone using the idea every head of
Speaker 1: the dialectic it keeps going. So what I was what
Speaker 1: I was thinking, is like, is like a lot of
Speaker 1: you can apply fifth generation warfare to like these types
Speaker 1: of groups who are mostly like they do some they
Speaker 1: do some fourth gent tactics in terms of like terrorism, right,
Speaker 1: Like they try to make political statements through terrorism and
Speaker 1: have terrorism an influential thing, but they're demands like you
Speaker 1: rarely like fifth generation stuff has not been around a
Speaker 1: long enough and no one's really been super successful at
Speaker 1: it in the past enough time for us like to
Speaker 1: like recognize that, right, because you can look at a
Speaker 1: lot of a lot of like an instructionary type stuff
Speaker 1: around like the Again, I'm just gonna use the Earth
Speaker 1: Liberation Front as an example of like a group that
Speaker 1: attempted kind of these types of tactics, Um, and they
Speaker 1: may have succeeded in the physical sense, but they did
Speaker 1: not succeed in like the cultural sense. Really, um so
Speaker 1: trying to like look at these types of things and
Speaker 1: how they relate to like specific you know, if you're
Speaker 1: gonna use like the take Kazinski example, same thing, except
Speaker 1: he's not a group. He's just one person, which is
Speaker 1: kind of more of a fifth gen thinks he's like
Speaker 1: fully autonomous, whereas I think, um, you know, stuff like
Speaker 1: the e l F tried to have that kind of
Speaker 1: militant group dynamic that is more similar to fourth generation warfare.
Speaker 1: So it's like this picking and choosing of like trying
Speaker 1: to trying to do physical action than trying to do
Speaker 1: cultural action, and it's it's not like the things that
Speaker 1: have succeeded. Let's take for instance, some the defend the
Speaker 1: Cascadian forest thing who just got just got um this
Speaker 1: is the specific action they were working on to protect
Speaker 1: a specific chunk of forest. H The Judge of approved
Speaker 1: their approve their motion because they were they actually were
Speaker 1: successful because they did not form this militant thing right now,
Speaker 1: they were just doing the cultural and it actually really succeeded.
Speaker 1: Um as opposed to just you know, burning down buildings
Speaker 1: and stuff to try to get your action forward. So
Speaker 1: just trying to look at like examples of when when
Speaker 1: like the goal is kind of the same and certain
Speaker 1: times succeed, certain certain types don't. How that might influence
Speaker 1: like organizing and how to selectively use like insurrection, but
Speaker 1: have it not be like a default mode for like
Speaker 1: always your group is better if it's in surrectorary m Yeah,
Speaker 1: And I one of the things that does characterize that
Speaker 1: I think is useful if we're because again I have
Speaker 1: my criticisms of the value of any of these like
Speaker 1: phrases as kind of discreete concepts. But one of the
Speaker 1: things that I think is useful about the concept of
Speaker 1: fifth generation warfare that does talk about something that is
Speaker 1: legitimately new to conflict that has not really existed before
Speaker 1: before the Internet is omnipresence um that that the conflicts
Speaker 1: are not limited in geographical space or in time, and
Speaker 1: in fact is like a constant factor all around you
Speaker 1: at all times because of the way the information sphere
Speaker 1: kind of actually functions. Um. You know, you can look
Speaker 1: at kind of like the mix of street fights and
Speaker 1: information warfare, doxing and whatnot between fascists and anti fascist
Speaker 1: for the last few years. It's omnipresent, it's always going
Speaker 1: on UM, and the battle space is kind of potentially everywhere,
Speaker 1: even though it's fairly rarely kinetic or physical UM. And
Speaker 1: I do think that that's an area in which, UM,
Speaker 1: it is really worth having a new term, in kind
Speaker 1: of defining a new term, because that's one of the
Speaker 1: few things I think that has legitimately changed. The Internet
Speaker 1: has made all of this stuff that's been happening for
Speaker 1: thousands of years faster UM. But the thing that it's
Speaker 1: really created that was not present before is this the
Speaker 1: this omnipresence UM. So I do think that that's really
Speaker 1: useful when Yeah, because like I would like to how
Speaker 1: conflict is different. I would like to kind of like
Speaker 1: think about like January six, within these frameworks, right of
Speaker 1: how of how disinformation and information was used relatively successfully
Speaker 1: to get a lot of people to actually move towards
Speaker 1: the more um you know, kind of backed by half
Speaker 1: the state, backed you know, not backed by well the
Speaker 1: larger majority. And yeah, how like it's a it's like
Speaker 1: a synthesis of the fourth generation of fifth generation ideas,
Speaker 1: which is why you know, there's a lot of overlap
Speaker 1: with these terms specifically, Um, but seeing how like one
Speaker 1: leads to another and it's not they're not necessarily inclusion exclusionary. Yeah,
Speaker 1: I mean it's like the result is whether they win
Speaker 1: or lose. Right, that's that's like that that's what makes
Speaker 1: it a war. Is is the is the is like
Speaker 1: you decide afterwards based on the result. Yeah, I mean
Speaker 1: it kind of. Yeah, that's certainly like how more modern
Speaker 1: wars happened, Like with Afghanistan, it wasn't so much like
Speaker 1: a clear like World War One, there's an armistice and
Speaker 1: like negotiated end of the war or in a certain
Speaker 1: date at all ends. It was a lots we haven't
Speaker 1: done that since. We haven't done that for the state,
Speaker 1: Like you know, I've never known the States to do
Speaker 1: that for a month. Because if you don't do that,
Speaker 1: you don't have to admit you lost exactly right, if
Speaker 1: you just kind of like leave and ship gets real
Speaker 1: fucked up. Um, you can just be like for one thing,
Speaker 1: you can say like if we'd stayed and spent more
Speaker 1: money on that war, we could have we could have
Speaker 1: pulled it out. Um, which is one of my like
Speaker 1: there's a lot of great criticisms of how the Biden
Speaker 1: administration handled things in Afghanistan last year, a thousand of them.
Speaker 1: But at the end of the day, it's like it
Speaker 1: was never going to be good, like it was always
Speaker 1: it was this horrible war. We were killing way too
Speaker 1: many people. Um, we weren't achieving anything. And that fact
Speaker 1: was made really clear by the fact that as soon
Speaker 1: as we pulled out our guns, um, everything collapsed. And
Speaker 1: that was always going to happen. And you can needle
Speaker 1: around the edges of how we could have, you know,
Speaker 1: better taken care of people who we had made promises
Speaker 1: to or whatever. At the end of the day, it
Speaker 1: was always going to be fucked because it was a
Speaker 1: thing we never should have done. And that's that like
Speaker 1: this idea that Lynd has that like, no, if we
Speaker 1: fix our doctrine, we have better tactical doctrine, we have
Speaker 1: better like we have. One of his big ideas is UM.
Speaker 1: He came up with this concept called movement warfare that's
Speaker 1: been hugely influential in the way the Marine Corps functions. UM.
Speaker 1: And the idea behind movement warfare is like, you should
Speaker 1: always have a bias towards action, and Lynda is very consciously, UM,
Speaker 1: trying to make this basically the evolution of of a
Speaker 1: German tactic called alf drugs tactic, which is like individual
Speaker 1: unit tactics basically. So it's like midway through World War One,
Speaker 1: the Germans start to realize, like, all these mass wave
Speaker 1: human charges aren't working great, um, and we should probably
Speaker 1: like figure out a way to get around these defenses.
Speaker 1: So they start training what are kind of the prototype
Speaker 1: of special forces, these like stormtroopers whose job is to
Speaker 1: like sneak in and not be seen and jump into
Speaker 1: the trenches and like you know, fucking axes and clubs
Speaker 1: and automatic handguns and um, fight in a way that
Speaker 1: like soldiers had not really fought in a long time.
Speaker 1: A lot of it was like may l a. It
Speaker 1: was this really and there were a lot of technical things,
Speaker 1: how to get around barbed wire, how to not be seen,
Speaker 1: how to like deal with machine gun nests, um. And
Speaker 1: one of the keys to it was like the German
Speaker 1: started to retrain their soldiers to were like you have
Speaker 1: to have like these individual units of five and ten
Speaker 1: men have to have like total autonomy, and then unit
Speaker 1: commanders have to have autonomy and they need to be
Speaker 1: will able to like we'll tell them we need you
Speaker 1: to be in this this place at this point in time.
Speaker 1: But it's up to you to figure out how to
Speaker 1: do that, because if you're if you've got this one
Speaker 1: guy who's three miles back giving the commands, everyone's just
Speaker 1: gonna get mowed down by machine gun fire. Needs to
Speaker 1: be more nimble UM. And that's part of why in
Speaker 1: World War One, in in World War Two, because the
Speaker 1: rest of the people fighting the Germans, like even the US,
Speaker 1: had not caught up to this kind of battle doctrine
Speaker 1: by the time World War Two was over um to
Speaker 1: the extent that the Germans had, And it's part of
Speaker 1: why there's such a lopsided casualty ratio in favor of
Speaker 1: the Germans in that war is they had what is
Speaker 1: very close to because all modern combat tactics are based
Speaker 1: on what the Germans started doing at the end of
Speaker 1: World War One UM and had really like nailed down
Speaker 1: to a science in World War two. UM And Lynda
Speaker 1: is saying that, like we need to extend that and
Speaker 1: like that's the thing we've gotten too far away from
Speaker 1: and we need to have You need to have like
Speaker 1: this bias towards movement and this the like officers need
Speaker 1: to be super aggressive and like always pursuing these kind
Speaker 1: of kinetic options. And again, as the Marine Corps battle
Speaker 1: record will show, this is very effective when you were
Speaker 1: getting into gunfights. But when was the last time the
Speaker 1: Marine Corps was on the side of a winning war? Like, again,
Speaker 1: it doesn't we can all needle about how to make
Speaker 1: our troops better at like killing people, but at the
Speaker 1: end of the day, we're losing wars because we're getting
Speaker 1: into wars that are not winnable and that's not something
Speaker 1: you're going to fix with battle doctrine. And Lynn doesn't
Speaker 1: understand that because he's a fascist. And I think it's
Speaker 1: just like this, this is the real like weakness of
Speaker 1: their politics, which is that was like, yeah, well, like
Speaker 1: it it's they're they're they're trying. It's like they can't
Speaker 1: tell the difference between war and like they don't think
Speaker 1: there's a difference between war and politics, right, and that
Speaker 1: means that they think that there's a military solution to
Speaker 1: every political problem and it's like, no, there's not, and
Speaker 1: like this is this is how this is what is
Speaker 1: how they keep destroying themselves, right, is that they you know,
Speaker 1: like like this is what happened to the neo cons.
Speaker 1: I mean, the neo cons is sort of held on
Speaker 1: in this kind of rump shell. But it's like neo
Speaker 1: conservatism and the project. Yeah, but but it's like, you know,
Speaker 1: like they don't they don't have like like even the
Speaker 1: people who used to be their base, like aren't there
Speaker 1: base anymore? Like those those people are all moving yeah
Speaker 1: yeah yeah, And it's it's it's like maybe they could
Speaker 1: have maintained it if they hadn't just like literally blown
Speaker 1: it apart, like trying to conquer a rock. And it's
Speaker 1: like they all do this. They all eventually are like, well, okay,
Speaker 1: well we'll find a military solution to this, and it
Speaker 1: blows up in their face because it turns out that, no,
Speaker 1: you can't actually do this. I mean, I think all
Speaker 1: this indicates a general progression into the more metapolitics idea
Speaker 1: and culture as politics ideas that we're trying to solve
Speaker 1: all these political problems, like at least like locally within us.
Speaker 1: You know, we're trying to be trying to do them
Speaker 1: called trually and choosing them in selectively in other countries. Right,
Speaker 1: Because the more kind of the idea of like let's
Speaker 1: just keep entering wars, which we're also doing at the
Speaker 1: same time, only for a very very very like like
Speaker 1: very specific regions. But I mean the trend of like
Speaker 1: verst you know, like Trump's not necessarily and like Trump's
Speaker 1: not really can anio con He preferred the cultural jamming
Speaker 1: like that was, that was his preferred method, and I
Speaker 1: got him relatively far in four years. And there there's
Speaker 1: an argument that Lynde is a big person who that
Speaker 1: he learned a lot from Lynda, even though I don't
Speaker 1: think he ever read his books. All the people he
Speaker 1: surrounded him with where fans of Lynn. There's a picture
Speaker 1: of Trump and Lend together and like a copy of
Speaker 1: or at least Trump together with a copy of his book, UM,
Speaker 1: which is titled, uh the Next Conservatism UM. And I'm
Speaker 1: gonna read in a quote at this point from The
Speaker 1: American Conservative, which Lynde has written for, that describes this
Speaker 1: book because it's it's uh useful. Um The Next Conservatism
Speaker 1: offers a comprehensive agenda of what Lyndon way Rich, who's
Speaker 1: his co author on this call a cultural called cultural conservatism.
Speaker 1: While the book aims higher than mere policy, the specifics
Speaker 1: mentioned are Trumpian reductions in legal and illegal immigration in America,
Speaker 1: first trade policy, and robust investments and domestic infrastructure, particularly
Speaker 1: street cars and trains in a less Trumpi in Vain.
Speaker 1: It also promotes homeschooling and incorporates some ideas of from
Speaker 1: the New Urbanism as part of a broader program called
Speaker 1: retro Culture. Of its connection with Trump, lynd says the
Speaker 1: book runs parallel to what he has been saying, but
Speaker 1: he doubts the billionaire's familiarity with its more philosophical ideas.
Speaker 1: Now here's the part that is going to be really unsettling,
Speaker 1: and this, I think is what lynd may actually be
Speaker 1: going for, rather than any kind of reform in the
Speaker 1: military to improve its ability to win foreign wars. Quote.
Speaker 1: In nineteen four an article appeared in the Marine Corps
Speaker 1: Gazette by Lynde and two of the authors of the
Speaker 1: nineteen eighty nine piece, where he introduced the concept of
Speaker 1: fourth generation warfare. It ended on a dire note. The
Speaker 1: point is not merely that America's armed forces will find
Speaker 1: themselves facing non nation state conflicts and forces overseas. The
Speaker 1: point is that the same conflicts are coming year the
Speaker 1: next real war we fight is likely to be on
Speaker 1: American soil. So that's what's going on here, Like, and
Speaker 1: that's the thing where biased towards action and increased killing power.
Speaker 1: If all you're really trying to do is murder everyone
Speaker 1: who disagrees with you using the military very quickly, well
Speaker 1: that might work for you. People should know about this.
Speaker 1: He has a fucking fiction book called Victoria, which actually
Speaker 1: if you go to like TV tropes, um, the there's
Speaker 1: a TV it's not just TV tropes anymore, but like
Speaker 1: there's a trope page from my book After the Revolution,
Speaker 1: and it's directly compared to Victoria, as like they're the
Speaker 1: opposites of each other, because Victoria is like a book
Speaker 1: about a civil war in the US that these like
Speaker 1: weird fascist uh like anarchists win, and like it's, uh,
Speaker 1: it's pretty fucked up. Like the problem is that like
Speaker 1: like like all of these like the Northwest is controlled
Speaker 1: by like environmentalists like leaders who get like eaten by
Speaker 1: these animals like wolves that they reintroduced to the to
Speaker 1: the society, and like California is so feminist that it's
Speaker 1: illegal to have sex and make babies, um, and the
Speaker 1: South fails because it's it's too multicultural, um And yeah,
Speaker 1: like it's it's all so the person who wins the
Speaker 1: war is like the governor of Maine who's a retro
Speaker 1: culture practitioner um and considers himself a subject of the kaiser.
Speaker 1: I maybe getting a couple of details wrong, but not
Speaker 1: that part I know. But it's it's a fucking nuts
Speaker 1: nuts So I've only read like little bits of it.
Speaker 1: Maybe one day I'll get through the whole thing. But
Speaker 1: it's that's that's the thing with all with all of
Speaker 1: these like cultural gamers, Like they try to put on
Speaker 1: like war aesthetics, but all of them are the nerdiest
Speaker 1: fuckers he'll ever. He's so stupid and I like he's
Speaker 1: wi all these guys are so they're so nerdy, all
Speaker 1: of them. Yeah, and like lynd everything about him makes
Speaker 1: sense when you understand that his primary guiding directive is
Speaker 1: anger over the fact that there's no longer a kaiser Um.
Speaker 1: He's a little but also like again, he was not
Speaker 1: lying about there's a picture of like Trump of this
Speaker 1: fucking book. He's not lying that Like fucking everybody who
Speaker 1: was like pilled in that White House knew about Lynn's
Speaker 1: ideas and have been He's been hugely influential, and not
Speaker 1: just among like the American right. His books have been
Speaker 1: found in like al Qaeda hideouts and ship like. He
Speaker 1: makes sense though that that that that like all of
Speaker 1: all of that really tracks is because yeah, like the
Speaker 1: barrier between like terrorist action as a part of fourth
Speaker 1: generation and in some ways fifth generation warfare and then
Speaker 1: the type of like culture jamming, those things go hand
Speaker 1: in hand like that is like that is the goal
Speaker 1: of it is to make it work that way. So
Speaker 1: that doesn't surprise me that those types of terrorist groups
Speaker 1: would be reading its books for advice so or for
Speaker 1: like to like figure out how the other side thinks. Alright, well,
Speaker 1: that's probably enough talking about william S lind for today
Speaker 1: and and cultural and the fourth generation, we'll talk. There's
Speaker 1: a lot to dig into about how these ideas have
Speaker 1: influenced chunks of the right, and now they're currently still
Speaker 1: being used for like these omnipresent conflicts that are going
Speaker 1: on right now. And again I do think particularly the
Speaker 1: idea of omnipresence is really useful for understanding modern conflict.
Speaker 1: I would I would go as far as to say,
Speaker 1: like crucial um so this is necessary background information to
Speaker 1: people to have, for people to have for like some
Speaker 1: of the other ship. We're going to be continuing to
Speaker 1: talk in this about in this series as we you know,
Speaker 1: as we talk more about kind of kinetic conflicts or
Speaker 1: at least building towards kinetic conflicts. Um. But yeah, I
Speaker 1: think this is this is a useful kind of grounding.
Speaker 1: And now I'm going to send Chris and Garrison off
Speaker 1: to write an episode explaining who Hegel is and everything
Speaker 1: he believed. I Yeah, it's gonna be great. You're gonna
Speaker 1: You're gonna hear you. You will watch me go mad
Speaker 1: in real time. It's gonna be great. Yeah. The other
Speaker 1: option is I can just read the Wikipedia page for
Speaker 1: Hegel with like a really offensive German accent. That's better
Speaker 1: than that, Actually better. I'm gonna go to I promise
Speaker 1: you one thing, which is that I will wind up
Speaker 1: either Russian or Australian by the end. I can't stop
Speaker 1: that drift when I whenever I start doing you know,
Speaker 1: I am a good German. Yeah, my name is Mr Hegel.
Speaker 1: The absolute that happen Cool Zone Media. We're gonna stop
Speaker 1: that right now. I probably should. It could Happen Here
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