Supervisor Elham AbolFateh
Editor in Chief Mohamed Wadie

On Fifth Generation of Wars


Tue 16 Apr 2019 | 06:02 AM
Yassmine Elsayed

By : Dr. AbdelHak Azzouzi

President and Founder of Moroccan Strategic and International Studies

 

Across history, there are five generations of war. Those reflect how humans have developed, countries were built and international system was set.

The first generation among those started in 1803 throughout 1815, where wars were basically counting on men power. Among examples is Napoleon war, where the strength of an army was estimated according to its number of personnels. Worth noting that Napoleon wars stand for the wars which happened in Europe during Napoleon rule in france.

Those wars were partial extension to the revolutionary wars triggered by the French revolution, which lasted throughout the first French empire. It started right after a war was declared between Britain and France, following accusations of violating the Treaty of Amiens, and ended on July 18th, 1815 when Napoleon was defeated, and the second Paris treaty was signed.

The second generation of wars was influenced by the industrial revolution, and the emergence of what strategists call the wars of guns and fire. The first world war is the best example of this. Then came the third generation, constituting the rapid wars, just like the victory of Germany over France in 1940; after which the guerrilla wars emerged and lasted throughout the cold war. Among the examples is the vietnam rebel movement. Those are the fourth generation and indeed they are non traditional wars. Worth noting that

the Vietnam War or the Second Indochina War was in the form of a dispute between the Democratic Republic of Vietnam (North Vietnam) With the FLN Against the Republic of Vietnam (South Vietnam) with its allies (including the United States) and lasted between November 1, 1955 to April 30, 1975. In 1957, the Viet Minh's forces in the south began to rebel against the Dime government. They were known as the Viet Cong. In 1959, North Vietnam announced its support for this group and ordered it to wage a full-scale fighting against its government. In 1960, the rebels formed the National Liberation Front, which was entrusted with the task of leading the revolution.

The fifth generation is constituting the contemporary wars, which combines various components of traditional and non-conventional wars. Perhaps the most important of these lies in electronic warfare.

I am writing these words to warn of what some countries in the Arab region are doing. In particular, I mean Iran, which is launching wars in Lebanon, Yemen and Iraq, using military and non-military resources, both governmental and non-governmental. These are dangerous moves that undermine the security of those countries and negatively affect their lives. Iran mobilizes sects sects to reach the targets through whatever means, and sometimes in invisible ways. In those wars, Iran tend to use tools that were not used in traditional wars.

The current determinants of the type of wars are radically changing from what we used to see, and what was believed by the classical strategists of wars like the old Chinese Sun Tzu or the Prussian General Carl von Clausvette, who regarded the war as a conflict between two eminentists but on wider scale, and eventually concluded that the war is an act of violence aims at forcing the opponent to cope by an imposed will. "Violence is the mean, the end is the imposition of a will on the opponent, meaning that the purpose of any military action is to defeat the enemy or disarm. He was ironically commenting on those who say that blood can be avoided in wars. He said: “Don’t talk about leaders who win without shedding blood”.

Today, electronic attacks can go beyond the horrors of classical warfare and can cause casualties and serious losses. This was reflected in the fourth part of hardcore movies ‘Die Hard 4’, or as known in North America ‘Live free or Die Hard’ where cop John McLean (Bruce Willis) is in a fierce war with a new type of cyber attack that starts to disrupt traffic lights causing a traffic jam before attacking network systems that control infrastructure of the United States, where the attack has placed the country in a perfect paralysis state.