Matt Wretchard at the Belmont Club has a great post on The Hunt for Ayman al-Zawahri. He helpfully recaps a lot of the news and then draws some insightful conclusions:
Even if Zawahri is not captured, the historical military invulnerability of tribal regions on Pakistan's Northwest frontier may have ended forever. Operation Mountain Storm's lethal marriage of mobility, persistent overhead surveillance and networked weapons means that small teams of men can operate effectively over wide areas -- essentially turning the tables on tribal fighters. Never again can terrorist chieftains like Osama Bin Laden invest large sums of money in caves and mountain fortresses on the assumption of their inviolability. The mud forts and honeycomb of caves, their ammunition magazines and hundreds of fighters -- representing an expenditure of terrorist millions -- is going up in smoke.
The real significance of ongoing operations in South Waziristan may be as a template for similar operations in the near future. The same principles used in Mountain Storm can be applied in the open spaces of the Sahara, the Syrian desert or the Zagros mountains deep in Iran. It isn't just the Al Qaeda that evolve. So do their foes.
I recently read a great paper on fourth generation warfare that was written way back in 1989, but is still extremely relevant and accurate today regarding the enemy we face. That paper chronicles first, second, and third generation warfare and points out that often tactics which were used in one generation become a hinderance in the next. A military has to evolve to continue to effectively wage war in successive generations.
When reading that paper it struck me how different "fourth generation" warfare is from the other three. It really makes one worry about how we'll be able to effectively deal with the enemy we face, even though no one else can hold a candle to the U.S. in conventional warfare. Judging by Wretchard's comments, it seems that Rumsfeld really is standing up to meet the challenge. All along Rumsfeld has said he needs to transform the military to effectively wage a "fourth-generation" war, and we seem to be making real progress. God bless him.
Saturday, March 20, 2004
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(italics mine)
Surely the point of that though is that 'conventional' war is no longer the way to do war effectively though?