FEATURE
Fifth-Generation War
Warfare versus the nonstate
by LtCol Stanton S. Coerr, USMCR
T
he United States is what Niall Ferguson calls an
“empire-State,”1 depending upon grand strategy
in projecting both force and ideas. American ex-
port of force has been based on planning for a
conflict that will be big, kinetic, morally crisp, statist, and
winnable—the World Wars I and II (WWI and II) model of
wars. In reality, our next conflict could well be small, morally
confusing, and idea centered, and could end in an ambigu-
ous stalemate, combining all of the worst ends of Saigon,
Mogadishu, 11 September 2001 (9/11), and Baghdad. At
the upper bound of conflict, Americans know how to win
air-land-sea battles with large conventional forces. At the
lower bound of conflict, counterinsurgency and irregular
warfare experts2 deftly explain small, discrete revolutions in
the jungle or the urban wasteland; put causes to the reasons
men rebel; and think about how to stop the next Marxist or
Islamic irregulars.
Yet as the primacy of other “states” recedes, and we stand
nearly alone, into the vacuum will step irrational actors,
united by a radical core belief in Islam. We are prepared at
the top and bottom of conflict, but not in the seam between
them. It is this seam in which the next actors will grow. The
rising global jihad, the insurgency that is the “vehicle of the
coward,”3 presents the first such set of actors, and the old
rules of warfare will not apply.
First, America’s fifth-generation warfare (5GW) irregular
opponent will not have a traditional great man leader (who
could be killed) or a field army (which could be destroyed)
Photo: We must ensure that our unit leaders are capable of dealing with the conflicts that fall between major theater war and counterin-
surgency. (Photo by Cpl Daniel J. Redding.)
Marine Corps Gazette • January 20 09
as its center of gravity. It will not have even the centers of
gravity, such as pride or religious fervor, that theorist William
S. Lind describes. As radical Islam fractures—and becomes
more dangerous—similar, associated, or even dispassionate
fellow traveler movements will observe and exploit al-Qaeda’s
success in becoming more powerful by losing mass. This
enemy will not have centers of gravity at all.
Second, the accelerating chaos of the Third and Fourth
Worlds, shifting transnational alliances, and the increasing
interest of transnational actors in fomenting and supporting
chaos will lead to the end of the state as prime mover and re-
dresser of grievance, putting paid to Lind’s “crisis of legiti-
On the Web
Read more about Lind 4GW at www.mca-marines.org/gazette/5GW.
>LtCol Coerr is a Cobra pilot and forward
air controller. He has deployed with a Ma-
rine attack squadron, a rifle battalion, and
an air/naval gunfire liaison company (AN-
GLICO). LtCol Coerr was a liaison to the 1
Royal Irish Battle Group during OIF I. He is
currently assigned to the Aviation Depart-
ment, HQMC. LtCol Coerr assumes com-
mand of 4th ANGLICO in January.
www.mca-marines.org/gazette 63
FEATURE

macy of the State.”4 Islam has no

state and is the stronger for it.
America is the ultimate expression
of the state,5 and as 4GW moves
to 5GW, we may be the weaker
force.
Third, and because of reasons
one and two, success in this type
of warfare will vary inversely with
military force. As the state de-
clines, unitary actors will be less
powerful as they use military an-
swers to political questions. We
will not be able to kill our way to
victory.
Radical Islam is not a problem
that can be solved. It is not a thing
that can be destroyed. It is not an
army that can be outmaneuvered.
5GW fighters will win by stale-
mate, because ideological or mili-
tary stalemate, such as that on the
streets of Baghdad or in the
madrasas in Peshawar or in the
slums outside Paris, points up the
impotence of secular military Figure 1.
might. A rifle is no match for an
idea. These fighters win by not losing, while we lose by not that atom are electrons, orbiting around a nucleus, that do
winning. not have positions but probabilities of positions. Though
Fighting this opponent requires us, as Marines, to do two bound by a force, they move through valences, closer to and
things: farther away from that center, depending on energy states.
• Prepare for 5GW.6 The electrons closer in have more energy, and as they lose
• Think of conflict itself in a different way, not by coming energy they move farther away into empty atomic space. In
up with different answers but by reframing the questions. one stroke, quantum mechanics married the observable with
Our new model will be QTW—the Quantum Theory of the unknowable, the measurable with the imagined, and the
War. traditional, rational, and observed with the bizarre, unimag-
ined, and unprovable.

“Real revolutions . . . don’t just pro-
vide a new answer, they change the
very questions being asked.”
—Caitlin Flanagan7
The Model: Quantum Mechanics
In the early- to mid-1900s, groundbreaking research on
the structure of the atom yielded quantum theory,8 (see Fig-
ure 1) which discarded linear thinking based on empiricism
alone. Giants of science—Werner Heisenberg, Niels Bohr,
Albert Einstein, Erwin Schrodinger, Kurt Godel—were deal-
ing with issues so complex that they invented not just new
answers but new questions. Quantum physics asserts that the
atom is almost an idea rather than an object, and that within
5GW: Background
The first generation of war arose from the first generation
of the state as the coherent governing entity and describes an
arc of regimented, linear combat beginning from the Romans
at Cannae and Zama, pausing at the formalizing of the state
in the 1648 Treaty of Westphalia, and accelerating the killing
up to and through the horrors of the American Civil War.9
The second, attritionist generation of war, began as man re-
alized what the state, massed and determined, could do—
the horrors of World War I trench warfare and a stubborn
Prussian insistence on demanding an orderly battlefield im-
posed on chaos. If battle wasn’t organized, armies could be.
(See Figure 2.)
The third generation of war began at the point where the
British Empire’s fall intersected10 with America’s rise from
power to empire and corresponds directly with a rise in the
mechanization of war. Conflict moved from up-close murder
to distant engagements with hardware, and the raw violence

64 www.mca-marines.org/gazette Marine Corps Gazette • January 20 09


Figure 2.
of war decreased in direct proportion to the beyond-visual-
range externalization of violence. With its roots in World
War I, this generation carried Western armies through
DESERT STORM, emerging from German staff officers’ clear-
eyed views of the chaotic battlefield and a concomitant will-
ingness to embrace chaos and substitute maneuver for men
marching into the bullets. This third generation, with its em-
phasis on surfaces and gaps and on speed, tempo, shock, and
the independent action of young officers, is the cradle of mil-
itary thinking from which today’s American officers were
raised.11 This set of ideas meshed nicely with Huntington’s
ideas on the progression of war—from an emperor’s acting to
expand kingdoms to states’ acting in raw national interest.
As the state grew more nimble, so did its backbone of mili-
tary leadership.
In the midst of this third generation, and himself a prod-
uct of it, arose Air Force theorist Col John Boyd, a startlingly
original thinker on war and vectors of force. Boyd was tan-
gential to the stepwise, progressive, chronological views of
everyone else, and his ideas crosscut these generations, di-
viding war into Napoleonic attrition (a bin into which he
lumps big wars, everything from WW I to nuclear conflict);
maneuver warfare focused on speed, shock, and tempo (from
the Mongols to Stonewall Jackson to GEN Hans Guderian);
and ending with moral war, starting with Sun Tzu and arc-
ing to modern insurgency.12 Boyd viewed military force,
though interesting, as simply one node (a physical one),
which along with mental and moral nodes, creates a web of
power centers that must be interwoven, exploited by Amer-
ican forces, and denied to opponents.13 Samuel Huntington
Marine Corps Gazette • January 20 09
looms above both Boyd and Lind
and applies such operational the-
ory to the state level. Now states
do not fight for land and treasure,
but rather small groups fight for
ideas.14
Operation IRAQI FREEDOM
(OIF) was the warfighting segue
into 4GW, which intersects with
Posen’s view of America’s fourth
new phase of national policy, ad-
justing from our orientation, to
full-scale war with the Soviets.
The 4GW, the generation in
which we are now, is a dynamic,
frightening, freewheeling type of
360-degree violence, with centers
of gravity unlike any to which the
American military has trained. It
is driven by and motivated by the
rise of radical Islam as an ideolog-
ical counterweight to what retired
Marine and professor Dr. Macku-
bin Owens calls American
“benevolent primacy.”
5GW: The Fight
While Americans focus on winning battles, our opponent
will be focused on winning wars. The threats he will present
will be “the marriage of instability and initiative,” not stand-
ing and fighting but in projecting “the smallest force at the
quickest time at the farthest place.”15 Such a place will not
be a battlefield of our choosing; such a force will not be an
infantry squad, or an airplane, or a ship. The weapon will
not be a club but a stiletto. The battlefield will be something
strange—cyberspace, or the Cleveland water supply, or Wall
Street’s banking systems, or YouTube. The mission will be
instilling fear, and it will succeed.
The lessons of the last two theater wars in Iraq are the
wrong ones. Our next opponent will have watched and qui-
etly learned the lessons of both Osama bin Laden and Saddam
Hussein (the “only jerk stupid enough to go toe-to-toe with
us”16) and will not strike into the teeth of the behemoth em-
pire-state with conventional force. It will strike where we are
weakest, remain in the shadows, and promote chaos. We will
be attacked not with a club but with a stiletto. (See Figure 3.)
Centers of Gravity in the Forever War
The Third and Fourth Worlds, those countries far from
the means of commerce and which Dr. Jeffrey Sachs defines
as the most likely to slip,17 create a matrix in which the 5GW
will grow. These “nonintegrating”18 regions are characterized
by shifting (or ignored) borders, diaspora of the dispossessed,
growing poverty, lack of state control, and unrelieved depri-
vation of the common man. The emerging enemy does not
need the support of one population. He is what LtCol Frank
www.mca-marines.org/gazette 65
FEATURE

G. Hoffman, USMCR(Ret) calls

a “transdimensional actor”19—not
local but global, not tribal but
transnational or supranational,
not focused on near-term success
but on long-term victory. The
world is not necessarily moving
toward al-Qaeda but toward the
idea of al-Qaeda and away from
the United States and her ideals.
This is a distinction without a dif-
ference. There is now somewhere
for the angry, alienated underclass,
anywhere in the world, to turn.
Radical Islam is a unifying force
for 5GW violence.
Military action is traditionally
predicated upon defining, attack-
ing, and overwhelming an enemy
center of gravity, and protecting
one’s own. Traditional thinking,
formed around “European-style
armed forces of the Industrial
Age”20 placed such centers of grav- *OP TELIC is the British name for OIF.
ity in the place a rational actor
would have it—a physical place, a Figure 3.
general, a military force in the
field. Destroy that thing, and you destroy the force. Dr. Milan and ideology that Americans cannot penetrate. Under QTW,
Vego of the Naval War College describes the center of gravity the 5GW irregular forces, such as those we will face, revolve
as a “source of massed strength” which “provides a locus to- around the central belief of an irregular actor, bound by the
ward which all sources of power should be directed.”21 goals of a unifying belief that we cannot see, and floating
Under QTW, for precisely Vego’s reasons, the 5GW freely and without apparent pattern, without regard to names
enemy will have no center of gravity. He will not mass, will and lines on a map.
not present a locus, and will not draw strength from a source
of nonmilitary power. To do so would give the American mil-
itary machine something to shoot at. Indeed, to him, the
“[American] military will simply be irrelevant”22 as he looks “Only three percent of the 550 mil-
for other weaknesses. His followers will not be an organized lion small arms and light weapons,
military force but will float freely around a belief or an idea—
those with the most energy the closest to the center, those worldwide, are in the hands of gov-
more disinterested farther away, gaining or shedding energy ernment, military or police.”
as they move.23 His approach may be nihilist, irrational, fun-
damentally bizarre, militarily unsound, or transparently self- —Moises Naim25
defeating. He will kill his own people, use children to
murder, strap explosives to the mentally retarded, destroy his
own “state” inside a border, remain immune to military de-
feat, and accept his own death. “We keep killing these guys, and
Loss of Monopoly on First Loyalty:24 The Decline of the they just keep coming.”
State —LTC Michael Fenzel, USA,
The fundamental characteristic of a state is a monopoly on
lethal force. However, the state as a concept lasts only as long Commander, 1/503d (Airborne),
as governing forces can answer grievances of the populace. Afghanistan,
The war in Iraq and the rise of the global jihad has intro-
duced the nonstate actors to the arena—ad hoc groups linked February 2008
to one another through webs of religion, tribe, race, family,

66 www.mca-marines.org/gazette Marine Corps Gazette • January 20 09


“We finished the fight, and we had
a few prisoners. I sent out the troops
to clean up, and I grabbed the guy
who looked most senior. I finally
asked him straight up: ‘Why are you
fighting us? What is it you want?’ He
said, ‘I don’t want anything. I’m just
here to kill Americans.’”
—Marine infantry officer, Iraq26
The fifth-generation force, currently nucleated around
radical Islam, is growing. The war in Iraq has placed before
such a protean enemy sharp targets, in the form of American
soldiers and Marines.
Bin laden has now set the world on the course to 5GW, not
by entering the conventional military contest in which he
would be outmatched, but because he has set up a counter to
Western secular thought. His is the alternative ideological sys-
tem. Yet, as states cleave along the lines of ethnicity, tribe, and
religion, “the people may not be the prize,”27 thereby upend-
ing all modern theories about fighting these types of war—in-
surgency, guerrilla campaign, revolution, irregular war—against
a formless foe. We want to promote American ideas overseas,
but the “common man is apolitical and is impervious to such
abstract ideals as democracy and representative government.”28
Figure 4.
Marine Corps Gazette • January 20 09
The common man is not, however, impervious to suffer-
ing and poverty, and it is here that the insurgencies that will
characterize 5GW will rise. As groups of people—whether
nations, states, polities, tribes, or clans—see their capabili-
ties and their expectations diverging, their frustration will
grow. The driver of anger which the Fourth World must suf-
fer is not only the raw, grinding deprivation that horrifies
Americans, it is a relative deprivation in which people see
others leaving them behind and in which their values of wel-
fare, power, and interpersonal pride are thwarted or ignored.
(See Figure 4.)
This is why insurgencies do not grow in places like Cal-
cutta, Darfur, Cite Soleil, or Abidjan, despite their grinding
hand-to-mouth poverty, but rise strongly in (relatively) af-
fluent places like Watts or San Salvador or Cape Town. There
is a larger, wealthier group at whom the desperately poor di-
rect anger. In such places will 5GW flourish, as the state fades
as a competent entity for delivering political goods to its peo-
ple. In its place will grow “big man” leaders, finding a seam;
retaining a monopoly on lethal force; providing a resonant
narrative of anger at the previous government as the agency
of final disappointment; mobilizing anger; uniting those oth-
erwise separated by religion, class, race, or tribe into an in-
surgent vector; and fomenting internal war.29
The QTW, therefore, applies. Radical Islam is not a Com-
munist pole, a Marxist line in the sand, a Meadian node, or
one of Boyd’s power centers, but rather it is scattered enti-
ties—boys, gangs, militias, soldiers, clerics—floating inco-
herently around an idea. Radical Islam is not an organized
hierarchy. It is a clearinghouse for violence.30 (See Figure 5.)
S = 1/Ve: Success Will Vary In-
versely to Exported Violence
The American focus on mili-
tary technology, winning by
killing, creates a fundamental
problem: precisely the same tech-
nology that wins conventional
wars loses unconventional ones. A
counterterrorism framework per-
petuates U.S. vulnerabilities over
the long term, as U.S. methods
will have to become more violent
to achieve continued success in
killing and capturing terrorists.31
Using our military strength
against us, Osama bin Laden
destabilized the entire Western
world, drove us into spending
what could end up as over $3 tril-
lion,32 turned both the angry
world underclass and the educated
European elite against the very
idea of American power, ground
world financial markets to a halt,
and ignited a two-front war. For
www.mca-marines.org/gazette 67
FEATURE
Figure 5.
the 5GW fighter, such terror is an inexpensive tool of insta-
bility:
[T]errorist attacks themselves do tend to be relatively cheap.
The 9/11 attacks cost between $300,000 and $500,000, and
according to UN estimates no other al-Qaeda-related attack,
including the Bali, London, Madrid and East Africa embassy
bombings, has cost more than $50,000, and most have cost a
small fraction of that.33
America reacted to 9/11 precisely as Bin Laden knew we
would and hoped we would: with a huge, public, angry, uni-
lateral, military lashing out in Muslim lands. In doing so, we
allowed Bin Laden to become the voice for the Muslim
world, to point out the presence of armed Christian armies
on Muslim holy land, and to become the cave-dwelling Arab
Muslim authentic in the face of First World mechanized
overkill. It is as if Bin Laden had read Boyd, who seems to
have foreseen the American military overreaction to the 9/11
attacks when he explains:
[You must] repeatedly and unexpectedly tie-up, divert, stretch-
out, or drain-away adversary attention and strength in order
to expose vulnerabilities and weaknesses, and (thereby) keep
pressure on and continually force adversary to adapt to many
abrupt and irregular changes when the adversary is strung-out,
or disconnected. Pull adversary apart by causing him to gen-
erate or project mental images that agree neither with the
faster tempo nor rhythm nor with the transient maneuver pat-
terns he must compete against. Enmesh adversary in a world
of uncertainty, doubt, mistrust, confusion, disorder, fear, panic
[and] chaos.34
68 www.mca-marines.org/gazette
America, in the end, does have
that preponderance of military
power that the Powell Doctrine35
prescribes. But as the 5GW
dawns, radical Islam is providing a
central idea—a unifying force—
to which those angry at American
preeminence are drawn. They
aren’t a coherent army and give us
nothing to shoot at. In the 5GW,
that may be enough to win.
Notes
1. Ferguson, Niall, The War of the
World, Penguin Group, New York, 2006,
title of Part II, beginning p. 189.
2. Chief among these are Kitson, Galula,
Vann, Halberstam, Boot, Nagl, and Fer-
tig. These men are all experts in insur-
gencies and small wars, though mostly
wars of Maoist bent and Asian and Latin
American foci. They all, however, stand
in the shadow of Dr. Bernard Fall, the
preeminent thinker on small wars, who
was killed while on patrol with the
Marines on the Street Without Joy in
Vietnam in 1967.
3. Chisholm, Dr. Donald, Naval War College, Joint Military Operations
faculty, discussion with author, 9 January 2008.
4. Lind, William S., Fleet Marine Force Manual 1A (FMFM 1A), Fourth
Generation War: The Austro-Hungarian Marine Corps, Marine Corps
Combat Development Command, Quantico, June 2007.
5. Ullman, Richard, “Redefining Security,” International Security, Vol. 8,
Summer 1983, p. 129. Ullman insists:
Defining national security merely, or even primarily, in military terms conveys
a profoundly false image of reality. [Such definition] causes States to concen-
trate on military threats and to ignore other, and perhaps more harmful dan-
gers.
6. Several scholars and thinkers have made stabs at defining 5GW. This is
because 5GW will itself be almost undefinable. William Lind provided a
definition in 2004 with a blog entitled “5GW?” See note 17 for further
discussion of Lind. Next came Tom Barnett on his weblog entitled, “My
Own Personal 5GW Dream,” available at www.thomaspmbarnett.com,
16 October 2006.
7. Flanagan, Caitlin, “A Woman’s Place,” Atlantic Monthly, January 2008,
p. 118.
8. See Figure 1. It is critically important to understand that though the
Bohr atom presented, and the QTW next to it, appear neat and orderly, like
stars orbiting a planet, they are not. The depictions created are a way for the
Western mind to organize the idea of entities’ gaining or losing energy as
they move closer to or farther from a center and are acted upon by a force.
These diagrams don’t show the position of objects; they show the proba-
bility that an object will be in a locus at a given moment. For discussion of
quantum theory, see Palle Yourgrau, A World Without Time (Basic Books,
Marine Corps Gazette • January 20 09
2004); Gary Zukav, The Dancing Wu Li Masters (Morrow, 1979); and Bill
Bryson, A Short History of Nearly Everything (Broadway, 2003).
9. Numerous works cover this topic, from the time (and works) of Cicero to
the work of Shelby Foote and Douglas Southall Freeman. Niall Ferguson and
Max Boot have looked at such first-generation war from the state perspective.
10. See Figure 3 on empire-states.
11. Ideas on the generations of warfare come from several sources, most
notably William Lind, who has published a draft of FMFM 1A. Lind was
a favorite of Marine Commandant Alfred M. Gray, and Lind’s ideas have
permeated all Marine Corps professional education for 20 years; as the
number “1” would suggest, these manuals are the bedrock on which Ma-
rine officer instruction is based. See also Walter Russell Mead’s discussions
of hard and sharp power in Chapter Two, Power, Terror, Peace and War,
Alfred A. Knopf, New York, 2004, and Frank Hoffman, Parameters, Sum-
mer 2007, who delineates crisply the debate between the classical school
of rational actor-driven war and this uncomfortable fourth generation in
which we find ourselves.
12. Boyd, Col John, USAF, Patterns of Conflict, 1986 (no copyright), p.
111. Boyd is particularly interested in how to “pull an opponent apart.”
Such action need not be, and properly expressed, often is not, military or
even kinetic. Just like Sun Tzu, Boyd would rather win without fighting.
His ideas correlate directly with those of Osama bin Laden.
13. Lind, FMFM 1A. These ideas permeate the book. See also Boyd.
14. Huntington, Samuel, The Clash of Civilizations, Simon and Schuster,
New York, 1986. Huntington takes a hard-eyed, realist view of the world,
insisting that the West and the “non-West” are rising in concert and in-
sisting that one cannot understand conflict without understanding cul-
ture. Huntington is academic, dour, and contrarian—and invariably right.
15. Boyd, pp. 64 and 107.
16. Zinni, Gen Anthony C., USMC(Ret), breakfast meeting with author, Uni-
versity of San Diego (USD), April 2004. The discussion has been transcribed,
recorded, and published by USD’s Kroc Institute for Peace and Justice.
17. Sachs, Jeffrey, “The Geography of Economic Development,” Strategy
and Foreign Policy, Naval War College Press, Newport, RI, 2006, p. 272.
18. Barnett, Thomas P.M., The Pentagon’s New Map, Putnam, New York,
2004. This idea permeates the book.
19. Hoffman, LtCol Frank G., USMCR(Ret), “Neo-Classical Coun-
terinsurgency,” Parameters, U.S. Army War College, Carlisle, PA, Sum-
mer 2007, p. 78.
20. Department of Defense, Irregular Warfare Joint Operating Concept,
11 September 2007, p. 7.
21. Vego, Milan, Operational Warfare, United States Naval War College,
Newport, RI, Lesson 1004, p. 309.
22. Lind, FMFM 1A.
23. See Figure 1. Bohr atom versus QTW model.
24. Lind, 5GW blog.
Marine Corps Gazette • January 20 09
25. Naim, Moises, “The Five Wars of Globalization,” Foreign Policy, Jan-
uary-February 2003, p. 30.
26. Boyce, Maj Giles “Russ,” Operations Officer, 3d Battalion, 4th
Marines, and commander of forces in Haditha, Iraq. Interview with au-
thor, February 2005.
27. Hoffman, p. 80.
28. Fertig, LTC Randall, USA, Symposium on Counterinsurgency,
RAND Corporation, 1963, p. 80.
29. The ideas of drives being frustrated, of the agency of final disappoint-
ment, and of the power of crowd dynamics comes from Ted Robert Gurr,
Why Men Rebel, Princeton University Press, Princeton, NJ, 1970. Gurr
is a sociologist but truly understands crowds and violence. See Figure 5
that was created to illustrate these points.
30. David Kilcullen is a former Australian Army infantry officer and an ex-
pert in counterinsurgency and was, until fall of 2007, senior counterin-
surgency advisor to GEN David Petraeus, USA. To Kilcullen goes the
credit for the idea of al-Qaeda as the “clearinghouse” for the global jihad.
He points out that the jihad is not what the insurgency is; it is what the
insurgency does. Nonetheless, the global jihad and the global insurgency
are right now one and the same.
31. Johnson III, COL James, USA, Joint Military Operations final paper,
Naval War College, Newport, RI, November 2007, p. 9.
32. See Linda J. Bilmes and Joseph E. Stiglitz, The Three Trillion Dollar
War: The True Cost of the Iraq Conflict, W.W. Norton, New York, March
2008. These researchers used econometrics to figure out how much the
war, in and of itself and separated from normal military spending, will
cost.
33. Bennett, Drake, “Small Change: why we can’t fight terrorists by cut-
ting off their money,” (sic) The Boston Globe, 20 January 2008, p. K2.
34. Boyd, pp. 155, 177.
35. Marine officers are seasoned on the Powell Doctrine, but such insis-
tence on overwhelming force draws from the underpinning provided by
BG Fox Connor, USA, the little-known mentor to both GENs George C.
Marshall and Dwight D. Eisenhower. See Mark Perry, Partners in Com-
mand, (Penguin Books, 2007). Secretary of Defense, Robert Gates, in his
article, “Reflections on Leadership,” in the Summer 2008 issue of Param-
eters, provides an interesting analysis of this intellectual thread. Connor’s
three rules of war are never fight unless you have to, never fight alone, and
never fight for long.
>Editor’s Note: The author holds a master’s degree from Harvard’s
John F. Kennedy School of Government and graduated with high-
est distinction from the Naval War College in 2008. While at the
Naval War College, his thesis, “Don’t Trust the Big Man,” delved
further into the ideas explored in this article, using Africa below the
Sahel as the case study on which this article is based. His thesis is
available at the Defense Technical Information Center website.
Join the De-
bate
Agree or Disagree? Join the discussion at www.mca-marines.org/gazette/Coerr.
www.mca-marines.org/gazette 69