ABSTRACT
Fifteen years after Bill Lind and his associates wrote that Fourth Generation Warfare (4GW) was about to replace Third Generation Warfare (3GW); twelve years after this author wrote that non-trinitarian War was replacing that of trinitarian War; five years after Mary Kaldor published New and Old Wars; four years after Robert Kaplan had turned his original Atlantic Magazine article into a book entitled, The Coming Anarchy; and a year after Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld, in a memorandum to his aides, admitted that the military establishment set up to wage the Cold War was not suited for the wars of the twenty-first century – after all this, even the US Armed Services are latching on to Madame History’s skirt. They are waking up to the fact that the world has changed and will continue to change, though not necessarily in the direction they expected and prepared for. The harbinger of this somewhat less than astonishing news is Thomas X. Hammes. Hammes is a Marine Corps Colonel on active duty with something called “functional area expertise in low intensity conflict” (Google.com). That means he helped train insurgents in several, unspecified, countries as well as serving in Somalia; it was the latter experience, he says, which really forced him to open his eyes.
