by Noah Raford
A better definition is that 5GW will be whatever mode of warfare successfully counters the threat of the decentralized, networked, irregular warfare of the kind seen in Afghanistan, Iraq, Mexico, and the Horn of Africa. 5GW is not here now, which makes categorical definition elusive, but it will be the great counteroffensive, the iron response of the state to crush its 4GW enemies. The reason for the conceptual resilience that 5GW enjoys—despite a broad lack of consensus regarding its very existence, much less a satisfactory working definition—is that the chaotic and fast-evolving conditions of postmodern warfare have defied the attempts of the best military minds to provide a simple, explanatory, strategic narrative.1
Instead, the disorderliness of the battlespace has invaded the realm of ideas and even familiar terms like conventional and irregular are now in question, as nation-states struggle to adapt to warfare that includes a wide range of unpredictable, adversarial, evolving non-state actors operating at multiple levels of conflict, under conditions of globalized connectivity that William Lind and others call 4GW.2 4GW—whether we accept the terminology or substitute another explanation—brings higher levels of uncertainty and unmanageable complexity in war. It is forcing states, armies, and societies into corners where their survival will depend on their ability to adapt.
This is a path of grave danger. States will either successfully adapt, or they will fail. Many will fail, lacking either sufficient political resilience to weather protracted civil conflict or an economic base from which to wage it. Those that manage to adapt will be most likely to do so by either (a) adjusting their response to complex, decentralized insurgencies down to a granular level of society with intelligence, counterinsurgency (COIN), information operations, and economic development—states, in essence, becoming more complex themselves—or (b) savagely ratcheting back the systemic level of complexity by a sustained application of extreme violence to disrupt the social fabric and simplify it by atomizing social networks deemed to be enemies of the state.
The first option involves counterinsurgency warfare and skillfully selective political and economic concessions by the state to separate the people from insurgents and to strengthen the legitimacy of the state in their eyes by displaying competence in providing physical security, desired public goods, civic engagement, and appropriate reactions to insurgency attacks. This is a sophisticated and exceptionally difficult policy to carry out and requires governmental elites to consider long-term national interest over their own immediate interests. This usually proves to be the sticking point.
The French lost politically in Indochina and Algeria—long before they lost on the battlefield—due to deeply exploitative and punitive colonial regimes that they could not bring themselves to reform. The United States, in turn, never succeeded in convincing the Saigon governments to reduce corruption or enact meaningful reforms that might appeal to South Vietnam’s rural peasantry, even when the regime was facing collapse. This contrasts with the more positive COIN experiences of the Malayan Emergency, El Salvador, and most recently, Iraq, where a more nuanced and concessionary approach, coupled with more precise uses of force, enlisted the population as allies (or as armed paramilitaries) against the insurgency. Even in El Salvador, where COIN was far more “kinetic” than it is today, it involved major political concessions by the Forty Families oligarchy in establishing genuine democratic government.
Unfortunately, because of the difficulty of finding or persuading sufficiently enlightened elites to reform in their own self-interest—and the challenges of navigating old-fashioned Maoist insurgency, to say nothing of today’s 4GW environments—most efforts at prosecuting COIN warfare have failed.3 We can expect that in the future, while some will succeed brilliantly, many states will likewise fail—especially those without a great power patron, as in the recent case of the deposed royal government of Nepal. These kinds of states—unpopular, authoritarian, relatively backward, corrupt, and isolated—are exceedingly poor candidates for bootstrapping a COIN strategy on their own. Or even with considerable outside help.
This brings us to the probability that for the aforementioned states, the actual options for their ruling elites for adapting to the threat of 4GW will be between accepting varying degrees of failure—conceding temporary autonomous zones (TAZ) to rebels, being overthrown, or imploding into anarchy as insurgents encroach—or taking the gloves off and using the indiscriminate, unrestricted violence of genocide to annihilate real and potential enemies before the international community can mobilize to prevent it. History suggests they might well succeed.
The Soviet Union
The Stalinist Soviet Union had, since the publication of Conquest’s The Great Terror: A Reassessment (1991), been one of the major examples of state democide—comparable to the great ethno-racial-sectarian genocide of European Jewry by the Nazis or of the Armenians by the Ottoman Turks. What is less well understood about Stalin’s crimes are that the apparently random terror, with quotas for arrests issued to branches of the secret police in every Soviet oblast, which swept up millions of Soviet citizens in the 1930s, contained a far more targeted campaign against specific and readily identifiable networks that Stalin considered especially problematic potential enemies.
Though small compared to the victims of the Great Terror at large, these networks compose a formidable list that included Old Bolsheviks; former Left Socialist Revolutionaries; the Jewish Socialist Bund; Trotskyites (real followers of Leon Trotsky, not those sentenced under Article 58), former Mensheviks; Ukrainian Communist Party leaders; most senior officials of the Soviet secret police agencies prior to Nikolai Yezhov assuming control of the NKVD (the more powerful forerunner of the KGB); Leningrad Communist Party leadership under Kirov; the Red Army officer corps, especially general officers; Comintern agents, especially those who went to Spain and China; Soviet military intelligence (GRU) officers; and foreign communists resident in the USSR.
The methodical nature of Stalin’s “inner terror” can be seen by looking at a few examples. The Polish Communist Party, in Soviet exile from the Pilsudski dictatorship, had its entire leadership arrested, along with 50,000 followers and relatives, of whom 10,000 were shot outright. In 1938, the effectively defunct Polish Party was formally dissolved.4 The Ukrainian Communist Party—and Kosior, who was the Soviet satrap in Kiev—particularly irritated Stalin, because of their Ukrainian “nationalism” and paid a heavy price when Nikita Khrushchev was dispatched to deal with them. Khrushchev personally ordered the shooting 55,741 Ukrainian party officials, including thirty-five out of thirty-eight provincial secretaries. Lavrenty Beria, who would succeed Yezhov as NKVD boss and oversee his predecessor’s murder, had a staggering 268,950 Transcaucasian Communists and their family members arrested and liquidated 10 percent of the Georgian Communist Party.5 Approximately 90 percent of the Red Navy officers were killed in 1937–1938, and in the Red Army, though less thoroughly savaged at the lower ranks, lost 154 out of its 186 division commanders and almost every army commander and army corps commander, along with their political commissars.
A frequent Stalinist purge technique was to liquidate not only the holder of an important post in an organization, but his immediate replacement as well (and not infrequently, the replacement’s replacement). They not only atomized existing social networks but also terminated institutional memory, as the documentary records were purged with the same severity as the staff. This permitted a complete reshaping of organizations in any fashion the dictator desired, and Stalin could be sure the “new blood” was completely loyal to him and untainted by previous “enemies.” Soviet society had been so thoroughly terrorized by the end of the Yezhovschina (“Yezhov’s time”—the Soviets’ name for the great terror of 1937–1938) that no effective opposition of any kind existed to Stalin’s will. Neither the Soviet government nor the Communist Party nor the general staff of the Red Army retained any independent functionality after 1938, and after 1948 the politburo itself fell into gradual disuse under Stalin’s paranoid eye,
as he arrested the wives and families of his closest collaborators.
Cambodia
Despite being a secretive, almost cult-like, ultra-Maoist movement, Cambodia’s Khmer Rouge leadership aped Stalin’s bureaucratic, totalitarian regime in conducting a two-tiered auto-genocide designed to exterminate specific networks, even as it is deconstructed Cambodian society as a whole. Submerged within the most radical and terrifying democidal expression of Marxist-Leninism in history was a sinister racial and religious subtext that would have warmed the heart of Heinrich Himmler. And like Stalin’s Great Terror, Pol Pot’s “Year Zero” left Cambodian society completely prostrate and incapable of even conceiving of resistance. “They treated us like dogs; we dared not protest” recalled one ethnic Chinese Cambodian peasant who was doubly suspect, not only for his ethnicity, but also for having converted to Protestant Christianity.6 As Khmer Rouge cadres would say, “To keep you is no gain; to kill you is no loss.”7
The Khmer Rouge idealized a peasant Communist utopia and followed revolutionary tradition in targeting the “bourgeoisie,” a category the Khmer Rouge radically expanded to embrace all urban dwellers all those with an education, famously killing those who wore eyeglasses on the presumption that they could read. Like other Marxists, the Khmer Rouge sought an atheistic state and targeted the Buddhist clergy for liquidation, along with those Cambodians who had been converted to foreign religions like Islam or Christianity. But the Khmer Rouge leadership also had deep pseudo-racialist antipathy for Muslim Chams, ethnic Vietnamese, and ethnic Chinese, all of whom—as non-Khmers—were slated for destruction, though to appease Beijing’s sensibilities, ethnic Chinese were always classed as “bourgeois” and not killed specifically for their ethnicity, unlike the Vietnamese minority.
As with Stalin’s purges of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union and the Polish and Ukrainian Communist Parties, the Khmer Rouge achieved a chilling thoroughness in their elimination of leadership networks in “traitorous” or “enemy” groups. Of the Islamic leaders in Cambodia categorized as “community leaders,” “deputies,” “Haji,” and “teachers,” the death toll was approximately 90 percent. The primary political vehicle of the Chams, the Islamic Central Organization, was killed off to almost the last man.8 Islam and the Cham language were banned.
An innovation in genocide, if it can be called that, instituted by the Khmer Rouge and later perfected by the Interahamwe militias of Rwanda, was the devolution of state-sanctioned mass murder from being the job of the elite to that of a granular social level. Unlike the Nazi Gestapo and the special Totenkopf SS division that ran Hitler’s death camps or Stalin’s NKVD, which executed political prisoners in secret or in faraway gulags, Pol Pot ordered that village officials, ordinary soldiers, peasants, or even children be enlisted to execute enemies, hacking them to death with farm implements in order to save bullets. One former Khmer Rouge official confessed to personally killing five thousand people by wielding a pickaxe.9
This downward dissemination of responsibility for genocide created situations where victims were frequently compelled to become perpetrators, demonstrating their loyalty by slaughtering neighbors, friends, spouses, parents, or children. These survivors under the Khmer Rouge regime were left with their social relations atomized, unable to reconstruct new social networks, as forming bonds of trust was impossible so long as the rule of Pol Pot endured.
Rwanda
The most “granular” genocide in history occurred in Rwanda in 1994, where between eight hundred thousand and one million Tutsis and “moderate” Hutus were systematically murdered over the course of just one hundred days by radical Hutu mobs mobilized and directed by Interahamwe and Impuzamugambi militiamen and the Rwandan government, possibly abetted by French military intelligence officers—France was formally accused of complicity in the Rwanda Genocide in 2008 by an investigatory commission of the Rwandan government.10 One of the most publicized genocides in real time, the Rwandan genocide is notable for the recruitment of enormous numbers of participants—every Hutu citizen was expected to play the role of an enthusiastic SS officer—and for the failure of the genocide to affect the military capabilities of the Tutsi rebel Rwandan Patriotic Front, which ultimately overthrew the Hutu government in Kigali.
Philip Gourevitch, author of We Wish to Inform You That Tomorrow We Will Be Killed with Our Families, described the unique character of the genocide in Rwanda in an interview with PBS Frontline.
What distinguishes Rwanda is a clear, programmatic effort to eliminate everybody in the Tutsi minority group because they were Tutsis. The logic was to kill everybody. Not to allow anybody to get away. Not to allow anybody to continue. And the logic, as Rwandans call it, the genocidal logic, was very much akin to that of an ideology very similar to that of the Nazism vis-à-vis the Jews in Europe, which is all of them must be gotten rid of to purify in a sense the people. There’s a utopian element in genocide that’s perplexing. But it is an effort to create community in the most strict sense of «us versus them,» by literally eliminating them and bonding all of us in complicity, in the course of that elimination. The idea was that all Hutus should participate in killing of Tutsis. And there have been cases of mass political murder, there have been cases of massacres and genocidal massacres, but never a country and a society so completely and totally convulsed by an effort at pure, unambiguous genocide since the end of World War II, since the passage of the Genocide Convention by the United Nations in the aftermath of the Holocaust.11
As with the genocide of Communist regimes, the radical Hutu state was targeting latent social networks of potential opposition in trying to destroy the Tutsi population, but unlike Stalin or Pol Pot, Hutu generals also faced an active military opponent in the Rwandan Patriotic Front (RPF), with which they were locked in a civil war, “Note that in 1991 Rwandan Major General Augustin Ndindiliyimana originally proposed creating the self-defense militias that became monstrous killing machines over the next three years. That same general as commander of the National Gendarmerie was a member of the ‘Zero Network’ used by the conspirators of the genocide. His case is hardly unusual; there was nothing spontaneous about the Rwandan genocide. Even as the interim government of Rwanda crossed to safety in Zaire in July 1994, Melvern quotes Prime Minister Kambanda proclaiming, ‘We have lost the military battle but the war is by no means over because we have the people behind us.’ ”12
That statement, hundreds of pages of government records, testimony at the International Criminal Tribunal for Rwanda, and countless firstperson accounts from the genocidal killers document what the genocide was all about: continued Hutu political domination of Rwanda.
The genocide failed to stabilize the radical Hutu government and, instead, led directly to its overthrow by its Tutsi rebel enemies. The RPF rebels were based in Uganda, and unlike most insurgents, they did not lose their military effectiveness because of the Hutu destruction of their civilian Tutsi base. By contrast, Rwandan society and the machinery of the government were severely disrupted by the genocide, both by the loss of Tutsi personnel throughout the private and public sector and by the mobilization of the Hutu population and prioritization of genocidal killings over their normal activities. The regime was less able to field effective military resistance to the RPF during the genocide than during the civil war, and it collapsed in July of 1994.
Analysis: Genocide as Statecraft
These historical case studies point not only to the persistence of genocide as a historical tragedy but its perceived utility as a tool of statecraft by regimes of a paranoid character that consider themselves surrounded by enemies, real or imagined. The siege mentality that is an inherent characteristic of governmental elites in states like Burma, Algeria, North Korea, Zimbabwe, and Sudan are like gasoline waiting to be ignited by the spark of 4GW into a monstrous conflagration.
4GW entities like Hezbollah, like the complex, decentralized insurgencies seen in Iraq, or like the narco-insurgency raging in Mexico operate at what strategist Jo
hn Boyd refers to as the mental and moral levels of war, seeking to erode the legitimacy of the state and win over the primary loyalty of the population—or a segment of it—to itself. It would be hard to conceive of a more antagonizing type of opponent for a paranoid, statist elite than a 4GW group whose existence and successes tend to inflame the worst kind of conspiracy theorizing. For elites of this kind, a democidal response to the challenge or the potential of 4GW conflict offers pragmatic and psychological benefits.
The pragmatic benefit is that genocide is often, though not always, effective at decimating the capacity of a targeted population to resist while terrorizing observers within the society into passivity or even active complicity. Algeria in the 1990s, Iraq in the 1980s, Guatemala in the 1970s, and Indonesia in the 1960s all successfully used death squads on a massive scale and in conjunction with regular military and security forces to brutally put down targeted groups: Islamist terrorists, Communist guerillas, or restive minority populations. Genocide does not require the sophisticated and expensive state security apparatus fielded by the Nazis. As Rwanda and Cambodia demonstrated, political mobilization and recruitment of a “perpetrator population” is enough; Rwandan Hutu militiamen actually murdered more efficiently with their machetes than the SS did with Auschwitz.
Psychologically, a regime that opts for so extreme a policy as genocide to crush an insurgency is akin to Cortez burning his boats before assaulting the Aztec empire. The state backs itself into a moral corner, and the only sure path for safety for its high-level apparatchiks is to prevail and retain power indefinitely. The bonds between members of the regime are tightened by mutual guilt and a common enemy (or perhaps by the enmity of the whole civilized world), as well as, frequently, by an increasingly distorted worldview, as the need to minimize the genocide or rationalize it as justifiable becomes an imperative, when the genocide is discovered by other states.
