The Onslaught of the Political
You may not like having enemies, but you certainly are someone else’s enemy.
The reactions of both governmental authorities and German media to the Islamist terror attacks of 2016 were revelatory. They revealed a reluctance to act on challenges by the Islamic State (IS)—whose involvement was flatly denied in some cases—in a genuinely political manner. Of course, this posture of weakness can not endure: the obligation to the political does not vanish due to us ignoring it. Thus, we see the state’s leading classes’ total misjudgment of the situation—the misunderstanding of our factual state of war with a political agent of a new kind that the “Western World” does not appear ready for.
Historical Perspectives
In fact, there has been a deep analysis of this problem for more than 30 years now. In time for the beginning downfall of the Eastern bloc, in the October 1989 issue of the U.S. Marine Corps Gazette there came out an article by the (civil) military theorist William Lind, co-authored with staff officers of the U.S. Army and USMC. Inspired by works of German military historian and Bundeswehr lieutenant-general Franz Uhle-Wettler (1927–2018) and considering technological leaps forward of that time, the authors posited that a soldier’s mission in peacetime was to prepare for the next war as best as he could—necessitating a thorough rethinking of both security policy and military affairs. The article developed a model of modern warfare as being divisible into overlapping “Generations of Warfare” (GW), starting with the Peace of Westphalia of 1648 that had established the state monopoly on war, thus transforming it from a diffuse feud between families or cities that was usually slugged out by mercenaries into a genuinely political instrument. The 1st Generation of Warfare (1GW) that was appropriate for this age was characterized by line infantry tactics, foot soldiers armed with inefficient muskets moving very orderly, yet slowly. This course of action required rigorous drills and distinct hierarchies, but was sometimes also ideologically motivated, especially throughout the columns of the French revolutionary army that put a citizen next to a citizen.