is ... an act of force to compel our enemy to do our will.--Carl yon Clausewitz (1) The strategic nature of war has changed, and our military and government are striving to adapt to fight and win in this new environment. Today we are engaged in global counterinsurgency, an unprecedented challenge which requires level of original strategic thought and depth of understanding perhaps comparable only to that of the Cold War. Our ongoing political-military actions to achieve success in Iraq and Afghanistan are simply subordinate efforts of this larger, complex world war. Our enemies today dearly understand the value of asymmetrical approaches when dealing with the overwhelming conventional combat power of the United States military. Unfortunately, our unmatched conventional capability has slowed the US response to the changing, asymmetrical nature of modern war. (2) We as military are at risk of failing to understand the nature of the war we are fighting--a war which has been characterized as a war of intelligence and war of perceptions. (3) We must confront this dilemma and take our thinking to new strategic level in this era to understand the tools and strategic approaches required to create victory in this very different 21st-century environment. Fourth Generation Warfare: Global Insurgency Retired Marine Colonel T. X. Hammes, in his recent book The Sling and the Stone, outlines an innovative construct to better understand the evolution of warfare. (4) The book's striking cover photo epitomizes the paradox in today's warfare of weak against strong: it shows young Palestinian boy, arm upraised, about to hurl rock at huge, US-made Israeli M60 tank. The shades of meaning are rich. In his insightful work, Hammes describes four evolutions of warfare, which he characterizes as First through Fourth Generation War. This theory is helpful as we examine the context of war today and assess the effectiveness of today's military to engage in--and win--these wars. Hammes' description provides us an alternative model to compare with our current network-centric model of war, which often seems primarily designed for nation-states engaged in force-on-force battles. (5) First Generation Warfare in this alternative construct dates from the invention of gunpowder, which produced the first military formations and tactics cued to firearms. First Generation Warfare was an offensively-oriented type of war, where light weaponry, limited-size armies, and horse and foot mobility provided very limited strategic mobility--armies walked everywhere--but some modest tactical mobility, with small armies unencumbered by extensive heavy weaponry. This era culminated in the Napoleonic wars of the early 1800s, and warfare began to change dramatically by the middle of the 19th century. By the time of the US Civil War, the advent of advanced transportation and communications systems, combined with heavier mobile firepower, signified the emergence of new model--Second Generation Warfare. Second Generation Warfare revolved around rapidly growing strategic speed of communication and transport--telegraphs and railways--in concert with massed armies armed with ever-deadlier small arms and artillery. This phase encompassed the Franco-Prussian War of the 1870s, the turn-of-the-century Boer War and Russo-Japanese conflicts, and ultimately the huge, million-man armies of World War I. The latter were massive formations linked to devastating direct and indirect firepower, leading inexorably to the strategic and tactical stalemate of trench warfare. Second Generation Warfare was characterized by large armies with strategic (but limited tactical) mobility, unprecedented weaponry and explosive throw weight, resultant heavy casualties, and gradual diminishment of maneuver, all of which pointed toward the defense achieving gradual dominance over the offense. …