Fourth Generation Wars 1
Pedro M. Otero Cabañas
Terrorist actions and sabotage, wars and armed clashes that are registered with chilling regularity in more and more countries, confirm a criterion that is becoming a certainty: the world is the scene of a generalized war or a period of eruptive wars, due to their multiplication in dozens of territories.
In his September 2015 visit to Cuba, Pope Francis considered that we are living the Third World War, but in stages. Unfortunately, the facts corroborate such a dire prediction.
Some with much media presence and others with less or almost none, the truth is that we are living regional wars in almost all latitudes or a Fourth Generation War, as some experts define these scenarios of death and extreme violence.
Fourth Generation War is a term used by experts to refer to the various conflicts arising from new technologies and globalized interactions. It is a denomination within the U.S. military doctrine that includes asymmetric warfare, low intensity warfare, dirty warfare, terrorism or similar and covert operations, popular warfare, civil warfare, terrorism and counterterrorism, in addition to propaganda, in combination with unconventional combat strategies that include cyber, civilian and political.
In this type of warfare there is no confrontation between regular armies or necessarily between states, but between a state and violent groups or mostly between violent groups of a political, economic, religious or ethnic nature.
The United Nations recognizes the prevalence of 13 armed conflicts, which it classifies as major. The oldest is the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, unresolved since 1948, and includes in the same category those in Afghanistan, Somalia, Pakistan, Yemen, Syria and Nigeria, as well as the current conflict between Russia and Ukraine.
The UN also categorizes 31 other armed conflicts as minor wars, citing those in Kashmir, Burma, the insurgency in northeast India and others in the Maghreb, Niger, Uganda and Sudan.
Specifically, between the former and the latter, there are currently more than 40 wars, conflicts or military actions in vast territories of the world, involving almost 100 million people, many of them civilians.
Today, even the apologists of capitalism themselves recognize that such a virulent world scenario is the result of the unfortunate policies pursued by the great colonialist and imperialist powers.
Political scientist Noam Chomski blamed successive U.S. governments for fueling territorial and tribal conflicts in Africa and for being, more than half the time, the cause of wars in other geographical areas.
The solution to these conflicts is still a long way off. It would seem that peace is a state of happiness alien to Man, immersed in conflicts since his very presence on Earth as a conscious being.
But to stop aspiring to peace is not an option and to fight to obtain it should be the first law of every nation.
