This is a consistent and perhaps workable solution. Personally I like the scheme sketched in If We Can Keep It. To elaborate on this (a post coming soon with more)… The distinction between war and not-war, however blurred, is so valuable — and well-established in the general public — that it is worth saving. So an alternative scheme is:

There are two kinds of non-Trinitiarian conflicts. The first group includes crime, religious conflicts, ideological conflicts (e.g., save the lab rats and trees), and private acts of super-emplowered individuals. It does not matter if these are trans-national (e.g., affecting BOTH Belgium and Holland) or not. None of these are war.

Taking over States, even diminished “failed” States, is a big goal — even for groups like al Qaeda. In our era the process by which state and non-state entities use intense violence to fight for dominance is 4GW.

“You may recall that a certain William Walker, a “filibuster” or…”

I’m familiar with Walker and others of his type, but never thought of them in terms of Corporate 4GW. Certainly food for thought.

But I must say, that the first thing that pops into my mind when I read “4GW,” is the change in military hardware which makes it possible for one man, armed with a $1,000 hand held missle device to take out a million dollar airplane or tank.

Pity the poor police forces that have to, with almost no aid from Washington, deal with this.

Once I was out on the beach, on the direct fly line to La Guardia Airport, and found myself surrounded by forty Cops, armed with sub-machine guns, accompanied by helocopters; all because some citizen in the parking lot, mistook my camera, monopode and 18 inch lens, as an Al Qaeda terrorist with a hand held missle launcher… :)

Dave

You may recall that a certain William Walker, a “filibuster” or “freebooter” took a band of mercenaries into Nicaragua and formed a hollowed-out state in 1856. W.Walker was not the 4GW — he was just an ordinary merc. The real 4GWs were the Western corporations that backed him. Walker was there to pick up the trash in the street, while the corporations pursued other objectives — i.e. profit!

So the explosion of 4GW is not happening because non-Westerners suddenly got smart and figured out how to erode Western states — it’s happening because Westerners got greedy, decided not to play by the rules they claimed to follow. Finally, 140 years after William Walker’s hollow state, Van Creveld and others realized that this kind of 4GW could be used *against* the West.