Review – The Sling and the Stone: On War in the 21st Century

The Sling and the Stone: On War in the 21st Century
by Colonel Thomas X. Hammes, USMC
Paperback, 321 pages. Published 2006 by Zenith Press. ISBN: 978-0-7603-2407-3

Written as the Iraq war was careening off a cliff and published in 2006, just before President Bush’s decision to “surge” in Iraq, The Sling and the Stone attempts to define the next generation of warfare. Hammes subscribes to the theory of Billy Lind, Gary Wilson, et. al. that there have been four generations of modern war, each reflecting and conforming to the society that engaged in it. First generation warfare relied on line and column to mass firepower at the crucial point on a relatively confined battlefield. The second generation employed rifled, breach loading weapons, barbed wire, and other technological advancements of industrial age to culminate in the static trench slaughter of World War I. Faced with the carnage of the first war, the Germans introduced the third generation, maneuver warfare, in 1939.

Fourth generation warfare is the weapon of the weak against the powerful. In Hammes’s telling, Mao “started this form of war,” (a dubious assertion) and subsequent practitioners have modified and improved it, making use of ever-changing technology, public opinion, and the fecklessness of the superpowers that insist on fighting the enemy the desire rather than the enemy that actually challenges them.

Hammes is particularly incensed by the Pentagon’s Joint Vision 2020 and the obsession with “cyber war.” His dismissal of cyber warfare has not worn well with time, in large part because the cyber war he describes is not the cyber war that has actually evolved in the last decade. Hammes is justly critical of Pentagon planners who insist on facing a near-peer competitor armed with high-tech weaponry and contesting territory openly. Such competitors justify massive defense budgets focused on high-end gadgetry produced by giant defense contractors. They provide jobs in congressional districts and require massive bureaucracies full of patronage appointees. Unfortunately, the United States is so good at and prepared for fighting such wars that no enemy it their right mind would dare to face us on our own terms.

Since Hammes published his book, the Russians have engaged in small wars in both Georgia and Ukraine. Russian capabilities have surprised many casual observers–after allowing their military to largely collapse in the 1990s, they have rebounded with a professional, well-equipped force prepared to fight effectively with massed fires and sophisticated battlefield coordination. They are using unmanned aerial systems effectively with long-range rocket artillery to strike deep in enemy territory. But, the Russians cannot project power far beyond their borders. The Syrian war has demonstrated both their capabilities and their limitations. Their single aircraft carrier is a joke, requiring them to maintain a secure airfield within range of the battlefield if they wish to bring to bear their air force. They were able to launch a few cruise missiles, but they did not achieve the sort of effects that the U.S. military considers routine. They did not even attempt to deploy large ground forces.

Meanwhile, however, the Russians have deployed a sophisticated and deniable cyber capability that causes the western world consternation. Hammes largely dismissed the cyber threat that has actually emerged while equating cyber war to the much touted “revolution in military affairs” enabled by sophisticated command, control, communications, intelligence, surveillance, and reconnaissance. Hammes argues that the U.S. overestimates the utility of its C4ISR dominance while underestimating the resiliency and ingenuity of its likely adversaries. Here he is undeniably correct. Hammes failed to see the potential for cyber warfare to emerge as a key tool in the asymmetric warfare toolkit–cheap, concealable, portable, and scalable.

Overall, Hammes’s book fits into the library of fine studies of insurgency, counterinsurgency, and terrorism published since 2001. It is not revolutionary, but it does provide solid case studies of modern asymmetric warfare and clearly articulates why the U.S. is likely to continue facing such threats and unlikely to face the peer competitor for which it endlessly prepares.