Thomas X. Hammes

Examining the brief career of the first Marine unit deployed to the Korean War, Hammes finds the legend of a well-trained formation led from top to bottom with combat veterans from the Second World War to be a great deal less than accurate. Instead, there is the reality of an ad hoc unit thrown together from what personnel were available in the wake of the Summer transfer season, but a unit still that did as much as any to hold the perimeter at Pusan, before being redesignated as the 1st Marine Division on the voyage to Inchon.

So if the conventional wisdom leaves something to be desired, how does Hammes explain the performance of the Pusan Marines? To a large degree he attributes this to good doctrine and culture. While some realistic training did take place in the brigade and while there were combat-experienced leaders at the level of brigade HQ, Hammes suspects that the single biggest reason for the unit's success was that the Marine Crops worked very hard at healing the rift between its ground and aviation elements post-1945; good aerial support was certainly a game changer in the battle to come. There was also an effort to really improve small-unit tactics at the same time, in the shadow of having to face the Soviet military. Finally, there was a real sense of getting back to basics in relation to the concept that every Marine is a rifleman before they are anything else, thus allowing for replacements gathered on the fly to be assimilated quickly and overcoming the usual lack of time needed to create a cohesive unit. The rest, as they say, is history.… (altro)

Author (and Marine Corps Col.) Thomas Xavier Hammes didn’t invent the concept of “Fourth Generation Warfare” (4GW) but popularized it and made it a subject of cocktail party conversation a couple years back. The book has some good information on late 20th Century insurgencies, specifically the Sandanista and Al-Aqsa uprisings.

Overall though, although Hammes book isn't meant to be a complete compendium of 4GW conflicts, I did feel that his description and defense of 4GW warfare as something unique to our times did ignore a lot of history and counterevidence - much of which, for example, could be found in the history of Eastern Europe from 1919 to 1939.

At its time, it was a timely dose of history and seasoned reasoning about counterinsurgency warfare at the beginning of the 20th Century. But now the book seems a lot dated since the 2004 Iraqi “surge.”… (altro)