Forty-six such air strikes against al-Q affiliates have been made this year in Somalia. This number is triple the number flown in 2016.
NAIROBI, Kenya (AP) — Six U.S. airstrikes that killed more than 60 people in a coastal Somali town were pre-emptive strikes to prevent a major extremist attack, according to a Somali intelligence officer.
The U.S. military said Monday it carried out four strikes on Dec. 15 in which 34 people were killed and two more on Dec. 16 which killed 28. The air attacks targeted Gandarshe, south of the capital, Mogadishu
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The U.S. airstrikes have picked up dramatically since President Donald Trump took office and approved expanded military operations in the Horn of Africa nation. Airstrikes also target a small presence of fighters linked to the Islamic State group. The U.S. has about 500 military personnel in Somalia and earlier this month opened a permanent diplomatic presence in Mogadishu.
www.apnews.com/...
Considering that such attacks are rationalized as a form of so-called Fourth Generation warfare. They are an extension of US military activity used in a variety of ways in an age of hybrid warfare doctrine.
The Trump administration's appointments have signaled that it will continue to prioritize the fight against jihadist violent non-state actors (VNSAs)—a broad term that we find far more useful than an exclusive focus on terrorist groups, but a term in desperate need of clarification.
www.lawfareblog.com/...
Suppression of numbers of domestic asylum seekers because they might be “violent non-state actors” is one aspect of a meme implied in the recent “US troops at the border” stunt that ended on 15 December 2018. Whether it has any factual basis has been shown to be specious at best. Darn those “bad hombres”.
Fourth-generation warfare (4GW) is conflict characterized by a blurring of the lines between war and politics, combatants and civilians.
The term was first used in 1989 by a team of United States analysts, including paleoconservative William S. Lind, to describe warfare's return to a decentralized form. In terms of generational modern warfare, the fourth generation signifies the nation states' loss of their near-monopoly on combat forces, returning to modes of conflict common in pre-modern times.
The simplest definition includes any war in which one of the major participants is not a state but rather a violent non-state actor. Classical examples of this type of conflict, such as the slave uprising under Spartacus, predate the modern concept of warfare.
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Fourth-generation warfare is often seen in conflicts involving failed states and civil wars, particularly in conflicts involving non-state actors, intractable ethnic or religious issues, or gross conventional military disparities. Many of these conflicts occur in the geographic area described by author Thomas P.M. Barnett as the Non-Integrating Gap, fought by countries from the globalised Functioning Core.
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Fourth-generation warfare theory has been criticized on the grounds that it is "nothing more than repackaging of the traditional clash between the non-state insurgent and the soldiers of a nation-state."[12]
Strategic Studies Institute writer and United States Army War College professor Antulio J. Echevarria II in an article Fourth-Generation War and Other Myths argues what is being called fourth generation warfare are simply insurgencies. He also claims that 4GW was "reinvented" by Lind to create the appearance of having predicted the future. Echevarria writes: "The generational model is an ineffective way to depict changes in warfare. Simple displacement rarely takes place, significant developments typically occur in parallel."[13] The critique was rebutted by John Sayen, a military historian and retired Lt. Col. in the Marine Corps Reserve.[14]
Lieutenant General Kenneth F. McKenzie Jr., USMC, characterizes fourth-generation warfare theory as "elegant irrelevance" and states that "its methods are unclear, its facts contentious and open to widely varying interpretations, and its relevance questionable."[15]
en.wikipedia.org/...