The controversy over ending Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell (DADT) is a typical modern morality tale, in which the moral always lose.  Although a few generals and admirals objected to allowing homosexuals to serve openly, a military led by real men would have seen every general and admiral resign in protest unless the new policy was reversed.

Predictably, President Barack Obama, who had campaigned on not repealing DADT, declared, “This law I am about to sign will strengthen our national security, and uphold the ideals that our fighting men and women risk their lives to defend.”  Also predictably, but with his usual eloquence, Pat Buchanan said, “You are trying to impose the values of Fire Island on Parris Island.  These are 19-year-old Marines.  They’re very macho guys.  Many of them are Christian traditionalists and you got these secular values and you bring open homosexuals into the barracks with these guys—it will be hellish.”

America needs to look beyond the current context to the overall structure and makeup of the military.  That’s because America has the wrong kind of military.  It’s a massive, expensive, centralized, bureaucratic machine epitomized by the vast Pentagon, whose functionaries occupy 130 countries but couldn’t defend their own building on September 11.  In this fantasy world, the military is no different from GM, Health and Human Services, the FBI, Disneyland, or any other civilian or government bureaucracy that now preaches the “inclusion” of all races, creeds, colors, sexes, disabilities, and lifestyles.  And you’d better agree—or else.

But we don’t fight bureaucratic wars anymore.  There will be no more battles against foreign bureaucratic armies, such as the Bulge, Normandy, Guadalcanal, or Iwo Jima.

Instead, what we have is Fourth Generation Warfare (4GW), as strategist William Lind has defined it.  This is warfare with nonstate entities, which involves not only insurgents, jihadis, or guerrillas, but any kind of nonstate entity: religions, nongovernmental organizations, the Basque ETAs, Iraqi insurgents, the New Irish Republican Army, Al Qaeda, Hezbollah, Hamas, the Taliban (out of power, for now), the People’s Mojahadin of Iran (Marxists on the U.S. State Department’s list of “Foreign Terrorist Organizations” who are nonetheless backed by the CIA), narcotraficantes in Mexico, and the International Planned Parenthood Federation and other groups that attack foreign countries’ demographics.

The entities of 4GW even include Wiki­Leaks; MasterCard, Amazon, Pay­Pal, and other financial entities that cut WikiLeaks off after its December 2010 dump of State Department documents; and hackers who briefly shut down the websites of the financial entities.

Fourth-generation warfare is a return to nonstate warfare of the sort that ended in 1648 with the Peace of Westphalia, after which powerful centralized states monopolized warfare, first in Europe, then in most of the rest of the world.  It should be met by reducing state targets through federalism and devolution; and with small, specialized fighting units.  Instead, the Pentagon, CIA, DEA, Homeland Security, TSA, and other bureaucracies have multiplied their functionaries, rules, snooping, and intrusions, such as the TSA’s groping at airports of grandmas, teenage girls, and even the ambassador from India.

According to the late John Boyd, a top 4GW theorist and decorated Air Force officer, there are three levels of warfare.  Physical is fighting battles.  Mental is disrupting the enemy’s communications or thinking processes.  Moral is the most important by far, Boyd said, and involves the “dissolution of the moral bonds that permit an organic whole to exist.”

The repeal of DADT is a moral attack on the U.S. military by the country’s own decadent elites.  It’s not just inversion activists who favor allowing open homosexuals in the military, but hetero elites who engage in personal debaucheries while investing in drug companies that produce abortifacient pills and pornography-spewing cable TV.  These same elites, many war profiteers, since 1945 have foisted bankrupting, undeclared, unconstitutional, and losing wars on the military.

A key tenet of 4GW is for states to avoid conflicts as much as possible, including refraining from invading foreign countries and not allowing in immigrants with different mores.  But America’s elites have given us the opposite, a policy Steve Sailer calls “invade the world, invite the world.”  The “dissolution of moral bonds” exemplified by ending DADT is another reason for many 4GW entities, such as Muslim jihadis and machismo-pumped narcotraficantes, to despise America and laugh at her newly effeminate military.