political centers of gravity have changed. These centers of gravity may revolve around nationalism, religion, or family or clan honor. Disaggregated forces, such as guerrillas, terrorists, and rioters, which lack a center of gravity, deny to their enemies a focal point at which to deliver a conflict ending blow. As a result, strategy becomes more problematic while combating a VNSA. It has been theorized that a state vs. state conflict in fourth-generation warfare would involve the use of computer hackers and international law to obtain the weaker side's objectives, the logic being that the civilians of the stronger state would lose the will to fight as a result of seeing their state engage in alleged atrocities and having their own bank accounts harmed. Three principal attributes of the new-age terrorism were held to be their hybrid structure (as opposed to the traditional microscopic command and control pattern), importance given to systemic disruption vis-a-vis target destruction, and sophisticated use of technological advancements (including social media and mobile communications technology). A terrorist network could be designed to be either acephalous (headless like Al-Qaeda after Bin Laden) or polycephalous (hydra-headed like Kashmiri separatists). Social media networks supporting the terrorists are characterized by positive feedback loops, tight coupling and non-linear response propagation (viz. a small perturbation causing a large disproportionate response). Criticism 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." Strategic Studies Institute writer and United States Army War College professor Antulio J. Echevarria II, in his 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." The critique was rebutted by John Sayen, a military historian and retired Lt. Col. in the Marine Corps Reserve. 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." Rod Thornton argues that Thomas Hammes and William S. Lind are "providing an analytical lens through which to view the type of