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I had been cautious of posting here, as I self-promote enough on other blogs, but now that Aherring and Curtis have asked me to share my thoughts, I thought I will.
Attempts to establish what is meant by 5GW runs into two main problems.
- William Lind’s dialectical definition of “generation” as a “dialectically qualitative shift” from the preceding generation. To the extent he means “something very different,” I agree with him. But his phrase has shades of Hegelian-Marxist-Dialectic b.s. about it. The generation model of warfare is too important to let it be ghettoized by worthless academic philosophy.
- The use my some commentators (I won’t name names) who see 5GW as just another useful buzzword, and so try to hijack it for their own quixotic theories. These writers seek to use deception to push their own agenda, by hijacking a more respected and developed theory’s terminology to push their own.
We need to safeguard 5GW Theory against these twin evils of academic theossophy and marketing buzzwordspeak. This can be accomplished by defining “generation,” or even better its symbol “G,” as a scale. It seems to be that “G” measures the kinetic intensity of conflict, which every new G being approximately 20 times less intense than the one below it.
This holds up under a first analysis. Pre-Modern Warfare (the Zeroth Generation of Modern Warfare, “0GW,” about 0Gs) is unremittingly genocidal. If the AD 1900s had the same fatality-from-war rate as the 6000s BC, we should have seen something like two billion war deaths. We might say that form the dawn of man to the dawn of agriculture war meant from measuring around 0.1 Gs on the kinetic intensity scale to .9 Gs.
Or think of it another way: 0G Warfare focuses on ending an enemy’s ability to fight by killing their men. By the time we get to 4G Warfare almost none of the battle is in the field, but in the mind’s of men who will live regardless. This 5GW we talk of seems to be even more mental and less physical, seeking to leave the men, material, and even will of the enemy essentially unchanged. If kinetic intensity is seen as morally bad, then every new G is a moral improvement. 5GW may truly be “moral war,” compared to everything that has come before.
My thinking has evolved through recent posts and discussions on tdaxp. As I am a self-promoter (see above),l the links to these are below:
Posted by Dan tdaxp on Oct 30, 2006 09:51 AM
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4 Comments
Much of my thinking centers on this.
Yes, I totally agree. This is in fact the substance of my most recent post only 3 hours previous. The Proof of 5GW
RevG,
The word ‘moral’ is such a loaded word, and our understanding of it may be greatly affected by the histories of our individual OODA loops!
So for instance, your post narrows in a little bit to the humanist-Christian point of view (especially as those affected the formation of the U.S.), and Dan’s use of the word here seems similar (or may be more heavily influenced by Christian concepts of morality); but mine is more of a Classical understanding.
I.e., given the tendency of each ‘generation’ to ‘go deeper’ into the enemy’s OODA, but also especially given my own take of that post — that going deeper into the enemy OODA is achieved by going deeper into the enemy’s territory and also increasing observational capabilities — 5GW will require and in fact profit from greater levels of precision than have ever been possible. So from a Classical point of view, morality is about clear thinking and clear understanding and the application of these to problems needing to be solved. Those have always been important, of course; but adhering to the concept is far more moral than merely giving lip service to it or merely using such clarity when it’s available (but forsaking clarity and playing quite ‘ad hoc’ or impulsively or both whenever clarity seems unattainable: that would be ‘immoral’.)
This is another reason why I think Global Guerrillas, although perhaps a description of a phenomenon or environment, is not a generational improvement in warfare. The type of ‘shotgun’ approach to causing change is, to my mind, immoral, because it depends far too much on chaos, creating incoherence, and especially chance. In some ways, this makes it appear 3GW.
Of course, Socrates’ dictum, to know thyself, is also important for achieving such morality; and when clarity is not present, skepticism seems to me the only moral alternative: or, asking the right questions, so that we can separate knowledge from mere opinion.
Dan,
I like where you are going with this, although like similar concepts I have used for approaching an understanding of skinning the gap, this appears to be more of a description of general features of 5GW (and prior generations) but really introduces the elephant standing in the middle of the room: How will 5GW effectors actually operate, then; and, more importantly, how can they succeed in defeating foes?
Maybe Arherring will begin to outline some of the processes as he explores his topics for exploration.