Dreaming 5GW

…after getting a little hot air from Michelle Malkin: “Michelle Malkin uses 5GW to strike back” —

Michelle Malkin has a new weapon in her arsenal. It is called Hot Air, yeah right, like a hydrogen bomb emits hot air! Her latest vlog post is called Freedom is not free. Amen, sister.

Today, I was introduced to a concept (5GW) that should have been self-evident.

The link to Phatic Communion’s “Initiating 5GW” is on the word flailing.  Heh. Well, the Thunder Pig finally found something by Lind to make a vertical line through the chaos — essentially, Lind suggests that any consideration of a fifth-generation of war is pointless because we are still in the very early stages of 4GW, and,

Attempting to visualize a Fifth Generation from where we are now is like trying to see the outlines of the Middle Ages from the vantage point of the late Roman Empire.

[Lind: “Fifth Generation Warfare?”]

— because, y’know, now is then as every vertical thinker knows.  Oh, wait!  Lind was making a metaphor!  So it wasn’t vertical…

Reading the short commentary by Lind — which, it should be noted, was written in early 2004 — I realized that most of his points have been addressed already.  In fact, this very commentary has already been included elsewhere in consideration of 5GW.  That consideration, at tdaxp, inspired most of my own.  I even posed the possibility, as others have, that nanotechnology might bring in the truly next-generational warfare.

One thing troubles me about Lind’s 2004 commentary:

One reason for the confusion may be a misapprehension of what “generation” means. In the context of the Four Generations of Modern War, “generation” is shorthand for a dialectically qualitative shift. As the originator of the framework, I adopted the word “generation” because I was speaking to and writing for Marines, and “dialectically qualitative shift” has more syllables than the Marine mind can readily grasp…

When he speaks of generation this way, he seems to be suggesting a singularity, or the point at which a phase shift occurs.  I.e., it is almost as if he imagines a single point in time at which the “dialectically qualitative shift” occurs.  Before that shift is one generation; after, the next.  Plenty of commentary since has focused on the possibility (I say, the certainty) that tactics associated with each of Lind’s generations have probably always been around — indeed, that is the main criticism of Lind’s Four Generations of Warfare.

I have attempted to also consider a type of shift, but one not so easily chopped into segments of time, by thinking of the generations of warfare as periods when warfare can be described in terms of refinement of tactics, inspired by shifting ground realities (including technology), when those tactics most come into prominence.  (One visualization already linked above, of a continuum, is an attempt at describing such phase shifting.)  Lately, I have also been contemplating what most 5GW theorists, and even Lind,  have already been saying but perhaps without realizing the significance of what we are saying:  that these generations of warfare come into conflict. I.e., when Lind said,

One simple test for whether or not something constitutes a
generational shift is that, absent a vast disparity in size, an army from a
previous generation cannot beat a force from the new generation….

what he meant was, both styles of fighting, both generations of warfare, are contemporaneous.  There is no clean break between them in a practical time/space sense — they must both exist, in order to be in conflict — but rather a broad period occurs when one generation and the following generation, responding to ground realities, might coexist at a relatively equal strength.  The ground realities “favor” neither one.  During such a period, there may be stalemates.  But the same ground realities that have inspired the next generation to form in response to them — both are relatively new — may continue to develop, and at some point, the ground realities will favor the new generation over the prior generation, and we will see that “qualitative shift” Lind mentions.  Even so, the old generation style of warfare continues as long as some ground realities justify it; thus, we might even consider the advent of a next-generation of warfare that is a mutation of the prior, during which tactics of previous forms of warfare are still utilized even as new tactics are born.  When critics of the concept of “generations of warfare” say that these styles of warfare have always been around, they are not far wrong:  similarly, the genes which make me have been around for a long time, but I am no pre-sapiens.  It’s just that new arrangements of genes, and mutations in genes, have given rise to a qualitatively different being.

If we think of the generations of warfare in this manner rather than believing that they occur on separate sides of singularities in time, we will be able to see how next-generation warfare might already be forming now.  The tactics and strategies of 5GW are already occurring as shifts in ground realities occur.  Heck, I’ve also already contemplated the role of pundits in 5GW.  Thunder Pig and I may be having the same dream, but it’s a response to ground realities we have both witnessed from different perspectives, across different domains:   It is consilient thinking in action — or metaphorizing the objective world, looking for the thing behind the things.


UPDATE: It seems that Purpleslog has already met the Thunder Pig, in much the same way: by being linked by him. Amazing how quickly a meme can spread…

Filed in The Vault and tagged William Lind, xGW