Toward a Better Understanding of 4GW

Vis-a-vis my remarks on the thread “Winning a Hockey 5GW”:

For some time now, I’ve had in the back of my head the thought that much of the way media is consciously used in America, and often subconsciously effective, is fundamentally 4GWish. I include the ‘-ish’ because I think there may be some confusion once we begin to consider generations of politics and generations of economics: 4GP, 4GE, and so forth — I would forgo doing so and simply lump them into 4GW, although I think some others would not like my manner of lumping them into one category.

Most strongly: We can see in politics the unspoken awareness of 4GW campaigns being conducted largely through media effects. Just in the last two days, when Hillary Clinton was asked whether Barack Obama is ‘qualified to be President,’ she hemmed and hawed and avoided answering the question. Rather than be some sort of 5GW effort to utilize the media, her hesitation was the result of an understanding that answering either way would give potential opponents a basis for conducting a 4GW attack. Yes, he is unqualified, would give opponents (whether fellow Democrats running for the same office or Republicans) another example of the ‘Hillary is just another arrogant Democrat / Clinton’ meme; He is qualified, would lend moral support to the Obama campaign.*  Her refusal to answer the question — just one example of a longtime standard in politics, and more so since the rise of television as a force in politics — is analogous to the effort by American troops to never give 4GW opponents in Iraq some fodder for media campaigns attempting character assassination of the U.S. foreign policy. [Sadly, examples like the prison sex photo scandal, or of rapes and murders of innocent civilians, have occurred and eroded the character of the American presence anyway.]

In the same way that 4GW fighters try to attack an opponent’s justification for fighting, political campaigns in America attempt to use character assassination to erode the support for that candidate. I know that Mark Safranski has pointed out that some 4GW theorists believe 4GW has been around for 70 or so years already; if true, and if generations of warfare represent a manner of thinking and operating in the world, then we should seriously consider how such thinking has affected other domains and not just warfare in the same time period. I think politicians in America are conditioned to think in a 4GW manner. Similarly, advertising campaigns try to do the same thing: “9 out of 10 doctors choose _________ for their patients” implies that using the other products is unjustifiable while building support of the one being advertised; this sort of campaign is made only stronger when the product packaging from the other products is included in the commercial. (A recent soda ad, I think it was for Diet Pepsi?, uses a Diet Coca-Cola can as a ‘stunt-double’ in car crashes and so forth, thus preserving the ‘better’ Diet Pepsi can.)

I think we must remember that memetic engineering occurs in 4GW, that media is an important tool of 4GW, and not get too carried away in seeing a media campaign and calling it 5GW. In the hockey example, the original linked article takes a very negative stance on the NHL, by calling them bumbling; and how is this different than calling American efforts in Iraq bumbling? A 4GW force may force the hand of its opponent, its opponent may then act in a way that backfires, and this only lends support to the 4GW campaign (its own justification) while eroding the character of its opponent. As the character erodes for the target and gets built up for the 4GW force, others may join in the 4GW campaign. I realize that Dan tdaxp has significantly used the term ‘tactics’ in the title for the post at tdaxp, and that some memetic engineering in the hockey campaign may cause the campaign to seem like 5GW if we extend the similarities while disregarding the dissimilarities; but from my perspective, getting faceless cohorts to buy into the character of Rory Fitzpatrick seems more 4GW than 5GW, particularly since the effort to get him included was an underhanded attack on the character of the All-Star dynamic.  How is such an effort distinguishable from the use of jingoism to build a foreign foe, or of racism to build an internal foe and an internal kinsman, in earlier examples of warfare?

There is this, though:  Because the data will out, politicians in America have learned to tie their tongues, just as Hillary Clinton has.  If a natural defense against potential 4GW character assassination campaigns has naturally arisen, i.e., secrecy — which we have also seen much of in the George W. Bush administration, to preempt potential 4GW campaigns against the White House — then we must wonder if attempts at secrecy to combat 4GW in politics are early examples of an emergent 5GW tactic arising to combat the more prevalent dynamic of 4GW.



UPDATE (fillip):  Mark Safranski of  ZenPundit has been hosting an interesting discussion on the issue of whether nuclear warfare should be considered a “lost generation” of warfare and included in the xGW model: “Downgrading ‘The Unthinkable’ to ‘Thinkable’”.  Some insightful (and some inciting) observations have been made in the comments section.

I made a quick comment with something I had not quite considered before, that the idea of nuclear warfare has been operative rather than actual nuclear warfare (thus nuclear warfare hasn’t crossed the threshold from theory to any sort of identifiable generation of warfare), and as such, the ‘unthinkable’ aspect of actually applying a nuclear warfare strategy made the advent of the nuclear age seem like the dawn of 4GW:

In general then, since it’s really the idea or theory of nuclear war that has been operative, rather than actual nuclear war, the nuke perspective seems rather 4GW. We don’t slaughter Iraqis willy-nilly, because we know our 4GW opponents would use that slaughter in their media campaign to erode our justification for our efforts in Iraq. [e.g.] As such, the dawning of the nuclear age seems to have been the dawning of 4GW.

I don’t make a habit of trying to isolate definite time-line shifts for the generations of warfare — in fact, I believe such an approach obfuscates what actually occurs — so this was a first, and more of a stab at a new thought than a statement of belief.

However, I find this follow-up consideration intriguing:  Given the awesome weight of the nuclear specter in America throughout the 50’s, 60’s, 70’s, and 80’s, a corresponding 4GWish manner of thinking about conflict may have set in.  Direct confrontation between great powers became terrifying; but the use of proxies and memes for doing battle — i.e., indirect conflict, plus a dispersal of smaller operative “forces” — could bypass such massive direct confrontation.   We know what the Cold War was like, of course; and…we know that an establishment of the meme “The Evil Empire” aided Ronald Reagan’s strategy for winning the Cold War.  Evil Empire was more than a concept; it was a moral statement.

Besides the fear of suffering a nuclear attack, some residual guilt over the two actual uses of nuclear weapons — however rationalized — may have abetted the move to 4GWish thinking patterns.  If we could defeat our foes and win our allies through memetic engineering, we would no longer need to kill to win our battles.**  Deterrence became a message: we could rattle sabers to accomplish what negative epithets and American Dreams could not accomplish by themselves.  I also wonder if Vietnam was the death rattle of faith in pure-force warfare; could the Viet Cong not hear our sabers rattling, see our awesome power?  Correspondingly, and ironically, our foes were showing that actual force strength was not all it was cracked up to be:  another blow to the once-dominant concept of winning with direct kinetic force alone.

A class of politicians maturing through those decades may have taken these lessons to heart without understanding exactly what they were learning.  It is amusing for me to wonder if ‘force of argument’ (rational argument) increasingly took a back seat to displays analogous to saber-rattling and moralizing — and that, as such patterns of political conflict grew in prominence, to the exclusion of rational debate, voters developed ‘in tune’ with such conflict, who actually looked for it and expected it.  This process of tuning would have far-reaching consequences:  a polity quite susceptible to 4GW memetic attacks.  And perhaps a political class developed that was incapable of creating a successful warfare strategy dependent on the use of kinetic force — or unwilling to do so (particularly also since the polity would not be able to appreciate such a strategy …)

Well, this update has only been a fillip.  For those sufficiently intrigued:  I once charged George W. Bush with trying to win the war in Iraq by utilizing such 4GW memetic moralizing, in comments on another thread. Even there, I was only brainstorming.

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*Addendum: There could be this possibility, among others: Clinton may not want to give opponents a tool for later attacking her honesty and judgment, if she already has Obama in mind as a running mate.

** Addendum II: Of course, the specter of the entire WWII itself, including the Holocaust, no doubt played a role. The advent of nukes, and their use, was a summation of all that, however, or an ideological avatar.