William Lind on 5GW

So eyes could see far enough to entertain the 4th generation? Oddly dismissive. Perhaps Lind sees the 5GW vision as an usurper of his own theories? Again, odd.

Keep 4GW open to be anything that happens, always-becoming; 4GW will then represent the end of history, the ultimate entropy; Lind will be the prophet of Ever-more.

But it also means that he’s simply not sufficiently developed his 4GW theory. If he had, the “vital, unexplored parts” would not be unexplored, and the mysterious “central elements manifesting themselves” would have been anticipated. It’s like Global Guerrillas (which, according to Robb, Lind has called 4GW — contrary to Robb’s calling GG 5GW) in that fuzziness now produces perfect 20/20 vision later.

Notice also how these things will be self-manifesting for the 20/20 hindsight: no call to develop warfare consciously and purposively in order to defeat those already fighting 4GW. Just wait, watch, declaim, and accept the award after others have done that.

I do think though that there is more to 4GW then just advanced/evolved guerrilla warfare by a non-state on a state.

I think the the book Unrestricted Warfare shows that 4GW should be considered Full Spectrum Warfare that can be state vs state, state vs non-state, or non-state vs non-state.

As longs as Lind leaves 4GW under-defined, he can’t conceive of 5GW…because every new is 4GW to him. He will be left behind.

The 4GW theory must move beyond Lind.

Hmmm…can we engage Lind in a Q&A my mail?

Or how about…a conference call discussion recorded and published as a podcast?

I’m sure that Lind has much to offer, even with the lack of definition….however, the goal is really to isolate enemies’ strategies and tactics in order to counter (or co-opt!) and create a better system (which some call “Victory.”) Leaving 4GW so open to future definition means being reactive and perpetually reflective rather than pro-active; so the notion of leaving it that open bugs the hell out of me. True, we need to keep an eye on the development of strategy and tactics our enemies might use; but it’s time to define the enemies and refine our own approach even if 5GW is ‘merely’ an advanced 4GW to defeat them in Lindian terms.

This reminds me of the criticism of Hammes both Arherring and I made.

Curtis,

I agree completely.

Though he didn’t mention it in his talk today, Lind is a dialectalist who believes in the process of thesis/antithesis/synthesis. 4GW is currently synthesizing, and the reason we can’t see beyond it is that 4GW’s antithesis hasn’t appeared yet.

Nice and infalsifiable.

Purpleslog,

That would be cool!

I think the main difference is that Lind looked back to see 4GW and its predecessors. In that, he saw how each generation arose to fight the previous generation (luring him into the what I see as a fallacy of assigning specific time frames to each generation based on the evolution of military thought in the West). We, on the other hand, are looking forward, into the future, and into the realm of the possible, to find that which will defeat 4GW (besides another 4GW).
I have noticed that Lind in the last few years has been prone to make sweepingly dismissive statements regarding ideas that he either reasons cannot be as insightful as his own, or in some way are impossible to fit into his personal paradigm (His review of Barnett’s BFA for example). It might be a mental short-cut but I think the origin of that practice is that Lind looks back to assign a narrative to what has happened. He is very good at it, and there is much merit to the xGW framework because of it, but as a result he is in some ways blinded to what is possible in the future because it, by definition, lacks a narrative and without a narrative he doesn’t see it.

On a different note, according to the program Col. Hammes was also to be a part of this discussion. What were his thoughts, and the thoughts of others on the panels or in discussions? Or are you saving them for seperate posts?

I waent to the Richards / Osinga (which ended up being the Zinnii / Van Riper) break-out session. I know Mark went to the Lind-Hammes debate — perhaps he will post more on that.

Hammes didn’t really delineate 5GW at the tactical/operational/strategic levels or anything. He did say that he sees something coming and directly disagreed with Lind on the possibility/inevitability of 5GW. As with his article “…5th Emerges” he raised the spectre of Bio/Nano threats as the vector it will ride in on. Depending on how those areas are developed and utilised they could certainly be its vanguard. That’d also be in keeping with the ‘hidden movements’ sketch that Dan has put out there and that I very much agree with. (High Five!) If 2 billion people died from an engineered outbreak and nobody claimed responsibility or was caught, then I’d say the Hammes and Dan combo hit the mark for 5GW. The abject horror in the wake of such an event would most likely move people even further from states, past primary loyalties, to simple self-preservation. The ‘Lindian’ moral sphere would cease to be relevant by that point. I’m not sure that Hammes sees it this way, or in these terms. It rather sounded like super-robust 4GW. But, maybe that was just me. Nonetheless, Hammes (and I just finally finished The Sling and the Stone) seems open-minded and still intellectually curious enough to not write anything off.
Isaac

Lind and Robb both have the open ended type theories that I think we all find very useful, but somehow lacking in rigor.

Would it be a helpful for this discussion of 5GW to hammer out a solid working framework of the generations? I know we’ve made attempts at defining 5GW, but it might be more solid if we had tighter definitions of the previous generations.