Polling the Intelligentsiasphere
As my first return post after more than a month, I’d like to ask a question of whatever regular readers remain with D5GW:
What are the key concepts/terms for the immediate future (next 50 years) and consequently for the fifth generation of warfare?
Among the obvious candidates, I have one answer which I think may well usurp the others or at least work in a consilient way with them. (Ha, and it’s not consilience!)
Follow-up posts will address the suggested answers; and you are welcome to preempt me by addressing your answers on your own blog if you blog.
Filed in The Vault and tagged Primary Concepts, Survey, Terminology
swarn, secrecy, structure, system
Correlation of Forces, Economy of Force, Indirection
Observation, Orientation, Decision, Action
Complexity, Orientation, Stability, Context, Deception, Cognition
I think dan and shane present more than enough terms for now though I'd add Disruption and Oblivious Complicity to the mix.
I'd also present the increasing disparity between the assymetric/COIN advocates and the cold war/netcen Stoics as something to be watched.
Not consilience, then surely not resilience either. How about "hyperpolarity" - originally from Moises Naim AFAIK, and I was reminded of it by the small-state discussion at Zenpundit.
Hmmm...I was thinking in terms of "offloading", which seems to hit every corner of the future.
Add co-optation, self-organizing, and black swan to the list.
I'd also like to point out something. Curtis is talking about the 'immediate' future, and then clarifies that to be 50 years. 50 years is a generational time-frame. Our grandchildren will be close to our age in 50 years.
How about the terms tactical, operational, strategic and grand strategic. I think these terms need to be better understood when applied to the planning horizon of 5GW.
I might also add interaction and identity to Arherring's co-optation and self-organization.
Arherring's right: we need a fundamental reassessment of temporal terms that, in my opinion, are taken for granted. In particular, is it still useful to discriminate between "tactics", "operations", "strategy" and "grand strategy"?
A British chess grandmaster (I can't recall his name, maybe Nigel Short?) once said "Tactics is what you do when you're doing something; strategy is what you do when you're doing nothing."
I've long had an issue with the knee-jerk reflex by many military theorists (esp. in the defense transformation community) to focus on the "operational level of war". However, that "level" -- with its antecedents in Napoleon's model of command and limitations in staff communications -- is fast becoming anachronistic at best. At worst, it is a rationale for bloated staff organizations....
Is it still valid to discriminate temporally between "tactics" and "strategy"? Or does 5GW remove the space-time dimensions from the battlespace in favor of purely cognitive domains?
Shane, Arherring: I think you may be on to something.
Singularity, of the Kurzweilian bent. I'll second the Black Swan.
Perhaps the multi-level hierarchy of war (tact, op, strat, grand strat) dilates under symmetric/bipolar conditions and the operational level of war emerges; and then folds away under asymmetric/unipolar conditions.
Here are a few (I missed this post the before):
demographics
Cognitive goods
http://zenpundit.com/?m=20070904
Opportunity Science
http://www.businesspundit.com/50226711/the_emerging_field_of_opportunity_science.php
Leverage Factors
http://purpleslog.wordpress.com/2007/09/17/leverage-factors/
http://www.dreaming5gw.com/2007/09/leverage_factors.php
Loyalties (people,systems, ideas)
Economy of Action and Force
Game Theory aka Deep Strategy
Quantum Computing
The Ideological civil war in the West
http://www.hudson.org/files/publications/idealogical_war.pdf
Effect of longer Life Spans / Longevity / transhunmanism
network orientation and self-organization
transnationalism
Fairness: Opportunity based or outcome based?
Poltical Islam and the 21st Century World