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I culled this from comments to an old post from around Christmas that people may have missed ( I certainly did at first).
Arherring commented:
Deichmans then commented:
Moon commented:
I am not sure if the operational level matters to a 5GW effort. Perhaps in 5GW the Operational level is all about security, deception, hiding, secrecy and survival.
What say you?
Arherring commented:
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.
Deichmans then commented:
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?
Moon commented:
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.I will add to this: is it worthwhile to bring in the other dimensions - Physical, Moral, Mental, and Institutional? I have been thinking of it as a matrix with grand-strategy/strategy/operations/tactics as one axis, and physical/moral/mental/institutional as the other axis.
I am not sure if the operational level matters to a 5GW effort. Perhaps in 5GW the Operational level is all about security, deception, hiding, secrecy and survival.
What say you?
Posted by PurpleSlog on Apr 1, 2008 02:30 AM
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3 Comments
I’m still reviewing / getting caught up with d5gw posts, e.g. I missed your 5gw institutional post, it’s a good one. But since I’m already commenting, I can’t resist a naive, premature thought-dump (on my part, not yours). ;-\
Have you considered dropping (for the time being) your Memetic Engineering, and then attempting to reconcile your remaining 5gw institutional styles with tdaxp’s three?
Regarding the physical, moral, mental, institutional, I can’t help but arrange those tetrahedrally in my head. A rough, naive cut at how to conceptually manipulate those w.r.t. the tactical-strategic scale array is to associate the lower scales (tactical) with *higher* dimensional configurations. e.g. 3 dimensions yields a 2D config, 4 dimensions a 3D. With a temporal compression in the Boyd loop in higher xGW, one loses dimensions in the configuration. So coming from 3gw/4gw, going toward/beyond 5gw, the dimensions converge to a singularity.
To invert the question you’ve posed, what scales of warfare should we be looking for in lower xGW that we hadn’t considered until we started to notice losing some in the compression of higher xGW? Still can’t shake the image of the tetrahedron; can anyone here propose some n-dimensional tessellation whereby the tedrahedron flattens (3D->2D) between some adjacent gens of xGW?
(Like I said, this is all naive and uncut, but I may be consumed by your idea in the near future.)
Moon,
I don’t think mine and TDAXPs are in conflict. Each of my styles could be done using a scheme of TDAXP and vice versa.
Arherring has also been presenting some styles…
http://www.dreaming5gw.com/2008/01/nuts_and_bolts.php
…which I missed when he he first posted. I am digesting it and will try to create a summary document of sorts (but I have been meaning to do something like that for a year).
I have to detail out the Strategic Citizen 5GW Style first though!
Moon:
“Regarding the physical, moral, mental, institutional, I can’t help but arrange those tetrahedrally in my head.”
I am having problems visualizing it (that’s on me). It sounds fascinating though!
Would you be willing to write a guest post and/or create a graphic? I would be more then happy to publish it here at Dreaming 5GW.