Of the People, By The People: The Strategic Citizen 5GW Style

• The hardest style to spot or to fathom
• No central planner or leader
• A competitive market of related / competing / supporting memes
• Action by SCs can be directed at their own states or other primary loyalty groups as well as other actors.
• Self-reassuring network
• Resembles a grand conspiracy to an observer. However, there is no vanguard, there is no puppet master.
• Some members of the 5GW SC network may be more influential then others. Call them “charismatic instigators”. They push, nudge, influence and inspire the 5GW. They do not control it or “aim” it. They may not even be aware of it.
• Question: How do you fight or counter a SC 5GW? 1) Recognize; 2) Disrupt / Distract / Co-opt / Expose
• “Expose” is hard for a SC 5GW…and maybe it is a “so what?”
• It is hard to focus or steer a SC 5GW.
• The SC 5GW has will have no grand success, only small victories or small adjustments to: rule-sets, institutions, societies, and culture
• Faces co-option attacks
• Faces coherence weakness
• Faces attention-span weakness. Challenge: How to keep SCs interested and active in the 5GW? Maybe only if a positive feedback loop of sorts emerges in the network.
• Faces focus challenge: How to keep focus, how to not loose focus?
• Question: What is the Center of Gravity of a SC 5GW? Perhaps the attention-span and purposefulness of the SC actors
• Timeframes are longs - messes with observation and orientation of the SC 5GW target(s)
• What about Secrecy? The SC 5GW doesn’t exist. It has no email address. It has not central web site. It has no face or a commandant-hiding-in-a-cave
• Important dimensions of War: mental, moral, and especially the institutional
• It is not clear how the levels of grand strategy, strategy, operational/ grand tactics, and tactics play out. This warrants more thought and a post.
• I think “institutional infiltration” will be a common way of the SC 5GW [this was mentioned in an early TDAXP 5GW Theory post - which I cannot find]
• SC 5GW may make use of Culture Jamming and may focus on Leverage Factors
• In SC 5GW, Kinetics actions are widely dispersed

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Note: This is not the Shloky version of of 5GW.

Shloky has defined 5GW in a superficially similar way as:

5GW is what we label the emergent pattern formed by a distributed multitude of empowered individuals acting in concert by acting in their own self interest, without any collaboration.

Dreaming 5GW co-blogger CGW critiqued this definition:

“Useful theory of warfare” : i.e., the actors have some understanding of what they are wanting to achieve, a theory of the conflict, and that understanding, however it plays out, has a direct correlation with the larger dynamic of the war. These individuals you propose, entirely self-interested and perhaps often unaware of each other, may indeed act in particular and quite different ways, thus causing the larger system to be shaped by what they do, but this is not warfare any more than a flock of seagulls or a collection of atoms or an infestation of roaches.

I furthered critiqued this definition elsewhere:

I think Shloky is saying there is nobody doing the manipulation. These actors just doing things on their own and the result is 5GW. I don’t understand this at all.

As I see it, successful 5GW must look something like: there is some thoughtful human-based actor (heh…no angry volcanoes!) starting at condition A manipulating (via techniques X, Y, Z, etc.) another actor or set of actors across possible domains M, N, O, P, etc. to achieve or get closer to desired end condition B. Yeah, there are alot of blanks to fill in.

Getting to condition B is the goal of the 5GWers. The actors being manipulated either don’t realize what’s going on or are okay with getting there regardless of who is nudging them.

…and…

I don’t see any value in that view. I can’t make predictions on the world and I can’t formulate or suggest policy using that 5GW theory.

…and…

If the results are accidental/coincidental - meaning nobody is trying to achieve them - then that def of 5GW is useless for planning or historical analysis.

I don’t mean it that there to be a Puppet Master behind it (there are other styles of 5GW…I have been too lazy to make those post yet).

You idea of a “common vision of a better world publically shared by many players” would be a possible valid way of having the decentralized actor connected and that possible 5GW style is worth looking into.

That is not what Shloky is suggesting. His 5GW theory idea is that the actors are not connected in anyway, that they are all acting on their own with separate visions and incentives…and that the aggregate end result of their unconnected actions is 5GW.

I am not trying to beat up on Shloky (whose blog I RSS subscribe to)…I just want to be very clear that the Strategic Citizen 5GW Style that is not what he was defining.