Dreaming 5GW

(This is part of a series of posts exploring what I consider to be the essential principles of 5GW.)

I. Hands in the Field

Early Mentions

I think that my earliest use of the phrase “hands in the field” in conjunction with the theory of 5GW may have been in a Q & A response to an early criticism of the theory of 5GW:  “Where is the ‘war’ part?” (October 14, 2006):

If we really want to engage in 5GW, we shouldn’t be talking about how 5GW is a manipulation of free will. We should be declaring that individual freedom is essential to victory.

No and yes. Do you want terrorists to have individual freedom? This talk of freedom — platitudes, really — may well be essential for 5GW, simply because a people that is being told, “We are manipulating you!” will prove less pliable. Make them believe they have absolute freedom to act: Yes, of course. Convince them they have the power to change the world…because changing the world will require a lot of hands in the field.

although the idea behind the phrase began to take form earlier.
 
Soon after, in a comment on the blog ZenPundit (13 November, 2006) I referenced an entry on my now-defunct blog Phatic Communion in which I’d found fault with President Bush’s use of the terrorism threat.  Regardless of the actual number of active anti-American terrorists roaming the world,

For each terrorist, there is at least one American standing in opposition.

The problem is: GWB’s rhetoric has been disempowering individual Americans; whereas, in 5GW, you gain hands in the field by empowering your (perhaps unwitting) agents. And we will probably need to move into the next generation of warfare if we are going to win this Long War — before our enemies do (as you have already pointed out.)

In other words, at the time I meant:   no reason exists for believing Americans should live — pragmatically — in fear of the terrorists since — pragmatically — any given American could do what any given terrorist might do, or do better, and there are so many more Americans than there are anti-American terrorists.  That was a rough statement of an idea I’d been trying to work into usefulness.  This was a meme circulating at the time, particularly by critics of the GWB method of population mobilization.  (“Shop and we won’t drop!”)

Subsequent discussions expanded the idea.  At D5GW-contributor Dan tdaxp’s blog, one commenter named Ron contributed a quote by T.E.Lawrence during a discussion of the OODA Loop (February 12, 2007):

“Do not try to do too much with your own hands. Better the Arabs do it tolerably than that you do it perfectly. It is their war, and you are to help them, not to win it for them. Actually, also, under the very odd conditions of Arabia, your practical work will not be as good as, perhaps, you think it is.”

and I responded,

The quote from Lawrence is interesting. In fact, the idea can be used to better understand the ‘hands in the field’ dynamic of 5GW: Get others to do the work altering the perceptions in the necessary ways.

Under another tdaxp post, one exploring the issue of patriotism (March 15, 2007), I suggested that remaining patriotic in the jingoistic with-us-or-against-us manner would be ineffective for the 5GW operator, while incorporating two more ideas:

Now, of course you might say that we can love them while hating their nation, also while loving our own nation as patriots; but this in-depth loving that would seek to “embrace and extend” in order to co-opt so many hands in the field, working the system from multiple sides, might require that we embrace whatever national identity they have — even while we try to extend it into becoming something else.

I had been influenced by Dan’s recent consideration of the “Embrace and Extend” tactic.  (March 13, 2007) — and by Thomas P.M. Barnett, too, who frequently uses the idea of “co-opting” to win.

The Inefficiency of One Hand Clapping

A recent series of posts helped to inspire me to begin this series on the principles of 5GW with Hands in the Field.  In my first post on my new blog, I let off some steam concerning the “greening” of Twitter which is ostensibly meant to help the dissidents of Iran.  I labeled the effort 4GW.

Two other bloggers have added to the consideration.  In “Media Spectacles, Michael Jackson, and Iran,”  D5GW contributor Adam Elkus concludes that effective mobilization of the Iranian dissidents will depend much more on what happens in Iran and locally than on whether Americans are paying attention, and that any info-war effort will need to be aware of the possibilities of an MJ-type black swan squashing that effort.  Joseph Fouche, meanwhile, goes into some depth to understand the power structure of the “Twitter War: Now With Tasty Frosting”:

Twitter is a dimension of power characterized by low resistance and low persistence. It is a target of power primarily because it’s a medium of power through which a war of influence could be waged. It is not the goal. Control of Twitter does not bring you into the zone of realization. Twitter is only a medium of power, a zone of application. The target of power, the zone of realization, is any force sufficient to bring kinetic power to bear on the regime. That didn’t happen because the medium was mistaken for the target.

These considerations returned me to an exploration of 5GW which predates my use of the term “hands in the field” but nonetheless laid the groundwork for it.  One of the seminal early considerations of 5GW, written by Dan tdaxp, introduced the idea of the importance of secrecy to a 5GW effort (indeed, this blog is named after that post), and that concept ultimately led me to write a series of posts in an effort to understand how, exactly, 5GW would be conducted.  To summarize:  1) no war effort would be worth the effort if the world was not actually changed by it, 2) every change to the world is an actual, physical change or it is not a change whatsoever, and 3) every actual concrete effect is observable, if not directly then through a type of forensics, or indirectly; and so 4) this concept of “secrecy” in 5GW needed an update.

As a side note, yet a relevant example, Adam Elkus recently considered the Western impulse to love the SEI renegade — just before squashing him. (RTJ)   In other words, open and direct activity invites retaliation.

From that chain of thought, then, sprang many other implications, all of which led back to the idea of “hands in the field.”

Indirection, for instance, or operating at several degrees away from final outcomes, would help maintain secrecy; multiple domains would need to be shaped to create 4th, 5th, etc., order effects.  (Direct action is quite traceable.)

Such manipulation would require many actors; but many actors would not act, or would act contrary to the war effort, if they knew they were being manipulated.  Thus, the 5GW effort would be strengthened via co-option:  let self-interest motivate those being utilized as “hands in the field.”

A winning 5GW would seek an outcome which is lasting, i.e. a strong and resilient system, and this would also require that those living within any newly created or newly modified system consciously or unconsciously continue to maintain that system — rather than consciously or unconsciously form groups to bring it down.  (They must remain the 5GW effort’s “hands in the field”.)

In one variation of the argument, even enemies would be made hands in the field via co-option, simply because wiping them out would be impossible and leaving them to run wild would threaten the 5GW effort.

One might then ask why those participating in the greening of Twitter are not, after all, conducting 5GW, since so many are participating.

Joseph Fouche answered that question well:

Khamenei, in the words of Zenpundit, is a political valet interested in this life. He is interested in concrete power. The opposition would only ever triumph if they attracted government elements who could present a sufficient physical counter-force to Khamenei’s forces. As of yet, that has not happened. Twitter War would have to…

    * Trigger internal forces to side with the opposition.

Or.

    * Trigger external forces to intervene on the side of the opposition.

…in order to actually reach the zone of realization with any impact.

Khamenei has to date been more focused on the physical, actual world plane than have the Twit supporters who have managed to garner support from other Twit greeners or, in the case of those dissidents in Iran, from other dissidents in Iran or sympathizers abroad.  In other words, nothing has really changed.  Greeners, whether Iranian or Western users of Twitter, were already opposed to the Iranian Regime.

As I expressed in Skirting the Metaverse, the changing of an icon to green may seem like a great action of support — the beating of paths into highways in the field — but it is more appropriately the sound of multiple people clapping one hand in the effort to increase the volume of their outrage.  We should not presume to know all that is happening within Iran or in the West that will have an actual effect on the outcome — I even mentioned a relatively ridiculous possible MJ-5GW-related interpretation of the Twitterverse — and so I would admit the possibility that every Twit greener has been co-opted in some 5GW fashion. They would be the 5GW hands in the field, not the 5GW operators themselves, but only if the increase in volume/noise was the work — action — required by the 5GW operators. 

While some thought has been given to the possibility of stand-alone superempowered actors conducting a type of destructive, system-perturbing 5GW, one is hard-pressed to define success on the basis of outcomes.  System perturbation on the order of Armageddon (and some do like to see that far) would be psychopathy rather than a warfare effort; and anything less would invite extraordinary retribution upon the SEI actor or group.

For any warfare effort to be considered 5GW, the utilization of “hands in the field” — i.e., massive co-option and not mere tribal bonding — will be key.



I. Introduction
II. Principles of 5GW:  Hands in the Field
III. Principles of 5GW:  Evolved EBO

Filed in The Vault and tagged Co-optation, Hands in the Field, Principles of 5GW