I found three 5GW related posts on Mitchell Langbert’s Blog.
In the first, he references another post mostly. His juices go flowing and two minutes later he posted Fifth Generation Warfare: 4GW No Longer Applies and wrote:
The model of 4th generation warfare as enunciated by Thomas Hammes and others is rooted in the insurgencies that Mao led in China and Ho Chi Min led in Vietnam.
[...]
However, the insurgencies he describes are mostly communist or leftist and prevailed in the age of radio and television. Such insurgencies were not Islamic, and pre-existed technological innovations that have occurred since the days of the Vietnam War, namely, the internet and cellular phones.
…then…
New technology, Islamic values and relations radically change the implications of Hammes’s strategic model. In some ways, Islamic culture makes fifth generation conflict more like pre-modern warfare.
I could not find his definition…so it his def may be the default “that thing that comes after 4GW”.
There is a nudge toward a definition at the end:
In particular, the interactivity of Islamic belief with military action means that a more total approach to war might be necessary than it would be with insurgencies that are built on shorter term loyalties to the personalities of specific leaders. 4GW may be passe.
This seems to moving toward Arherring’s working definition:
An emergent theory of warfare premised upon manipulation of multiple
economic, political, social and military forces in multiple domains to
effect positional changes in systems and achieve a consilience of
effects to leverage a specific goal or set of circumstances.
Two more minutes later he wrote in The Need for Counter-4GW:
If Lind, Hammes and other advocates of 4GW are right, it seems to me that the response will not come from the state, which is bound by special interest groups. Rather, it needs to come from private individuals who respond to the terrorists’ 4GW with counter-4GW. This would involve standing up to the media and our leaders who are motivated by personal interest in responding to special interest group pressure rather than the national welfare.
I think 5GW responses by citizens to shortcoming in their state’s response to 4GW will emerge (if they haven’t already).
[Cross-posted to Dreaming 5GW]
Filed under: 5GW
