UNTO THE FIFTH GENERATION OF WAR
” …each new generation required developments across the spectrum of society. Technological change alone has never been sifficient to produce a major change in how man wages war. It requires a complete societal change- political, economic social and technological – to create the conditions necessary for major changes in war “
– Colonel Thomas X. Hammes, The Sling and the Stone.
William Lind, one of the fathers of 4GW theory has welcomed yet cautioned against attempts to ascertain with too much precision any outlines of a 5th Generation Warfare that might be evolving within the dynamic of 4GW conflicts we see in Iraq, Afghanistan and in transnational terrorism. Yet according to theorists and practitioners of 4GW like Colonel Hammes, that form of warfare, although just now coming in to its own has already been present for some seventy years ! Undoubtedly then 5GW is also here with us, waiting for the next Mao or Rommel to fit the disparate puzzle pieces into a coherent pattern.
4GW advocates disdain an overemphasis on particular technological breakthrough, criticizing in particular the Network-centric Warfare theory developed by Admiral Arthur Cebrowski . Or at least the celebration of high-tech warfare capabilities by some of Cebrowski’s followers in the Pentagon ( for a critique of both schools shaping of current policy, see ” The Pentagon’s Internal war Over what Iraq Means” by Dr. Barnett ). Therefore, I will generally accept some major premises of 4GW theory as articulated by Hammes in speculating about the parameters of 5GW, specifically:
1. Generational changes in warfare requires complete societal change.
2. Practitioners of warfare drove the evolution of warfare by seeking solutions to practical problems
3. Each succeeding generation reaches deeper in to enemy territory to defeat him.
The first question we should ask are what changes are driving society, nationally and globally ? Very briefly at the planetary level we have Globalization – an acceleration of the rate and degree of complexity of all forms of exchange ( in PNM theory Barnett’s “ Four Flows“); Post-Westphalianization – the rise of International, Transnational, Subnational and Non-state Actor challengers to the sovereign primacy of the Nation-State; and finally, State-Failure or severe State dysfunction where the ability of a State to constrain and police anarchic, nihilistic and disconnective forces is overwhelmed by post-Westphalian challengers, economic collapse and natural disasters.
Additionally, in the scientific and economic realm, the drivers of future societal changes in the next twenty to fifty years would most likely come from the following fields – Artificial Intelligence, Genomics, Alternative Fuels, Quantum Computing, Human Brain Research, Complexity and Chaos Theory, Nanotechnology and String Theory. it is impossible to assume the implications of any one of these fields over such a long timeline, much less all these fields in combination but what is a safe assumption is that the magnitude of changes that are coming will be very significant and result in substantial economic, social and political transformations.
In sum the global trends I have listed have in my view some fairly direct logical implications for warfare, already visible even today:
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