Superempowerment: The range of effect for each individual soldier ( or terrorist) will be vastly increased even as the economic costs are driven down by market forces and proliferation of dual-use technology to the civilian consumer.

Fluidity: Globalization makes possible virtual armies that are networks of networks that are both resilient and adaptable in a Darwinian sense.

Multidimensional Battlespace: War occurs in the context of everything else – physical space, cyberspace, the logosphere, financial, legal and societal networks – shaping the battlespace itself to the disadvantage of actual and potential opponents will become crucial aspects of strategy and not merely moving more effectively within it.

Autonomous Surrogates: Active regular military forces are seconded by a variety of substitutes to carry some aspect of the warfighting load – PMC’s, NGO’s, Paramilitary and Subnational networks, International Peacekeeping missions and increasingly, robotic agents.

Todays Predator drones and other prototype UAV are going to evolve and inevitably merge with Ai technology so that we will have, shades of science fiction, autonomous war machines that will have basic programing but also the capacity to learn, make independent decisions, cooperate with one another and adapt to changing circumstances on the battlefield.

These however are simply aspects of the emerging warfare and not the strategic purpose behind such a shift that make one generation of warfare different from its predecessor. The rise of 5GW will represent the solution to defeating 4GW forces in the field and here we come to a very troubling moral possibility.

4GW forces like al Qaida erase the distinction between Combatant and non-combatant and target an enemy’s will to resist, often moving submerged witin society itself as a clandestine network structure. Such forces have proven exceptionally difficult to defeat for traditional militaries and as Colonel Hammes pointed out in The Sling and the Stone, 4GW strategy has allowed inferior forces to defeat even the superpowers.

A strong possibility exists that given successive generations of warfare tend to drive ” deeper” into enemy territory, that 5GW will mean systemic liquidation of enemy networks and their sympathizers, essentially a total war on a society or subsection of a society. There is no where ” deeper” for 5GW to go but here. At the high tech end 5GW would be precisely targeted to winnow out ” the bad guys” in a souped-up version of Operation Phoenix but at the low-tech end we could see campaigns that would be indiscriminate, democidally-oriented death squad campaigns that shred 4GW networks by the same actuarially merciless logic that led the Allies to firebomb German and Japanese cities in WWII.

This is a terrible prospect but there is evidence that 5GW tactics of this kind have defeated 4GW Communist revolution in Guatemala and El Salvador, stymied FARC and ELN in Colombia, beat back Islamists in Algeria and the Kurdish PKK in Turkey. Contravening data would include the Hutu militia genocide in Rwanda designed to eviscerate the ethnic supporters of the Tutsi rebels but instead led to the rebels toppling the Hutu regime and spreading disorder to neighboring states.

My efforts here to outline 5GW are purely speculative. A second potential form of 5GW might be Thomas P.M. Barnett’s ” System Administration” based Global Transaction Strategy to export security and connectivity to the Gap, short-circuiting the political appeal of 4GW movements before they grow out of all control. Or we may see both forms used in tandem and even likelier, some new dynamic currently impossible for us to forsee at all.

What is certain is that 4GW movements like the Iraqi insurgency and al Qaida will drive the evolution of warfare to 5GW as nation-states struggle to find solutions to the strategic problem presented by 4GW enemies and the societal disintegration they bring in their wake.

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