5GW sounds like semantics to me. Subterfuge, espionage, Machiavelli and Sun Tzu by another name. It's always been fought, it always will be fought. Supposedly, in 5GW the other side won't know we're fighting, but neither could we because that kind of information is hard to keep from the world. Are we talking about shadowy wars fought by elites sworn to secrecy? Great. Sounds like today to me. Sign me up for MI6.
I hope I'm not talking out of my arse here, but I don't believe that integrated battlespace technology has as much to do with the prosecution of next-generation warfare as do cellphones and the internet.
All our overwhelming technology and firepower does is force the enemy to abandon symmetrical warfare, hence 4GW. Our own technology dooms us to failure because the enemy adapts to it easily while we in turn can't adapt to them because we're over-reliant on high-tech. How on earth does the F22 win the kind of conflict Hammes described?
Bill Lind goes on about in terms of forecasting the death of the nation state. I'm not so sure if that's the case, and perhaps nor are you.
H. John Poole has written a lot of handy (slightly nutty) books about 4GW infantry tactics. Keeping in mind that 4GW is defined by the blurring of the boundaries between military and society, one lesson I pulled from Phantom Soldier was that Western states have trouble understanding 4GW because we haven't yet practiced it ourselves. Can you effectively practice 4GW as a state? Well, some states have. Phantom Soldier described the Vietnamese border conflict with China. A good example of the integration of the military and society versus an enemy in a state-on-state conflict.
4GW right now is only visible as a defensive measure. I don't believe anyone has made the leap from defensive to offensive 4GW yet. That's what eludes us. Otherwise, we'd have figured out how to win in Iraq - starting with the elimination of our Huge Defensive Footprint on the ground.
Maybe 5GW is a way of vocalizing our realization that we can't win 4GW because we haven't learned how to alter societies' opinions? How could we win in Iraq? Well, if we could make the Iraqis believe that a secular democracy is the most important thing in their lives and something worth dying for, that would do the trick. How can we achieve that? Well, friggin' telepathy or microwaves into the brains, or some other fancy futuristic warfare mumbo jumbo might do it - although allocating aid money correctly, not torturing prisoners and stamping out corruption would be a start...
Which leads me to:
With all due respect, I've delved into this theoretical stuff for the past five years, and it's all pretty b0ll0cks. Like a bunch of college students debating the relative merits of Marxism <snore>.
We still haven't figured out how do deal with the Iraqi insurgency. I'm incredulous that the powers at the top haven't yet sat down and gone
"How do we minimize the enemy's strengths?"
"Well, we could prevent him from targeting our patrols with IEDs and snipers."
"How do we do that?"
"By sneaking around, blending in, hiding."
"Hmm...you mean out-G'ing the G? Let's do it."
Once we've done that or whatever it takes to win, I'll turn to 5GW. Right now, the only thing I can think about 4GW is how it's Total War by another name, and how we're trying to come up with all sorts of theoretical excuses to avoid having to solve practical realities. Right now. On the ground.
Bookmarks