The 4GW Festival of Fabius Maximus

[Fabius Maximus]

It's a hot topic by email among some working with military theory, and I've exchanged many dozen notes on the subject. I think this is the very edge of new thinking about war/conflict. But it seems to have a small audience.

As I said on my blog: "In an age of {nukes &} 4GW, conventional war between major powers is unlikely — perhaps obsolete. But political stresses remain a fact of life and must be expressed. Perhaps money has replaced bullets as the new form of combat. WWII was as much a war between competing economies as between armies. Modern financial systems allow us to eliminate bombs as the intermediate step, for pure economic warfare."

From A brief note on the US Dollar. Is this like August 1914?

The first and perhaps most important work in this area was Unrestricted Warfare (1999), written by two PLA Air Force Colonels. They say, in effect, the first war of the new era was the attack by speculators on the SE Asian currencies. This wrecked their economies; people were eating bark. If these hedge funds and other traders were based in, for example, Singapore they would have been politely invited to stop. Now. If they declined, the next measures taken would have been less pleasant.

But they were based in New York and London, attacking behind the shield of western military power. Notice has been taken.

Tom Clancey's Debt of Honor describes commercial aircraft being flown into buildings as weapons. Fact. Will the earlier events in that book -- an geopolitical attack on US stocks and the US dollar, also become fact?

If you find this of interest, start a thread. I might have a few things to say on it.