Fifth Generation Warfare

In recent years, military thinkers have been focused on "fourth-generation" warfare – that is, conflicts over ideas, waged by ad-hoc warriors. Compare that to industrialized "third-generation" warfare fought with bullets and bombs by traditional armies over land and resources. The U.S. and its allies are advanced at 3GW and have growing capabilities in 4GW. Today, however, we are being attacked by a multi-prong Fifth Generational War model. 5GW is new and is already in full force after Russia is credited with the first organized implementation on a large scale in the Ukraine.

Consider isolated incidents that occur every year such as mass shootings, police incidents, race involved events, etc. Nothing new is happening but these events are becoming a target of severe scrutiny used to sow discord. There has never been a time in our nation's history where minorities have been treated more equally, or when police have been better trained or held more accountable; organized control has become more strict, yet the media would imply the opposite.

The polarization of the political and social landscape exists on purpose. The discord among various opinionated groups is an intent of the enemy. Life, freedom, resources, acceptance of all races, law enforcement, economy, etc. are overall far more advanced and and progressive than that of other nations. This country will not fall from the outside, but can only collapse from within. Our adversaries know this. 5GW is the only attack means capable of effecting long-term damage on the US.

5GW, or Fifth Generation Warfare, has become an emerging threat to global stability. It's a tactic already employed by U.S. adversaries that have brought us into a Third World War. So what is 5GW? Fifth-generation warfare (5GW) is warfare that is conducted primarily through non-kinetic military action, such as social engineering, misinformation, propaganda, and cyberattacks, along with emerging technologies such as artificial intelligence and fully autonomous systems. Fifth generation warfare has sometimes been described as a war of "information and perception". According to Marine Lt. Col. Stanton Coerr, "The battlefield will be something strange – cyberspace, or the Cleveland water supply, or Wall Street's banking systems, or YouTube. The mission will be instilling fear, and it will succeed". Fifth generation warfare is an attempt to accomplish strategic objectives through the use of propaganda and information attack vectors. It's carried out by unknown actors for unknown reasons. Even if the core enemy is identified, the victim nation will not be able to understand the purpose or end goal. The space in which 5GW is carried out is still evolving and due to the victim organization or nation being unaware of the where, why, and how, it's not possible to counter until harm has already been inflicted.

Decision Dominance is the ability to create and use intelligence in order to command the cognitive mission space. The difficulty is defining what that mission space is exactly. The opponent will be much more ambiguous and warfare becomes an insidious creep designed to degrade from within. This could be by infiltration within a political party, a major news corporation, or social media sphere by an activist-driven agenda.

The U.S. is in possession of the most advanced and powerful military in human history. There isn’t a country or collection of countries on the planet that could stand against the might of the US armed forces. Civilians, even armed and organized ones, stand even less of a chance. One way to successfully engage with overwhelming military might is to adopt asymmetric guerilla tactics in non-tangible spaces such as the internet and media. 5GW is decentralized, non-hierarchal structures using political, economic, social and military power to attack the enemy through whatever vector available.

Historically, wars are ended with treaties, signings, and declarations, but where wars begin is often much more ambiguous. It's become evident that war has already begun. We're slowly realizing we're under attack.

The key to success in such a period of change and persistent conflict is an agile strategic approach that relies on a wide array of capabilities. Accordingly, the U.S. must review and adjust its national strategies, war-fighting concepts, and force structures. The nation must be able to adaptively and effectively combine these new capabilities to prevail in the hybrid conflicts that will dominate the near to mid-term future.