We Are in a World War. It Is a Fifth Generation War
“All warfare is based on deception.” -Sun Tzu, The Art of War
“Political tags – such as royalist, communist, democrat, populist, fascist, liberal, conservative, and so forth – are never basic criteria. The human race divides politically into those who want people to be controlled and those who have no such desire.” -Robert A. Heinlein, The Notebooks of Lazarus Long
“There’s class warfare, all right, but it’s my class, the rich class, that’s making war, and we’re winning.” -Warren Buffett
Most people, even today, associate war with armies, rifles, bullets, and bombs—maybe aircraft carriers or submarine torpedoes. Those are all still around, of course, but are far from the whole story. Most don’t know the whole story because they’ve never studied fourth generation warfare, much less fifth generation warfare.
Fourth generation warfare came about when it was realized that nuclear weapons rendered high-level, command-and-control (third generation) warfare obsolete. Especially since today’s nuclear arsenals would make what was dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki look like cherry bombs by comparison. All-out nuclear strikes would turn both combatants’ territories into uninhabitable wastelands. Neither Rome on the Potomac nor Rome in Moscow wanted that. This might be the real reason a third generation World War III between the U.S. and the Soviet Union was avoided.
But it doesn’t follow that there was no state of war between the two. It was just fought with different methods and different weapons.
War came to involve espionage, infiltration, and subversion from within, utilizing information and disinformation including efforts to undermine the enemy’s history, education, and culture. Not that such efforts were new, but they were repositioned and assumed new prominence. Fourth generation action is less centralized. Violence is ratcheted down, and when used, consists of guerrilla operations and/or insurgencies instead of all-out attacks. Insurgents are often non-state actors (“terrorists”) with non-state targets, dissolving the distinction between combatants and citizens. There is also the occasional political assassination.
Strategists behind such operations use psychology. The point of fourth generation warfare is not to win through military conquest but by weakening the enemy’s resolve until he either ceases fighting or gives up without a fight.
It is now clear from declassified materials that the Soviets were using such tactics in the 1950s and 1960s. Someday, someone in a position to do so might find it in himself or herself to issue an apology to the ghost of Sen. Joseph McCarthy, although I’m not holding my breath. For among the tricks in the fourth generation arsenal are efforts to create and exploit divisions in enemy ranks, so that the enemy turns against his own. Those trying to expose danger find themselves savaged, often on “moral” grounds. Anyone here old enough to remember, “Have you no shame, Senator?!”
Nearly all wars since the late 1940s have involved substantial fourth generation tactics. Vietnam was lost because the U.S. lost the will to fight.
The Iraq invasion of 2003 was third generation, since we had a vastly superior force. But the year-long demonizing of Saddam Hussein in Western mass media prior to that assault was fourth generation.
https://newswithviews.com/we-are-in-a-world-war-it-is-a-fifth-generation-war/
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