@SKYDOG @Boilerbuck I have no "informed" opinon to either accept or reject we are really in the fifth generation of warfare, but the "very, very little" (almost non-existent) I've read it has elements we recognize to some degree...although I really don't know what it is other than to recognize "some" see it as a reality in their mind.
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"This, according to Lind and his co-authors, brought us to the late-20th century, when the nation-state began to lose its monopoly on war and military combat returned to a decentralized form. In this era—the era of
fourth-generation warfare—the lines between "civilian" and "military" become blurred, armies tend to engage in counter-insurgency operations rather than military battles, and enemies are often motivated by ideology and religion, making psychological operations more important than ever.
But, some argue, we have now entered a new era of warfare, namely
fifth-generation warfare. There is still much debate about what defines fifth-generation warfare, how we know we are engaged in it, or even if it exists at all (Lind, for one, rejects the concept). Various scholars have made their own attempts at defining fifth-generation warfare (5GW), like Dr. Waseem Ahmad Qureshi, who
identifies it as "the battle of perceptions and information," or Qiao Liang and Wang Xiangsui of the People's Liberation Army, who write of the era of "
Unrestricted Warfare" in which "a relative reduction in military violence" has led to "an increase in political, economic, and technological violence."
If academic debates about the changing nature of warfare are your thing, then there's plenty of reading for you to do on the subject, from
The Handbook of 5GW: A Fifth Generation of War? to a
slew of academic articles.
But for the purposes of this editorial, I'm not interested in that debate. In fact, we're going to use a decidedly non-academic definition of fifth-generation warfare from
an Al Jazeera article as our starting point: "
The basic idea behind this term [fifth-generation warfare] is that in the modern era, wars are not fought by armies or guerrillas, but in the minds of common citizens."
There are two important things to note about this definition. The first is that fifth-generation warfare is not waged against either standing armies of nation-states or guerrilla insurgents but against everyday citizens. The second is that this war is not being fought in a battlefield somewhere, but in the mind.
I will expand the definition somewhat to include the fact that this war is being waged at all levels, not just the mental. The gist of it is this: Fifth-generation warfare is an all-out war that is being waged against all of us by our governments and the international organizations to which they belong. It is being waged against each and every one of us right now, and it is a battle for full-spectrum dominance over every single aspect of your life: your movements and interactions, your transactions, even your innermost thoughts and feelings and desires. Governments the world over are working with corporations to leverage technology to control you down to the genomic level, and they will not stop until each and every person who resists them is subdued or eliminated.
The most incredible part of all of this is that so few know that the war is even taking place, let alone that they are a combatant in it.
The best way to understand this war is to look at some of the ways that it is being waged against us.
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