Against William Lind, Against John Robb, in favor of 5GW
Abbott, Dan. "Against William Lind, Against John Robb, in favor of 5GW." Dreaming 5GW. October 30, 2006. http://www.dreaming5gw.com/2006/10/against_william_lind_against_j.php (accessed September 10, 2009).
Dan of the blog tdaxp, contributor to the blog Dreaming 5GW, suggests two problems with the way 5GW theory has been approached, singling out William Lind and John Robb as examples.In the first case, “worthless academic philosophy” may swamp the theory of 5GW making it similarly worthless. As an example, Dan suggests that William Lind’s use of the idea of a “dialectically qualitative shift” to describe succeeding Generations within GMW theory has “shades of Hegelian-Marxist-Dialectic b.s. about it.”
In the second case, Dan uses John Robb as an example of those who would latch onto, and attempt to co-opt, the phrases 5GW or fifth-generation warfare as buzzwords upon which they can place their own pre-existing theories: “These writers seek to use deception to push their own agenda, by hijacking a more respected and developed theory’s terminology to push their own.”
Dan suggests a safeguard against both “these twin evils of academic theosophy and marketing buzzwordspeak”: by using G in xGW to describe a scale measuring “the kinetic intensity of conflict.” 0GW, then, would be the most violent — genocidal — and, at the other end of the scale, 5GW would be the least kinetically intense.
In giving such a structure, it is implied that a rational, verifiable framework for xGW would safeguard the theory from haphazard and opportunistic uses.
Links to:
On 0GW:
“It seems to be that “G” measures the kinetic intensity of conflict, which every new G being approximately 20 times less intense than the one below it.
This holds up under a first analysis. Pre-Modern Warfare (the Zeroth Generation of Modern Warfare, “0GW,” about 0Gs) is unremittingly genocidal. If the AD 1900s had the same fatality-from-war rate as the 6000s BC, we should have seen something like two billion war deaths. We might say that form the dawn of man to the dawn of agriculture war meant from measuring around 0.1 Gs on the kinetic intensity scale to .9 Gs.
Or think of it another way: 0G Warfare focuses on ending an enemy’s ability to fight by killing their men.”
This holds up under a first analysis. Pre-Modern Warfare (the Zeroth Generation of Modern Warfare, “0GW,” about 0Gs) is unremittingly genocidal. If the AD 1900s had the same fatality-from-war rate as the 6000s BC, we should have seen something like two billion war deaths. We might say that form the dawn of man to the dawn of agriculture war meant from measuring around 0.1 Gs on the kinetic intensity scale to .9 Gs.
Or think of it another way: 0G Warfare focuses on ending an enemy’s ability to fight by killing their men.”
On 4GW:
“By the time we get to 4G Warfare almost none of the battle is in the field, but in the minds of men who will live regardless. “
On 5GW:
“This 5GW we talk of seems to be even more mental and less physical, seeking to leave the men, material, and even will of the enemy essentially unchanged. If kinetic intensity is seen as morally bad, then every new G is a moral improvement. 5GW may truly be “moral war,” compared to everything that has come before.”
Filed in Blog Post and tagged X vs X, xGW vs GMW