Corbett: Your Guide To 5th Generation Warfare

We are in the middle of a world-changing war right now.

Oh, I don’t mean the war in Ukraine, the one that all the media are asking you to focus your attention on. Yes, that conflict continues to escalate, and every day there are new stories about provocations and threats that could lead to a nuclear exchange . . . but that’s not the war I’m referring to.

No, the war I’m talking about is an even broader war. A war that is taking place everywhere on the globe, even as I speak, and that involves virtually everyone on the planet, young and old, male and female, military and civilian. It is the war of every government against its own population and every international institution against free humanity.

This is no ordinary war, however. Most of the victims of this warfare aren’t even able to identify it as war, nor do they understand that they are combatants in it.

It’s called fifth-generation warfare, and I’m here to tell you all about it.

I am James Corbett of The Corbett Report and this is Your Guide to Fifth-Generation Warfare

WHAT IS FIFTH-GENERATION WARFARE?

What is fifth-generation warfare, anyway? And, come to think of it, what were the first four generations of warfare?

Good questions. For an in-depth answer to the latter question, you’ll want to read “The Changing Face of War: Into the Fourth Generation“—a 1989 article from the Marine Corps Gazette co-authored by William S. Lind—and you’ll want to watch “William S. Lind & Philip Giraldi – Fourth Generation Warfare & The Deep State.”

WILLIAM S. LIND: This city and every capital in the world is completely oblivious to the fact that it is caught up in a change in warfare so great that it not only makes our current defense and foreign policies obsolete, it essentially makes obsolete the whole framework within which we think about defense and foreign policy.

[. . .]

The change is what I call the rise of fourth generation war and this is specifically the fourth generation of modern war. [. . .] We now think of foreign affairs and defense within the framework of the nation-state. Armed forces are designed to fight other state armed forces. But that reality is changing.

[. . .]

What’s happening around the world today in more and more places is that state armed forces find them find themselves fighting not other state armed forces, but fourth-generation forces. Non-state forces.

SOURCE: The State and Modern War

In a nutshell, Lind et al.’s thesis is that the “modern age” of warfare began with the Treaty of Westphalia in 1648, which, Lind opines, “gave the state a monopoly on war.” From that point on, modern warfare went through three generations, namely:

• First-generation warfare: the tactics of line and column, developed in the era of the smoothbore musket;
• Second-generation warfare: the tactics of indirect fire and mass movement, developed in the era of the rifled musket, breechloaders, barbed wire and the machine gun; and
• Third-generation warfare: the tactics of nonlinear movement, including maneuver and infiltration, developed in response to the increase in battlefield firepower in WWI.

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 line 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’re 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 [5GW] 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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