What is 5th Generation Warfare (5GW)? — James Corbett

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 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.”

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