“War is politics by other means” – Carl von Clausewitz
A lot has been written about the nature of war, Sun Tzu penned his tome 6 centuries before Jesus walked the earth. Man has been fighting man since the beginning and a lot of selection pressure has been expended making sure those who are good at war, (or good at avoiding it) have more children. The Generational Warfare Model was discussed in an earlier re-posting of a Marine Corps Gazette article The Changing Face of War: Into the Fourth Generation.
Wars are only fought for two reasons: to impose one’s will on another, or to preserve one’s ability to exercise his will. The scale at which any of these happen can be changed, the motivations, and even some rather complex plays of will and exercise, but the distilled essence is this, everything else is abstraction.
5th Generation Warfare (5GW) has been presented as a new doctrine for non-kinetic war, where the battlefield leans on “information and perception” as a means of shaping behavior. While this is a novel concept, information warfare, propaganda, subterfuge, and deception have been the bread and butter of conventional forces for centuries. The major limitation of any 5GW theory is the at times willful ignorance towards the previous generations and it’s ability to define itself as being distinct.
During WW2 leading up to the D-Day landings, the allied militaries had engaged in a task of convincing the German leadership that a major offensive was coming up, with large amounts of men and materiel, lead by a legendary commander, and would be preceded by a smaller attack in a different place to draw away important resources. While Allied Command spoon fed the information to the Germans, they did so in a way that the German Command ignored their perceptions long enough that a decisive advantage was gained. This was a decidedly kinetic movement, decidedly within the realm of a third generation war, and it was devastating. Under a 5GW approach, would the goal be to just keep the Nazis occupied preparing for an assault that would never come? Continuing to ratchet up the tension?
War will always be kinetic, things will always be damaged. Manipulating the available information, and feeding in other information may shape perception, however the most effective way to do this, is to feed information the confirms existing biases and feeds into the existing perception of the opponent. That Clausewitz quote was a tell.