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Dreaming 5GW Should Stay Dreaming

Dreaming5GW –

We need to safeguard 5GW Theory against these twin evils of academic theossophy and marketing buzzwordspeak

It is too early to start labeling and cutting out ideas. 5GW is an incoherent amalgam of a variety of perspectives. (What exactly is Dan is planning on safeguarding?)

Keep it open. We’re all better off that way.



-Shlok
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5 Comments
  • Dan tdaxp
    Oct 30, 2006

    Do you prefer when terms don’t mean anything?

    Reply
  • John Robb
    Oct 30, 2006

    I can’t understand what he is talking about either. It’s really strange stuff. What the heck does he think he is safeguarding?

    Reply
  • LOL Dan.

    The whole thing is a cloud, and there’s no point in trying to lock one of those up.

    Reply
  • Curtis Gale Weeks
    Oct 30, 2006

    Shloky, I think Dan’s point (part of it) was that the two he mentions have already tried to lock in 5GW. He just disagrees with they way they’ve done it.

    I think Lind’s general thinking on generations is pretty good, although I’ve also argued against seeing a neat division of time periods and the ‘generations.’

    I think Dan’s on an interesting track for G, although I may have been earlier in suggesting the trend toward less kinetic and more non-kinetic operations — albeit, on the subject of skinning the Gap (tying this to 5GW only cursorily).

    Reply
  • Greetings,
    I read most of your blogs regularly – good stuff all around. The interplay and information flow between you guys and a few others (Zen, Purpleslog…) is refreshing both in its depth of thought and tenacity of position. I’m really glad to have stumbled across all of this. I’m a writer at the National Counterterrorism Counterinsurgency Integrated Test and Evaluation Center (NACCITEC) at US Army Yuma Proving Ground (YPG). My background is in Philosophy, UC Berkeley ’97, so I tend to temper my thoughts on all of the GW talk with a smattering of the prominent ancient eastern philosophers as well as with later western world-view, particularly Heidegger. As Shloky may remember, I’ve been doing a lot of close reading in our official military doctrines lately on the subjects of counterterrorism and counterinsurgency. The doctrinal papers provide an interesting jumping off point for me having had no military experience and a rather ‘liberal’ upbringing and ‘progressive’ college experience. A comparison, for example, of FMFM8-2 (Counterinsurgency, c.1973) as against FMFM3-24 (Counterinsurgency, c.2006) illuminates both some shifts in our positions (e.g. funnily/sadly/ironically, our definition of ‘wars of liberation’) and major, major growth in our knowledge and understanding of insurgencies and warfare generally. Sorry for the long intro, there – but I would posit that the ‘background’ to anything is crucial.
    So – generations… I agree that hard and fast cut-offs or biblical-like ‘begats’ don’t acurately portray the situation. There are both overlaps and grey areas. There’s also what I see as ‘feature augment’, borrowed or latent traits appearing intergenerationally. John has written about this. Also, people can be born in the same generation, even in the same family, and exhibit radical differences in world-view, skill-sets, etc. etc. which could even be significant enough to beg cross-characterization generationally. I know a guy that rode a horse to school – out of necessity – well into the ’80s and never saw a black guy before he was 18 and entered the Marine Corps. He was an anachronism, to say the least, but excelled in the Corps. Other influences factor prominently in development. I don’t see the situation as being all too different in the chronology of generations of warfare – or anything else to be typified as having generations or generational aspects as we discuss them.
    Take advertising… Dan’s discussion of 5GW caused me to consider this. I think he hit on something with his diagrams and getting all the way over to ‘before’ the observe bit. Mass advertising, mailers, etc. – classic 3GW. 4GW elements can be seen with linked advertising, pop-ups based on data and key-stroke mining and other ‘smart’ or ‘directed’ types. 5GW presented a problem in finding an example. Dan mentioned that one side may not even know that they are at war with the/another. I sort of see pharmacutical companies engaging in this. Pfizer, I believe, has a pill for ‘generalized anxiety disorder’ or something like that. 10 years prior to the pill’s launch, the disorder was scarcely mentioned in medical journals or the world press. Once the pill was ready for the mass market, however, it turned up all the time. Suddenly, if you were having a bad week/month or usually felt nervous about speaking in front of groups at work – or some other altogether normal bit of the human condition, you had a problem (you lost) and they had the solution (they won). Is that a stretch? The other one of these that gets me is Restless Leg Syndrome. Seen the ads? Same thing…
    Anyway, perhaps too long of a post – but, I wanted to introduce myself a bit and get in the mix. Usually, I’ll just read…
    Nice,
    Isaac

    Reply
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