5th generation warfare tactics of Arkansas

In the perennially healthy Pacific Northwest my college courses taught a lot about cross-cultural understanding. Dialogue, even if oppositional, is always full of opportunity for increasing understanding. I would sit in the classes and think back to how oppositional politics was played in Arkansas, circa 1989-1994. I felt a twinge perversity, because I had been involved in a political methodology anathema to what the Pacific Northwest practices.

In Arkansas, political enemies are taken out in a certain style:

1. Wait a few years, till the "issue" which you both were battling over ceases to be on people's minds.

2. Send them to prison on charges within a sphere of their lives totally unrelated to whatever you both were embattled over.

3. Be unjust, whatever they lose in life is out of scale with the "issue" you both once engaged in.

Then was with a sense of pride that saw this methodology associated with the cutting-edge, with 5th generation warfare:

"If traditional war centered on an enemy's physical strength, and 4GW on his moral strength, the 5th Generation of War would focus on his intellectual strength. A 5th Generation War might be fought with one side not knowing who it is fighting. Or even, a brilliantly executed 5GW might involve one side being completely ignorant that there ever was a war. It's like the old question of what was the perfect robbery: we will never know, because in a perfect robbery the bank would not know that it was robbed."

Dreaming 5th Generation War http://tdaxp.blogspirit.com/archive/2005/07/20/index.html

It is interesting that we call our age the Information Age. Information seems to the body of 4th generation warfare. Sounds like 5th generation warfare may be about no information. The enemy learns from mistakes, can even become repentant and change course in their lives and switch to your side, because your "information" is so compelling. With communication always transferring across boundaries, dead ends/pathos in societies can be averted.

Not so if you send no information that helps the opponent associate an attack with previous interactions (with you) or a synopsis of your moral ideology.

The opponent is hit , with no message. And long after whatever was at stake is over.

Open Source My Learning: About 5th Gen Warfare

Not going to really post anything original this entry. I am going to post my brain in the process of learning, alternatively we could say I am posting a snapshot in time of when specific memes successfully excited my brain into accepting them for future exploration.

The memes deal with 5th Generation War -examples and theories of the paradigm.

MEMES:

• 5GW www.dreaming5gw.com
• 4-5GW www.thomaspmbarnett.com/weblog
• 4GW Open Source Warfare
• SURVIVAL WITH 4GW www.enterrasolutions.com

BOOM XGW2:

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A conceptualization of the relationships between the succeeding generations of warfare. The "Boom" is the kinetic activity which determines the battle.

See "X vs X: Boom and the Generations in Conflict" on Dreaming 5GW.

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Mass Killings: Semantics and Future Trends

This is post is about the surge of mass killings in the USA ( lone gunmen shooting random strangers in a public place for the sole purpose of killing, rather than for money or political terrorism ). I am going to be highly parasitic, pointing the reader to authoritative writers blogging on the phenomenon, lifting quotes from them, then making a few quips of my own. Here are the list of blogs with significant, mature things to say on the mass killing issue:

• On Superempowerment and 5th Generation Warfare
• Mass Murder and the Decline of the State
• War or Not War

great quotes from the above links:

It is only when (leadership) allows ignorance about the evolution of weaknesses and imbalances into crises to exist that crisis conducive environments can grow and intensify. The more established the dysfunctions and weaknesses the thicker the veil of ignorance. The vulnerability of an organization does not so much reside in its actual weaknesses as in the ignorance of these weaknesses, an ignorance that is activated by defense mechanisms that regulate the managers’ threatened self-esteem and leads them unconsciously to favor laissez-faire over correction. The more entrenched the imperfection, the more likely it is to lead to a disruption and the more prohibitive the psychological and sometimes economic cost of a correction. — “Is Crisis Management (Only) a Management of Exceptions,” Christophe Roux-Dufort, Journal of Contingencies and Crisis Management, June 2007

Do we man the equipment or equip the man? (this is a deeply penetrating phrase that points toward human's integration of technology into social judgement and solutions. )

(Retro-Romanticism and Jingoism?): We must learn, unlearn relearn and become once again the resilient communities of our frontier history.

For my part in the above ideas for solutions to thwart the further rise of mass killings, I offer: little. At least little for the societies who congregate in these public places. My solutions for this issue:

• Live in apartments or condos above the 1st floor.
• Shop online.
• if attending a church, attend one that has armed guards^{like this}.
• Live in the inner-city, as suburban and rural people are more likely to be mass killers.

Of course the above are cases of abandonment and lily-pad hopping, which is exactly what I intentionally have done. If I was to support measures to suppress the rise of mass killings, it would fit something antithetical to "systems intervention" at the personal level. I don't believe a professional class of psychiatrists or theologians should be imposing even a benevolent or healing mechanism in the mass killers head, nor do I want the local community to impose its normalization. Above all no one should ask about another persons character, unless entering into a business or marital contract. These "rules" I have against intervention or character evaluation (even with intent to improve) leave only an impersonal , mechanistic or intelligent-technology solution.

The foundation of this stance is that society has become too large and complex for humans to effectively intervene and manage. A set of good do's and don'ts, or mantra such as "anything goes except violence"; do not map well onto the world. Most writers make a career out of claiming the world is the thing in error and needs simplifying. Those writers are wrong. The things which do not map, even benevolent thought-controllers, are the error. Ten Commandments, Bodhisattva Vow, a rap song that preaches pacifism -these all fail to change the world because they were not made with a knowledge of its whole. Only something non-human can gain that knowledge.