5th generation warfare. Are we in a silent war against an invisible enemy?

Does violence happen at random?

If it did, there would be no need for detectives or criminal psychology. These fields assume that criminal behaviour is the result of internal psychological states. The purpose of these methods is to identify criminal intent and prevent future crimes.

This concept simplifies further — All behaviour originates from the mind.

If you dig into older philosophical traditions, e.g., Hermeticism, Platonism or Pythagoreanism, you will discover a common proposition that claims: ALL is mind.

How does this apply to warfare?

Fifth Generation Warfare (5GW) is a modern term for an old idea.

The supreme art of war is to subdue the enemy without fighting. — Sun Tzu¹

This expands into two approaches.

1. Strike the enemy when they are involved in preparations.

2. Intimidate the enemy to surrender.

The first approach requires the acquisition of enemy intelligence. By disabling supply lines or resources, the enemy has limited means to fight back effectively, which may result in swift victory or surrender.

The second approach is similar. By intimidating the enemy, they form a belief that victory is unachievable or defeat is inevitable. This may result in surrender or significantly destabilize their defence.

Figure 1 — Hierarchy of the mind

There are different aspects to this philosophy:

1. Beliefs influence emotions, which influence behaviour.
   i.e., Psychological warfare.

2. Enemy actions depend on beliefs, which are formed through information.
   i.e., Information warfare.

3. Supply scarcity and risks to necessities creates mental stress (e.g., food crisis).
   i.e., Economic warfare.

These are not used in isolation, because they naturally feed into each other.

The weaving technique is performed along an emotionally escalating narrative, in particular a dialectic such as the Hegelian dialectic, and may be executed in stages.

Consider the Four Stages of Ideological Subversion:

1. Demoralization.
   Remove morals and principles from a population.

2. Destabilization.
   Create turbulent conditions.

3. Crisis.
   Introduce a significant disruption.

4. Normalization.
   Establish a new set of conditions.

“A person who is demoralized is unable to assess true information.” — Yuri Bezmenov²

5GW uses minimal up front energy, but requires a long period of time to execute.

Carl von Clausewitz wrote a Theory of War and claimed that war is “a duel on a larger scale,” where its purpose was “a continuation of politics by another means.”

The purpose of war is the acquisition of power.

Daniel H. Abbott, in his book The Handbook of Fifth-Generation Warfare (5GW) [1], describes war using the nGW framework.

He refers to n as “gradient” instead of “generation,” which are defined as:

1. Zeroth Gradient Warfare (0GW).
   A genocide where there is no distinction between soldiers and civilians.

2. First Gradient Warfare (1GW).
   Concentration of labour and the attempt to win by selecting the most able-bodied.

3. Second Gradient Warfare (2GW).
   Concentration of firepower where society is involved in economic or technical roles.

4. Third Gradient Warfare (3GW).
   Better use of strategy and equipment.

5. Fourth Gradient Warfare (4GW).
   Demoralize an opponent or provide incentives for rebellion.

6. Fifth Gradient Warfare (5GW).
   Attacks occur below the threshold of observation from an imperceivable opponent.

5GW is described as a moral and cultural war fought by manipulating contextual information and its perception. The most successful 5GW is one where the aggressor is never identified. Counterinsurgency to 5GW requires that the aggressor is forced to reveal itself and engage in a lower gradient of war.

---

5GW is effectively perception management executed by an invisible enemy.

The modern weapons of this warfare include:

1. Social engineering.

2. Misinformation.

3. Cyber attacks.

4. Artificial intelligence.

5. Biochemical products and nano devices.

6. Other subtle tactics (including financial engineering).

For more information about 5GW, please see the Resources section at the end of this article for a short list of books and papers to read at your convenience.

---

Is this even happening?

You tell me.

Take into consideration the alleged Communist Rules of Revolution:

1. Corrupt the young, get them interested in sex, take them away from religion. Make them superficial and enfeebled.

2. Divide the people into hostile groups by constantly harping on controversial issues of no importance.

3. Destroy people’s faith in their national leaders by holding the latter up for contempt, ridicule and disgrace.

4. Always preach democracy, but seize power as fast and as ruthlessly as possible.

5. By encouraging government extravagances, destroy its credit, produce years of inflation with rising prices and general discontent.

6. Incite unnecessary strikes in vital industries, encourage civil disorders and foster a lenient and soft attitude on the part of the government towards such disorders.

7. Cause breakdown of the old moral virtues: honesty, sobriety, self-restraint, faith in the pledged word.

---

Consider yourself lucky if you have not recently:

1. Injected yourself with a biological substance.

2. Recorded biometric data in a social media or government system.

3. Allowed your mental health to significantly deteriorate.

4. Become financially dependent on government or corporations.

5. Performed irreversible surgeries.

While these may not be game over, they are setbacks that make you more susceptible to future psychological operations. This is not the complete scope of what is going on.

Did you know that your bank account balance is basically just a text file?

Society does not work the way we were led to believe. Our beliefs are managed to control how we act by the information percolated through schools and media.

Question everything and rebuild your belief system based on reality.

What kind of defences are there to 5GW?

Since 5GW is executed on a mental field, the defences are also mental.

Review Figure 1 — Hierarchy of the mind from the beginning of this article:
Information → Beliefs → Feelings → Behaviour

Consider the following methods of defence:

1. Manage your information sources.
   Avoid monopolized sources of information. The general rule is that all sources of information have a bias. Acquire as much variety as possible by verifying:

   1. Financial independence.
      Is the author or publisher able to voice an opinion without severe financial impact?

   2. Ideological motivation.
      Is the author or publisher appealing to a political ideology?

   3. Language diversity.
      How similar is the terminology used throughout the sources?

2. Develop your emotional intelligence (EQ).
   Psychological and social engineering operates through ego defence mechanisms. By learning to spot emotional changes in yourself and others, such as stress or gratification, you may be alerted to the presence of perceptual distortion. Below are examples of adversarial circumstances where a developed emotional intelligence has defensive value:

   1. Offensive Tactic Example 1 — Bait and Switch.
      Someone intentionally makes me angry (mental stress produced by my beliefs of how something “should be”). The individual then waits for my reaction and offers me a solution that gratifies my ego. This is a bait and switch tactic that uses cognitive dissonance to increase acceptance of a prepared solution.

   2. Offensive Tactic Example 2 — Social Conditioning.
      A teacher isolates and publicly scolds a student for misbehaving during class. Positive behaviour is rewarded with praise. This is typical operant conditioning using iterations of social punishment and reward.

   3. Offensive Tactic Example 3 — Gaslighting.
      You engage in an argument that fascism is a socialist ideology based on the cooperation between corporations and government, and not “far-right.” Your adversary cites Wikipedia “Fascism is a far-right, authoritarian, ultranationalist political ideology,” and states ‘your definition never existed and you are delusional.’ This causes you to question your perception of reality, which is a form of gaslighting.

3. Recognize that your perception is a belief system not a fact system (IQ).
   This is difficult for many to accept, but human beings are virtually unable to perceive technical facts, i.e., symbols with syntactically consistent relationships to truth.

   1. Assume your perception is always faulty.
      René Descartes proposed the existence of an evil god with utmost deceptive powers that can present a complete illusion of an external world.

   2. Use systematic doubt.
      Systematic process of skepticism and information evaluation.

   3. Make use of scientific and engineering verification methods.
      Adopt rigorous verification and hazard management methods from STEM fields.

4. Discard moral relativism.
   This is the most important method. Without morality there is no anchor to a perceived reality. Perception will distort itself around desire created from fantasies and illusion.

Concluding remarks

The current war is far from over. However, most do not realize it is even happening!

The fools will be subjugated — one way or another. Either they are subjugated by a so-called “elite” group that wishes to destroy and enslave humanity or they obey a new rule of law designed by the moral and cognitively capable.

Personally, I prefer the later.

The foremost is unacceptable and will result in a significant loss of life.
I wish more people would recognize the severity of the situation we are all in.

Please consider reviewing some of my previous articles regarding similar topics:

• Persuasion marketing and psychological operations.

• How does brainwashing work? Your guide to understanding mass formation psychosis.

• The basics of psychological operations (PsyOps).

• The hidden mechanism of mass media propagation and persuasive influence (PsyOps).

---

Playing out now are the consequences from strategic moves executed long ago.

Do not let turbulence distract you from the origin of these events: the mind.
Control your mind or else have it controlled for you.

It is an easier statement to make than achieve.
How many can claim they are masters of their own mind?

Please leave a comment below and let others know how you intend to retain sovereignty over your mind — and perhaps even your soul.

---

Resources

[1]

Title: The Handbook of Fifth-Generation Warfare (5GW)
(US Link).
Author(s): Daniel H. Abbott
ISBN-10: 1934840173

[2]

Fifth Generation Warfare has been tearing families and neighbors apart because they are being targeted to hate one another.

Now two of America’s leaders are sounding an urgent alarm and working to educate citizens on the impact of Psychological Actions in the first of an ongoing informational series entitled, ‘The Citizen’s Guide to Fifth Generation Warfare.

— ‘The Citizen’s Guide to Fifth Generation Warfare’ by General Michael Flynn and Boone Cutler is Now Available

Title: The Citizen's Guide to Fifth Generation Warfare
(US Link).
Author(s): Michael Flynn, Boone Cutler
ISBN-13: 979-8888625279

[3]

(Page 14: Fourth Generation Warfare Evolves, Fifth Emerges).

Title: DTIC ADA521639: Military Review. Volume 87, Number 3, May-June 2007
Author(s): Defense Technical Information Center (DTIC)

[4]

(Note that the generations are defined slightly differently in this piece).

Title: Fourth Generation Warfare and Its Impact on the Army
Author(s): Major Robert B. Polk, United States Army

[5]

The intent of this paper is to argue that postmodern warfare and fifth-generation warfare impact traditional notions of peace and conflict and therefore, a transformative approach to the definition of peace is required.

The main objectives of this paper are three-fold:

• the first is to contend that where traditional notions of peace include the absence of kinetic violence exclusively, fifth-generation warfare and postmodern warfare encompass several different forms of combat;

• the second objective is to argue that in fifth-generation warfare conflict is perceived as not only intrastate disagreements but conflict between cultural groups, taken across transnational borders.

• Finally, considering the above arguments, this paper concludes by suggesting that peacebuilding requires a need for peacebuilders to adopt a new definition of conflict and peace.

— Fifth-Generation Warfare and the Definitions of Peace, Abstract

Title: Fifth-Generation Warfare and the Definitions of Peace
Author(s): Asmaa Patel, Simon Fraser University

1. Sun Tzu (c. 544 – 496 B.C.E.) was a Chinese author of The Art of War, an ancient Chinese classic on military strategy.

2. Yuri Alexandrovich Bezmenov was a KGB defector who claimed Russia had a long-term goal of ideologically subverting the U.S and other western nations.