Cain's 5th Generation Warfare Project

[Cain]

I decided the best of the information was already present at Dreaming 5GW and Skilluminati, so I've basically grabbed every useful article off of those two sites (as well as some linked works), PDF'd them and uploaded.

You can download here:  http://mihd.net/198d5z4

[Triple Zero]

ok even more to print out, thanks [this is just more than i can read off a monitor, so i'll have to wait until i get the chance and remember to print it for free ]

[LMNO]

I swear, once I get a Kindle for my birthday, I'll already have maxed out it's memory.

Thanks for this, Cain.

[That One Guy]

I've been meaning to poke my head back in here (since this thread is not only awesome, but relevant to so many other things, OM:F stuff especially) but I've been amazingly busy the last month or so. I'll definitely grab all the stuff from the link, Cain - many thanks for putting it all together!

I should have time this weekend to give it a read (or at least read a good chunk of it), and I'm looking forward to whittling down the core definitions/principles and themes from all of this. I think we've already gone over a bunch of the core approaches earlier in this thread, but this gives me a chance to see where the academics and tacticians are approaching this from.

Thanks again, and I'll definitely give it all a look shortly 

[Cain]

OK, I've gone a little further.  I've uploaded what I consider to be 5GW-esque texts - fiction and non-fiction which seem to embody aspects of the method of warfare.  The download is 66MB, and includes the following:

The 5GW Primer that I previously uploaded.
36 Strategems of War - T'ai Kung
The CIA's Nicuraguan Sabotage Manual
Cultural Revolution, Cultural War: How the Conservatives Lost England and how to get it back - Sean Gabb
Pure Effect - Derren Brown
Destabilizing Networks - Carley, Lee and Krackhardt
Fighting the War of Ideas Like A Real War - Michael J Waller
Game Theory At Work - James D Miller
Pattern Recognition - William Gibson
Theory of Power - Jeff Vail
The Bourne Identity - Robert Ludlum
The Bourne Supremacy - Robert Ludlum
OSS Simple Sabotage Manual - Office of Strategic Services
The Art of Seduction - Robert Greene
Social Defence, Social Change - Brian Martin
The 48 Laws of Power - Robert Greene
The Re-emergence of Emergence - Phillip Clayton and Paul Davies
The Art of Memetics - Wes Unruh and Edward Wilson
The Psychology of Entertainment: Blurring the lines between Entertainment and Persuasion - L. J. Shrum
Unrestricted Warfare - Qiao Liang and Wang Xiangsui

http://mihd.net/jawqg51

[That One Guy]

I ran across this article this morning concerning the use of things like Twitter and other social networking sites to organize and communicate among terrorists etc.:

http://news.cnet.com/8301-1009_3-10075487-83.html

The article lists a few potential scenarios (taken from a US Army report) that definitely reinforce many of the possibilities raised in this thread. Fun stuff 

[Cain]

Hah, I saw that on Arms and Influence.  They suggested it was the Army trying to be cool and hip and stuff, in the embarassing way 40 somethings with mid-life crises do.

Anyway, I've been slowly reading the file I uploaded, alongside After Authority.  I think I may be able to articulate some basic working principles soon, with examples.  Stay tuned.

[That One Guy]

I'm still in the process of working my way through all that as well (great resource by the way and thanks again!), and I definitely got a chuckle out of the descriptions of tactics in that article above (which has a link to the Army Report itself in PDF form which I plan on reading a bit later).

It's interesting for the "know thy enemy" factor if nothing else.

[Rococo Modem Basilisk]

I'm not sure if this was already mentioned, since I just skimmed most of the previous pages, but I think that one of perhaps the most oddly effective tactics that could be used would be a purely symbolic and quite obviously nonviolent symbolic attack. 9/11 would not have had the pro-american backlash within the US had people not died. What if instead of crashing a plane into the twin towers, someone simply demolished the statue of liberty overnight, with no casualties? Suddenly, a huge segment of the american self-image would disappear. It's like a widescale physically-based memebomb that cannot be as easily denied or ignored as a written or spoken one, yet would not provoke the same kind of "I'm hurt, people are killed, let's get these bastards" sentiment that one would get in response to something with actual casualties. In fact, having that kind of feeling of getting revenge through death for something that didn't endanger anyone would be immediately, on the face of it, absurd to many people.

I think that would probably fit into the fringes of 5G warfare. That said, it's the same kind of thing that traditional terrorists/protesters have been attempting for years -- it just wouldn't be possible to do without any casualties without having the same level of integration with remote others that the internet provides.

[Cain]

So, I've been ignoring this for, like, months now.

But there are two good new articles up that you should read:

http://www.dreaming5gw.com/2009/05/xgw_and_torture.php

And

http://www.dreaming5gw.com/2009/06/principles_of_5gw_hands_in_the.php (edited for correct link)

The second one in particular is worth reading.

[Cramulus]

both were good reads. thanks

[Richter]

Good stuff.  I like how it addresses expanding the concept to action with a larger group.  It's easy to see how the concept could be employed by the individual, but scaling it up seems to lapse into cat herding territory pretty easily.

[Pariah]

Any chance you could re-upload that pack of books?

[Requia ☣]

Any chance you could re-upload that pack of books?

This

[Cain]

Any chance you could re-upload that pack of books?

Uh, maybe.  I could probably upload a better selection of books, but it would take time to pick them all out.

Anyway, for the anime fans

http://phaticcommunion.com/musing5gw/2010/02/intimations-of-5gw-death-note.php

http://phaticcommunion.com/musing5gw/2010/02/intimations-of-5gw-death-note-the-rules-of-the-game.php

It is curious that, of the characters used in the anime version of Death Note, the four principle characters in the series are amoral, megalomaniacal, monomaniacs.  For an exploration of 5GW via the allegory of Death Note, this feature of the anime stands out, particularly when earlier permutations of this exploration have centered on issues such as Puppetmastery,  Superempowerment of individuals, the use of unwitting proxies and unwitting pawns, and creating system-wide changes via perturbations or engineered "Black Swans", etc. These are themes repeatedly raised during discussions of 5GW, with the common presumption that either an individual or a very small group of individuals may manipulate whole systems (megalomania) via unaware proxy/pawn "hands in the field" and whatever perturbations are required toward one eventual and ultimate goal (amoral monomania.)