Tuesday, July 19, 2005
FIFTH GENERATION WAR IN THE OODA LOOP
Dan of tdaxp has picked up the 5GW ball where I left it yesterday and run downfield to the end zone. Dan took some of my speculations from yesterday and employed a Boydian analysis of putting them into the Observe -Orient-Decide-Act (OODA) decision cycle of the great military theorist John Boyd. Aside from Dan's usual, sterling graphics he has brought out some exciting points about 5GW possibilities that I had missed. Some excerpts:
"War is going deeper into enemy minds. Every generation of warfare aims for deeper in the enemy's OODA loop
...The 4th Generation of War redshifts deeper into the OODA loop. It slides into the "Observation" realm. 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. "
Excellent thinking ! My Commentary:
*I had vaguely mentioned a move toward " shaping the battlespace" by which I meant preemptively seizing control of the power to determine Rule-sets, altering the physical settings and systems and preemptively influencing longitudinal cultural and political trends. Dan has correctly aligned this in the OODA cycle as affecting the enemy's ability to " Observe" and illustrated the relationship with other generations of warfare.
* Dan's post seems to have the advantage of organizing the concepts in harmony with the ideas of Sun-Tzu and John Boyd.
* It occurs to me after reading Dan's post the that a very powerful shift of longitudinal perspective takes place. 4GW is executed over a very long time frame, sometimes decades. 5GW is conceived in terms of strategic vision over an even longer time frame, sometimes before an opponent realizes that they will be an opponent but the execution time may be very short in comparison to 4GW. The operative question is probably whether the attacker or the defender has initiated 5GW - once you are already attacked you have missed your opportunity to shape the battlespace.
Great work Dan ! ¶ 6:49 AM
Dan of tdaxp has picked up the 5GW ball where I left it yesterday and run downfield to the end zone. Dan took some of my speculations from yesterday and employed a Boydian analysis of putting them into the Observe -Orient-Decide-Act (OODA) decision cycle of the great military theorist John Boyd. Aside from Dan's usual, sterling graphics he has brought out some exciting points about 5GW possibilities that I had missed. Some excerpts:
"War is going deeper into enemy minds. Every generation of warfare aims for deeper in the enemy's OODA loop
...The 4th Generation of War redshifts deeper into the OODA loop. It slides into the "Observation" realm. 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. "
Excellent thinking ! My Commentary:
*I had vaguely mentioned a move toward " shaping the battlespace" by which I meant preemptively seizing control of the power to determine Rule-sets, altering the physical settings and systems and preemptively influencing longitudinal cultural and political trends. Dan has correctly aligned this in the OODA cycle as affecting the enemy's ability to " Observe" and illustrated the relationship with other generations of warfare.
* Dan's post seems to have the advantage of organizing the concepts in harmony with the ideas of Sun-Tzu and John Boyd.
* It occurs to me after reading Dan's post the that a very powerful shift of longitudinal perspective takes place. 4GW is executed over a very long time frame, sometimes decades. 5GW is conceived in terms of strategic vision over an even longer time frame, sometimes before an opponent realizes that they will be an opponent but the execution time may be very short in comparison to 4GW. The operative question is probably whether the attacker or the defender has initiated 5GW - once you are already attacked you have missed your opportunity to shape the battlespace.
Great work Dan ! ¶ 6:49 AM
Comments:
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Mark,
How did you conclude that 5GWs would have a very long conception? I discovered the same thing through software development analysis, but before that came to me I thought your comment was out-of-the-blue.
Your comments are very, very insightful.
-Dan
How did you conclude that 5GWs would have a very long conception? I discovered the same thing through software development analysis, but before that came to me I thought your comment was out-of-the-blue.
Your comments are very, very insightful.
-Dan
Hey Dan,
Thank you very much my friend. Your latest post has a great deal of food for thought for me to chew on tonight.
I found SAD - which I've not heard of before today - to be interesting. It's a clever structure for thinking in itself; it forces a software designer/programmer to take their ideas through most of the steps of Bloom's Taxonomy. A pretty good start toward systemic thinking.
To answer your question I'll say in the short term your OODA post made me go back and look again at " shaping the battlespace" and what that could mean in terms of affecting the opponents "Observe" step by changing their potential data inputs. ( Morally, it was also nice to see alternatives in 5GW scenarios to a simple linear escalation to genocide)
Medium term, I was drawing on my experience in teaching gifted and profoundly gifted students to get out of the mental cul-de-sacs they limit themselves with via horizontal thinking, changing position/perspective/premise, looking at decision-tree probabilities etc.
And from a "cognitive map" of background knowledge, aside from looking at history in general that having read Machiavelli, Han Fei-Tzu, Cicero, Ibn Khaldun, Polybius, Sun Tzu, Montesquieu, Ayn Rand and similar thinkers helped me a great deal in terms of seeing implications and patterns quickly.
More tomorrow, you've given me a good deal to ponder ;o)
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Thank you very much my friend. Your latest post has a great deal of food for thought for me to chew on tonight.
I found SAD - which I've not heard of before today - to be interesting. It's a clever structure for thinking in itself; it forces a software designer/programmer to take their ideas through most of the steps of Bloom's Taxonomy. A pretty good start toward systemic thinking.
To answer your question I'll say in the short term your OODA post made me go back and look again at " shaping the battlespace" and what that could mean in terms of affecting the opponents "Observe" step by changing their potential data inputs. ( Morally, it was also nice to see alternatives in 5GW scenarios to a simple linear escalation to genocide)
Medium term, I was drawing on my experience in teaching gifted and profoundly gifted students to get out of the mental cul-de-sacs they limit themselves with via horizontal thinking, changing position/perspective/premise, looking at decision-tree probabilities etc.
And from a "cognitive map" of background knowledge, aside from looking at history in general that having read Machiavelli, Han Fei-Tzu, Cicero, Ibn Khaldun, Polybius, Sun Tzu, Montesquieu, Ayn Rand and similar thinkers helped me a great deal in terms of seeing implications and patterns quickly.
More tomorrow, you've given me a good deal to ponder ;o)
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