5GW

The Federalist has put up an excellent paper on Fifth Generation Warfare. The authors pick apart the currently fashionable notion of Fourth Generation Warfare, providing a nice military history lesson in the process. Then they point out that 5GW is just now emerging.

In fact, the media has effectively become an altogether different sort of "non-state actor" on the world stage. The fact that the media can even entertain the notion of affecting political outcomes because it wields that much power, leads to the next concept: The weaponization of the media. This is a dangerous tool and one that our adversaries have mastered.