Great essay on hybrid warfare

V. 5th Generation War

I’m publishing this essay the week after Venezuela’s President, Nicolás Maduro, was kidnapped by American forces, and after the first bombing of a South American city by the USA in history, a world I’d never think I’d live to see. There is an overwhelming sense of confusion amongst almost everyone now, including many journalists — something which is likely by design. As we have seen, we have moved to forms of warfare that are not understood by the public, which heavily rely on AI surveillance, narrative control and deception, the exploitation of social media, and the design of increasingly unusual, and cruel, methods of punishment and killing.

The invasion of Venezuela is a perfect example of this kind of warfare, which has also been termed Fifth Generation Warfare (5GW) by military experts. According to Professor Armin Krishnan in his book Fifth Generation Warfare: Dominating the Human Domain, 5GW is the latest, most secretive, and difficult to understand form of war. Daniel Abbot’s Handbook of 5GW defines it as “an emerging theory of warfare premised upon manipulation of multiple economic, political, social and military forces in multiple domains.” This manipulation involves the oversight of all fighting domains — land, air, maritime, space, cyber, and cognitive — through what is termed a “common operating picture.” This unified view is made possible by Pentagon projects including Project Maven (which pioneered AI targeting), Joint All-Domain Command and Control (or JADC2, which connects sensors from across the armed forces) and software built by Palantir.

We can see in the invasion of Venezuela some hallmarks of 5GW, as offered by Krishnan:

• Fifth generation warfare bypasses the battlefield and targets society as a whole, rather than its military forces.
• Violence in 5GW is very dispersed or hidden, which makes it difficult to perceive as war.
• Fifth generation warfare relies on covert or ambiguous means that hide nefarious activities or disguise them as benign or harmless.
• The objective of 5GW is to overthrow an existing political order or change the culture in a society in accordance with the goals of the aggressor.

According to Krishnan, 5GW “shifts the emphasis from the control of physical terrain to the control of the human terrain and the human mind as a target of attack.” This means that the capture of President Maduro, under the cover of law enforcement, is only the beginning of the operation. The real battle begins afterwards, in the campaign to legitimize the kidnapping, manufacture consent for similar interventions in the future, and to pull one of two reactions from you, the witness: increased favor, or fear, of the administration.

The worse after effect of 5GW is that it turns everyone, at home and abroad, into a subject of war.

The outsized role of social media in the Venezuela incident is clear. In war-room pictures released by the White House, we can see Marco Rubio, Donald Trump, Pete Hegseth and others monitoring an OSINT (Open Source Intelligence) account on X. In the aftermath of the presidential kidnapping, official government accounts blasted propaganda parading the image of Maduro and remixing press conference clips with music. These hype-videos have far more in common with what I see Palantir and its officers posting on social media than anything I’ve ever seen from official government accounts. The objective is clear: to drive fear, awe, and uncertainty to mask the next move.

In the world of hybrid warfare, however, it takes two to tango: the government and the media. After the assault in Venezuela, Fox News and the Wall Street Journal constantly failed to mention the dozens of bystanders killed in the invasion of Venezuela, including a 78-year old woman killed after her public housing complex was shredded by American bombs. They are creating the same conditions that allowed victims in the Gaza conflict to receive sub-human treatment in the media, enabling their easy slaughter and oblivion, and allowing Americans to quickly forget the consequences of interventionism. The New York Times provided even more critical assistance: it refused to report on the illegal invasion when it was tipped-off ahead of time, providing cover for the administration’s illegal acts, potentially enabling war crimes while violating its own ethical code to stand for the truth no matter the circumstances.

When the media fails to do its job, or to question modern military forces and events through the lens of contemporary doctrines like 5GW, it reflects a misunderstanding of how war is waged today, and serves as little more than an accomplice.