Fifth Generation War In Minneapolis

In previous decades the US failed to win an irregular war in Afghanistan. Now, apparently, the US cannot even win an irregular war in the US. Donald Trump, the president of the “world’s last superpower,” has capitulated to a militia in Minneapolis, promising largescale withdrawal and an end to most of the immigration raids.

The jokes write themselves. The US had the second best army in Afghanistan, now the US has the second best army in the US. How did it come to this? Let’s analyze.

The history of irregular war in America

American commentators typically frame every conflict as good guys versus bad guys, which is fine for a person’s own moral compass, but usually counterproductive for analysis. Since very often the underdog is portrayed as the good guy (but not always, like the American Confederacy), this poisons discussion of irregular warfare. Leaving moral statements at the door, I would say in very broad terms, the abolitionist movements and slave revolts leading up to the Civil War, the respective militias in the war itself, the KKK and resurgence of segregation in the early 20th Century, the unionist movements and the coal wars in roughly the same time frame, and the communist and overlapping civil rights and black power movements are all noteworthy examples of irregular conflict in American history, with varying gradients ranging from (almost) nonviolence to open warfare.

Note two common characteristics in these examples. The first noticeable pattern is that it is very rare for one side to have a monopoly on irregular tactics. The abolitionists faced the slave patrols, the civil rights movement clashed with white citizen councils, the FBI infiltrated black power and communist groups, and so on. Irregular tactics are helpful, even for a government with firm control over its population and territory. Or even more simply, it’s basic “fight fire with fire,” countering an irregular enemy with irregular tactics of your own. The 1925 Soviet movie Battleship Potemkin I just reviewed has a scene showing a government provocateur attempting to disrupt the communist opposition with antisemitic rhetoric. So while I am discussing some American-specific characteristics, there are also some truths that are globally true.

The second common characteristic is that movements without state support tend to fail miserably. West Virginia coal miners were bombed from the air and crushed by the army. The black power movement petered out with almost every black leader of any significance dead or in jail. Yet the much more watered-down and politically acceptable civil rights movement achieved their desegregation goals carefully catered by the federal government. The dissolution of the Soviet Union caused the American communist movement to largely evaporate into political irrelevance. Moscow was no longer communist, and also, just as importantly, perceived themselves as an ally of Washington, not an enemy. So there was no ideological or geopolitical benefit to entertaining American communists.

From the fourth into the fifth generation

I recently wrote a review of Abbott’s handbook of 5GW, expressing skepticism at the American-centric theory of generational warfare. But it makes sense that a military theory designed by and for Americans would work in America. Consider what William Lind and his coauthors said in that first groundbreaking article back in 1989:

Small, highly mobile elements composed of very intelligent soldiers armed with high technology weapons may range over wide areas seeking critical targets. Targets may be more in the civilian than the military sector. Front-rear terms will be replaced with targeted-untargeted. This may in turn radically alter the way in which military Services are organized and structured.

Units will combine reconnaissance and strike functions. Remote, “smart” assets with preprogrammed artificial intelligence may play a key role. Concurrently, the greatest defensive strengths may be the ability to hide from and spoof these assets.

The tactical and strategic levels will blend as the opponent’s political infrastructure and civilian society become battlefield targets. It will be critically important to isolate the enemy from one’s own homeland because a small number of people will be able to render great damage in a very short time.

Leaders will have to be masters of both the art of war and technology, a difficult combination as two different mindsets are involved. Primary challenges facing commanders at all levels will include target selection (which will be a political and cultural, not just a military, decision), the ability to concentrate suddenly from very wide dispersion, and selection of subordinates who can manage the challenge of minimal or no supervision in a rapidly changing environment. A major challenge will be handling the tremendous potential information overload without losing sight of the operational and strategic objectives.

Psychological operations may become the dominant operational and strategic weapon in the form of media/information intervention. Logic bombs and computer viruses, including latent viruses, may be used to disrupt civilian as well as military operations. Fourth generation adversaries will be adept at manipulating the media to alter domestic and world opinion to the point where skillful use of psychological operations will sometimes preclude the commitment of combat forces. A major target will be the enemy population’s support of its government and the war. Television news may become a more powerful operational weapon than armored divisions.

Almost all of these ideas proposed by Lind,materialized in the Minneapolis insurrection. A decentralized (and therefore difficult to pin down) networked command structure using end-to-end encrypted communications completely outmaneuvered Trump’s forces. Crowd-sourced surveillance networks (which I suspect also utilized open-source information, like traffic camera feeds) detected and quickly moved to obstruct every federal convoy. Some commentators have compared the Minneapolis insurrection to past riots like Black Lives Matter and the Occupy movement, but I see this as apples and oranges. Those previous movements didn’t have coherent tactical goals and more importantly, they did not directly target government security forces.

Every rioter became the “super empowered individual” described in 4GW and 5GW literature, with a smartphone in his or her hand connected a rudimentary but secure and completely effective command and control (C2) network, and, just as importantly, a camera livestreaming Trump’s atrocities to the world. For over a week every major social media platform was flooded with propaganda eerily similar to the CIA playbook in conflict zones overseas. Trump’s thugs are like nazi brownshirts terrorizing civilians and are operating rape camps – exactly the same accusations leveled against Milošević, Gaddafi and Putin. Except this time, the atrocity propaganda is aimed at the US government itself. Or perhaps more likely, it is atrocity propaganda manufactured by one part of the US government directed at another part of the same government.

It’s generally agreed upon that the most fundamentally important characteristic of fifth generation warfare is to stay in the gray area between peaceful (therefore useless) protest and violent insurgency, which puts the targeted government in a tough predicament, with no clear way to respond within the scope of their own legal system. The Minneapolis “protests” were explicitly engineered to cause deaths. Air horns, whistles and verbal harassment was deployed to agitate and disorient the ICE officers (or break their OODA loops, as Boyd might suggest if he were with us today). No insurrection, even with broad public support, can have infinite numbers of active participants, but with fast communication they can easily achieve numerical superiority, which any policeman would find intimidating no matter how well armed he is. After a certain point, violence becomes a matter of merciless probability. If you go out on the street and physically attack armed men a thousand times, eventually one of them will shoot you. It’s not even a question of if, but when somebody snaps and pulls the trigger. Whoever organized these riots knew they would lead to deaths, and that was the entire point.

After the technology and ideas of war, which we already touched upon, this last point brings up the most important piece of the puzzle, the human element. America is full of people who are bitter and feel empty. Such a person is more than happy to die and be celebrated as a martyr, the first time his life had meaning, is when it ended. One bullet fired in anger gives the insurrection the moral high ground.

Why Minneapolis?

I think one of the most important questions is why did Minneapolis become the battlefield and not some other city, or why not all of them? Well for one, Abbott emphasized that, ideally, a 5GW force should structure their operations in such a way that the targeted government is not even aware that they are under attack. Uprisings nationwide would trigger alarm, and it was better to keep Team Trump complacent.

Secondly, inexperienced soldiers need practice, and untested tactics and weapons need to be tested. A largescale operation requires more skill to execute successfully, and risks harsh consequences if it fails. It is logical to test 5GW tactics in one place.

And lastly, the porcupine strategy, and the general idea of choosing the battlefield are old concepts. A smart general compels the enemy to fight in a location where they are disadvantaged. In this respect, Minneapolis is perfect. It’s a blue stronghold full of people fervently opposed to Trump (a communist fascist dictator who’s literally worse than Hitler and Stalin combined, from what I’m told), and just as fervently in love with mass immigration, which they see as simultaneously a good and bad thing; good because diversity is our strength, and also righteous punishment because America is racist and deserves to be colonized by the globally disadvantaged.

Minneapolis is a juicy honeypot for Trump too. It’s the epicenter of the Somali fraud scandal, a perfect low-hanging fruit for Trump to prove to his supporters that he takes his campaign promises seriously, as well as a great morale boost for his troops. What Trump apparently did not consider was that the enemy has the home court advantage here, and Somali fraud is so sacred to them, they are willing to die for it. Luckily for them, Trump did not take any of this onto consideration, and nobody in his circle did either.

International support for the 5GW fighter

Some readers might have noticed how both international globalist liberals and anti-US leftists overwhelmingly sympathized with the Minneapolis insurrection over Trump. You might also have noticed that Trump is trying to deflect from his defeat by rambling about Iran (again). This should not be surprising to anyone who has been paying attention.

I wrote this almost two years ago,

The main thing to remember is that American conservatives will immediately and without hesitation surrender on any domestic issue as long as an appropriate foreign enemy is dangled in front of their noses. It’s pitiful, actually. Give an American conservative fantasies that he’s a heroic freedom fighter mowing down hundreds of ruskie invaders with his hunting rifle, he’ll gladly lose every election for the rest of his life, let drugs and human trafficking over the border, let his neighborhood get turned into a crime-infested ghetto, and do nothing while the lives of his children are ruined.

A classic example of conservative stupidity is when they were laughing at US aid to transgender issues in Pakistan. Tons of conservatives were laughing about how this is a dumb waste of money. No, this is not a waste of money. Every person in a foreign country like Pakistan who receives Amerian dollars will immediately become loyal to the Democrat (not Republican!) party, even if he doesn’t agree with them ideologically. But then his children and definitely grandchildren will agree with Democrat ideology. It’s total global victory in three generations, but Republicans are too dumb to even notice the strategy exists, or figure out it has domestic implications too…

If you even try to explain to the American conservative that he is hurting himself and his own family, he’ll just scream incoherently about not letting Putin win. It is actually more important to hurt Russians (or whoever the declared enemy of the moment is) than to safeguard his own family and community.

Democrats built an international coalition while Republicans fiddled. Democrats have an ideological and political alliance with the establishment of most of Europe, while Republicans don’t have an alliance with anyone. It would have been smart for Republicans to foster good relations with the political elites in places like Hungary and Russia, but Republicans don’t because they’re too arrogant and – I cannot overemphasize this enough – they’re really, really, really, really, really, really stupid. Just to prove my point, walk up to any American conservative and ask him how he think how the Republican party and American conservatives should foster good international relationships. He won’t even understand what you’re on about, and you’ll probably feel like you’re talking to the stupidest person to ever exist. Every conversation with American conservatives is like this.

Why did 5GW fail in other places but succeed here?

Contrast the successful 5GW operation in Minneapolis with the regime change efforts in Belarus, Russia and now Iran that (so far) failed. Those are all coherent nation states who mobilized their populations against a shared and agreed upon perception of external threat. The affected governments mobilized a portion of their population, and persuaded the majority of people to at least passively accept the heightened security measures. And just as importantly, very few people joined the opposition. So as time went on, the patriotic minority (by that I mean people who actively, rather than passively, support the government in words and actions in their daily lives) grew in number while the opposition shrank. Lukewarm oppositionists chickened out in the face of reprisal, and ringleaders went to jail or were forced to flee the country, causing their movement to collapse.

Consider Iran’s immediate and very effective tactics against the attempted regime change. They shut down the internet, crippling the large majority of the opposition’s communications and media outreach, forcing the ring leaders to lean into Starlink, leading to their arrests, then Starlink itself was jammed (a trick they probably learned from the Russians’ experience against Ukraine).

I would like to compare and contrast Iran’s response with Trump’s, but I can’t because he largely didn’t respond at all. The inevitability of an officer-involved death shows both cold calculation on the part of the insurrection organizers, and also staggering incompetence in the Trump administration. The complete absence of any kind of plan for crisis management or media messaging in the event of a death is inexcusable. It’s particularly egregious for there to have been a high profile shooting, Renee Nicole Good, and then the shooting of Alex Pretti almost two weeks later and still no damage control plans in place.

Aside from the information sphere, I am astonished at how little support ICE got on the ground. Right now in Ukraine there are two-man teams fighting with greater dispersion than ever seen before in history, supported by networks of drones and fire support being delivered with timeliness, precision and scale that was never possible before either. Meanwhile, ICE has been wandering around the streets of Minneapolis with no apparent high-tech support, or even basic small unit tactics that could easily misdirect and scatter their opposition. They shouldn’t be constantly and repeatedly getting entangled in road blocks, yet that’s what has been happening.

The incompetence is so severe and systemic, it calls into question just how well Trump and his minions actually control the government. The bureaucrats actually running the US don’t have to directly oppose Trump. They can hurt him just as much through willful neglect of their duties, or even just malicious compliance to Trump’s orders that are poorly thought out and needed some respectful pushback, which is basically all of them.

In that respect, Trump’s predicament might not so different from Roman emperors who feared a dagger in the back more than an invading army. They feared betrayal so much, Rome’s last great general Flavius Aetius returned to court after defeating the Huns just to be personally murdered by his own emperor. Of course no system can survive such internal conflict for long, or at least not when there are strong external enemies ready to exploit weakness.

5GW, or any type of warfare, is more than just weapons and tactics, and every army is a reflection of the society it came from. You could not, for example, bring the training manuals for Cromwell’s ironsides to an 12th Century baron and expect him to find them useful. Cromwell’s new army demanded a society that existed in 17th Century England, but not in the 12th. Likewise, the protagonists in Kipling’s The Man Who Would Be King did not change warfare in Afghanistan. The sackful of guns were a magic trick that scared all enemies into surrendering. The moment everyone figured out that the Englishmen weren’t gods and the guns weren’t magic, they became useless.

So 5GW fails in places like Belarus, Russia and Iran because they’re coherent nation states. It succeeds in places like the former Yugoslavia, Ukraine and the USA because those places are failed states where the ideas of national identity and shared culture have withered away, to be replaced by extreme polarization. The US population now is split into groups that mutually hate each other and think, literally, that everyone in the opposing group is evil and should be killed. Almost no left-leaning American cared when Ashli Babbitt and Charlie Kirk were killed. And likewise, almost no right-leaning American cared when Good and Pretti were killed either. Of course there is some morally correct position that all of these killings were bad and avoidable, but I argue that it is pointless to expect aggravated people in a war to care when someone from the other side is killed. Arguing otherwise is just failure to understand the situation.

The strategic consequences of Minneapolis

Now that Trump has signaled that these tactics work, they will almost certainly be repeated, likely on a greater scale, and with improvements. Because unlike Trump, his enemies are capable of learning. His support base will also likely be demoralized, as their savior is further proven to be corrupt and incompetent. Emboldened enemies and discouraged supporters are not a good combination in the upcoming midterms.

Aside from his tactical failure, Trump has also consistently failed to properly address the roots of mass immigration into the USA. A handful of highly publicized raids and vague assertions of many self-deportations (which aren’t backed up in any way since he classified the statistics) ultimately are unlikely to have any significant impact on overall immigration. The things that would have a significant impact, punishing employers who break immigration law and aggressively outsource their entire workforces to foreigners, Trump doesn’t seem interested in doing.

Meanwhile, all his enemies have to do is wait him out. The most concerning point in all this is that the Rubicon has already been crossed with the reelection of Trump. The enemy is out for blood, and will be merciless if (when?) they come back into power.

Ian Kummer

I now have a new YouTube channel that I will use to upload videos from my travels around Russia. Expect new content there soon. Please give me a follow here.

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