This enables authors to keep track of who is linking to, or referring to their articles. Six Apart started a working group in February…

Thanks!

The model won’t be out for at least 6 months, although I’m expecting it to take about 9 or so. A lot will depend on actors beyond my control .

Actually, I’ve run into the “but is it war?” question a lot over at the SWC and came up with a similar “solution”, although I refer to “competition” rather than “confrontation”. That shift let’s me use Darwinian theory as a way of analyzing selection criteria in environments (aka battlespaces”), and apply it to a much broader arena.

We too, especially in the case of the very indirect 5GW, have run into the question of ‘is it war?’. So far that is something that has not been resolved to my satisfaction. However, I think Rupert Smith has offered the best answer to that question by observing that the world we live in is a world of confrontation that on some levels and in some places crosses over into conflict. Call the conflicts war or not, the confrontations are always there and we must understand that and act accordingly.

Getting the right questions, in the sense of ones that make immediate sense and actually produce applicable answers, seems to be the bane of most theories . I’m building a theoretical model right now for asymmetric warfare, but it has to include so many areas that are not usually considered “warfare” that it makes me wonder .

I’m looking forward to finding out more about X Gradient Warfare. Sounds like a great reformulation!

Marc

What you are saying really makes sense to me as it relates to issues I have thought very deeply about.

For a long time the theory that I have been working on, 5GW or Fifth Generation Warfare, had been hampered by the assumtions and framework of William Lind’s Generations of Modern Warfare (GMW). This caused great disagreement between theorists. Even the terminology of ‘generation’ didn’t quite seem to fit.

Eventually, the conflict resulted in the creation of a new theoretical framework for (what is essentially) asymmetric warfare, XGW or ‘X’ Gradient Warfare, with new terminology and thinking that discarded the assumtions of GMW and narrowed the focus of the theory framework. As a result the theory seems much more useful, much more understandable, and much more applicable in a real-world context.

In a sense, now that we have refined the basis for our theory, we can now ask the right questions.