Journal of Strategic Security

Volume 15 Number 4 Article 2

Fifth Generation Warfare, Hybrid Warfare, and Gray Zone Conflict:

A Comparison
Armin Krishnan
East Carolina University, [email protected]

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Recommended Citation
Krishnan, Armin. "Fifth Generation Warfare, Hybrid Warfare, and Gray Zone
Conflict: A Comparison." Journal of Strategic Security 15, no. 4 (2022) :
14-31.
DOI: https://doi.org/10.5038/1944-0472.15.4.2013
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Fifth Generation Warfare, Hybrid Warfare, and Gray Zone
Conflict: A Comparison

Abstract
Strategists have noted substantial changes in warfare since the end of the Cold War. They
have proposed several concepts and theories to account for the fact that the practice of
war has largely departed from a Clausewitzian understanding of war and the centrality of
physical violence in it. Emerging modes of conflict are less focused on the instrumental use
of force to achieve political objectives and are more centered on notions of perception
management, narratives, asymmetry or irregular conflict, the adversarial uses of norms,
and covert and ambiguous uses of force. This article aims to systematically compare three
more recent theories of war or political conflict, namely fifth generation warfare (5GW),
hybrid warfare (HW), and gray zone conflict. The article demonstrates that although they
have the same intellectual roots, they are also different in terms of what they suggest about
the nature of contemporary and near future conflict. Each of them can enrich our
understanding of contemporary warfare, which will be the key to mastering these new
modes of conflict short of (theater conventional) war.

Acknowledgements
I would like to thank Thomas Dolan from the University of Central Florida for comments on
an early draft of the article and the unknown reviewer who helped to improve the
manuscript.

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iss4/2
 Krishnan: Fifth Generation Warfare, Hybrid Warfare, and Gray Zone Conflict

Introduction
Over the last two decades three different theories of conflict short of
(major) war have become prominent in the Western strategic debate,
trying to come to terms with the changing threats and realities of war:
Fifth generation warfare (5GW), hybrid warfare (HW), and most recently
gray zone conflict (GZC). Western national security establishments have
discussed all three theories and references to them even appear in policy
documents. Critics have pointed out that none of the ideas promoted in
these military schools of thought would be particularly new and that they
would lack intellectual rigor. For example, Derek Barnett has accused the
Fourth Generation (4GW) and 5GW schools of suffering from a
conventionality of their ideas. They would paradoxically argue against the
status quo of military thought without “presenting a true alternative.”1

Donald Stoker and Craig Whiteside have similarly claimed that the other
two of these concepts (gray zone conflict and hybrid war) would be an
“example of the American failure to think clearly about political, military,
and strategic issues and their vitally important connections.”2 The new
theories would tend to cloud rather than clarify the issues, would distort
history, would confuse war and peace, and would undermine U.S. strategic
thinking.3 At the core of their criticism is the idea that the new theories are
“intellectual constructs that fail to honor the critical distinction between
war and peace” and as a result “we have lost the logical foundation for
critical analysis.”4 By conflating peace and war one would make it
impossible to adequately understand either, leading to strategic failure.
While some of the criticism of Stoker and Whiteside (and others) seems
justified, there may still be important insights to gain from their careful
analysis that may lead to a better new paradigm of contemporary warfare
in the future.

Other studies have critiqued 5GW, HW, and GZC, but there has not been a
systematic comparison of the three. This article does not attempt to
undermine the intellectual merits of these theories. Instead, it argues that
despite their inadequacies each of the three theories has something
important to contribute to our understanding of contemporary political,
military, and societal conflicts and that they complement each other by
capturing different facets of conflicts short of war. The article will first
outline each of the three theories to systematically compare them in a

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second step using the framework developed by Donald Reed.5 The article
demonstrates that the theories have the same intellectual roots but also
that they differ in terms of where future belligerents will fight wars, who
will fight, why belligerents will fight, and how belligerents will fight in
future wars. This means that each of these theories describes different
distinctive modes of conflict and hence each of them requires a different
approach to counter them.

Challenging the Clausewitzian Paradigm of War

No military thinker has shaped the Western understanding of war and

strategy as much as the 19th century Prussian military theorist Carl von
Clausewitz. He defined war as “a duel on extensive scale” and “an act of
violence to compel our opponent to fulfil our will.”6 Inherent to the
Clausewitzian paradigm is that war is organized violence waged by regular
armed forces of nation states against each other according to established
rules during a clearly delineated period, ending in a negotiated peace
settlement. Military writers in the West have not seriously questioned
these fundamental ideas of what war is supposed to be until recently. In
1989 William Lind introduced in an influential article the concept of
fourth generation warfare (4GW) that threatened to make conventional
military forces and maneuver warfare obsolete.7 Martin van Creveld, who
is a theorist in the 4GW school of thought, expanded these ideas in his
1991 book The Transformation of War. In this book he argued “that the
Clausewitzian Universe is rapidly becoming out of date and can no longer
provide us with a proper framework for understanding war.”8

During the 1990s when the Revolution in Military Affairs (RMA) school of
thought was prominent, John Arquilla and David Ronfeldt laid out their
ideas of information warfare, netwar, and conflict at the societal level
waged by networks “involving measures short of war.”9 They predicted
that “most netwar actors will be nonstate and even stateless. Some may be
agents of a state, but others may turn states into their agents. Odd hybrids
and symbioses are likely.”10 In 1999 two Chinese strategists, clearly
influenced by the netwar concept, published their book Unrestricted
Warfare, which claimed that “war will no longer be what it was
originally.”11 They argued that “[w]arfare will transcend all boundaries and
limits, in short: Unrestricted warfare.”12 This means that war would now
include everything that can be used to weaken or destroy an adversary

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 Krishnan: Fifth Generation Warfare, Hybrid Warfare, and Gray Zone Conflict

with nothing forbidden and to combine it all for maximum effect.13 Robert
Bunker, who reviewed Unrestricted Warfare, has suggested that “the
significance of this work cannot be overstated.”14 Arguably, the concept of
unrestricted warfare also profoundly impacted and influenced the schools
of thought of 5GW, HW, and GZC.15 It seems that all three schools have
similar intellectual roots, but still come to different conclusions about the
new reality of conflict and how one can be successful in these conflicts.

Fourth and Fifth Generation Warfare

Lind postulated that successive generations of warfare represent

qualitative shifts that make previous forms of military power obsolete.
According to Lind, warfare evolved from a focus on massed manpower
(1GW), to a focus on firepower or attrition (2GW), and eventually to a
focus on maneuver (3GW). Fourth Generation Warfare was supposed to be
the latest generation warfare, which focuses on insurgency. Thomas
Hammes proposed a more elaborate theory of 4GW in his book The Sling
and the Stone, which emphasized the influence of Mao on modern
insurgency and how this foreshadowed 4GW.16 The 4GW school had
notable critics such as Antulio Echevarria, who wrote a comprehensive
rebuttal of both the idea of generational warfare and the interpretation of
insurgency by 4GW theorists.17

However, in the early 2000s some 4GW proponents had already moved on
to 5GW. Robert David Steele was apparently first to declare the emergence
of a fifth generation of warfare in 2003.18 Hammes’ book also briefly
explored the possibility of a fifth generation of warfare (5GW) in several
places.19 Following the dialectical logic of the theory of generational
warfare first outlined by Lind, 5GW would represent a response to the
success of 4GW and hence would be about defeating insurgencies.
Hammes claimed in 2007 that as “4GW has been the dominant form of
warfare for over 50 years, it’s time for 5GW to make an appearance.”20

In Hammes’ view, advances in biotechnology and nanotechnology would

drive 5GW. These technologies could enable super-empowered individuals
or small groups to pursue ideological or personal objectives independent
of nations but leveraging state-like capabilities. An individual or small
group could carry out a massively destructive bioterrorism attack on a
nation state with technological capabilities that may even originate from a

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nation state as happened during the 2001 Amerithrax attack.21 Hammes

concluded that

[t]he anthrax attack provided stark evidence that an individual can

attack a nation state. Over time, the combination of political
motivation, social organization, and economic development has
given greater destructive capability to smaller and smaller groups.22

A sophisticated treatment of 5GW is found in the aforementioned article

by Donald Reed, who has pointed out that as of 2008 there was no
common definition of 5GW.23 For Reed 5GW is “the outcome of changes
that are occurring in the Information Age.”24 He suggests that

[f]ifth generation warfare transcends fourth generation warfare by

expanding the domains of conflict even further to include the
physical (including land, air, and sea), information (including
cyber), cognitive, and social (including political) domains.25

Daniel Abbott published in 2010 a collection of articles on ideas of an

emerging fifth generation of warfare under the title The 5GW Handbook,
which remains the most systematic treatment of the theoretical approach
to date. The book suggests that 5GW would amount to “[m]oral and
cultural warfare [that] is fought through manipulating perceptions and
altering the context by which the world is perceived.”26 The theory
suggests that in 5GW “violence is so dispersed that the losing side may
never realize that it has been conquered. The secrecy of 5GW makes it the
hardest generation of war to study.”27 The Handbook of 5GW proposed
dropping the term generation altogether and to replace it with gradient or
grade.28 This means that the history of warfare is not a sequential
evolution of different modes of war (a major criticism of 4GW).

The Handbook of 5GW further suggests that “5GW is the manipulation of

the observational context in order to make the enemy do our will.”29
Success in 5GW would depend on deception and misdirection rather than
the use of violence as proxies are coopted or manipulated to act on a
sponsor’s behalf without even knowing it. Daniel Abbott wrote:

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 Krishnan: Fifth Generation Warfare, Hybrid Warfare, and Gray Zone Conflict

A fifth 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.30

The practice of 5GW relies on broadening the scope of a conflict to the

extent that the enemy is not able to perceive it as such, making the enemy
unable to counter the covert or indirect attack. An example that Brent
Grace uses to illustrate the essence of 5GW is how the city of Chicago
defeated the Black Kings gang in the Robert Taylor housing complex in the
1990s by radically altering their environment and the culture they lived in,
which the gang was previously able to dominate.31

Some terrorism scholars have adopted the concept of 5GW and have given
it a different interpretation. George Michael invoked the concept in his
book on Lone Wolf Terror and the Rise of Leaderless Resistance. He
claimed that a “distinguishing characteristic [of 5GW] is its
leaderlessness.”32 In Michael’s view, the current terrorism shares
similarities with the anarchist movement of the 19th century and that
“[t]errrorism in the West appears to be moving in the direction of
leaderless resistance and lone wolf attacks despite the limitations of this
approach.”33 The threat would be based on the ability of “aboveground
groups to raise ideological consciousness [that] can also motivate
unaffiliated underground movement radicals” to commit random acts of
terror.34 In this sense, 5GW would be a more advanced insurgency that is
extremely difficult to defeat since it so highly individualized and dispersed.

At this time, Western national discourse has dropped the notion of 5GW.
However, the 5GW concept is hugely popular in South Asia with a still
expanding scholarship in India, Pakistan, and Singapore.35 What has
replaced 5GW in the West is North Atlantic Treaty Organization’s (NATO)
new concept of cognitive warfare, which NATO first introduced in 2021. It
overlaps with 5GW ideas. On the NATO website on can find the following
definition:

In cognitive warfare, the human mind becomes the battlefield. The

aim is to change not only what people think, but how they think and
act…In its extreme form, it has the potential to fracture and
fragment an entire society, so that it no longer has the collective will
to resist an adversary’s intentions.36

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An example of 5GW or cognitive warfare is the alternative media space,

which has become a new battlefield for the mind of people. Andreas
Turunen claims that

The incentive of the alternative narratives is to decrease the public

trust on government and despite the differences in the political
leanings of different alt-news sites, they seem to share common
anti-government objectives and aspirations.37

Hybrid Warfare

Many analysts credit Frank Hoffman with coining the terms hybrid war
and hybrid threat, which have become the foundation for a school of
military thought. In December 2007 Hoffman’s paper builds on the 4GW
school but also majorly departs from it. Like 4GW school, the hybrid wars
school assumes that irregular conflicts dominate contemporary warfare. 38
Unlike the 4GW school, it does not share the pessimism regarding the
ability of regular forces to master this form of conflict. According to
Hoffman,

[c]onventional, irregular and catastrophic terrorist challenges will

not be distinct styles; they will all be present in some form. The
blurring of modes of war, the blurring of who fights, and what
technologies belligerents will leverage, produces a wide range of
variety and complexity that we call Hybrid Warfare.39

For Hoffman hybrid war is multi-modal warfare that combines

conventional and unconventional warfare. Adversaries “will employ all
forms of war and tactics, perhaps simultaneously.”40 America’s opponents
would not be likely to accept established rules and would try to exploit
surprise by behaving unexpectedly and by using tactics and leveraging
technology in ways that are unpredictable. This would include a
combination of primitive forms of warfare, criminal activity, and high-tech
weaponry.41 ‘“Hybrid Wars” blend the lethality of state conflict with the
fanatical and protracted fervor of irregular warfare. The term “Hybrid”
captures both their organization and their means.”42 States could be
“blending high-tech capabilities, like anti-satellite weapons, with terrorism
and cyber warfare directed against financial targets.”43 Furthermore,

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 Krishnan: Fifth Generation Warfare, Hybrid Warfare, and Gray Zone Conflict

[i]n such conflicts we will face major states capable of supporting

covert and indirect means of attack, as well as Thomas Friedman’s
“super-empowered’ fanatics capable of highly lethal attacks
undercutting the sinews of global order.44

Hoffman’s main example for hybrid warfare is Hezbollah’s war on Israel in

2006. Hezbollah was able to exploit the vulnerabilities of a Western-style
military and to employ advanced technology successfully and in an
innovative way such as their use of missiles and drones. Hoffman argued:

Mixing an organized political movement with decentralized cells

employing adaptive tactics in ungoverned zones, Hezbollah showed
that it could inflict as well as take punishment.45

The Quadrennial Defense Review of 2010 referenced Hoffman’s concept.

The policy paper suggested that hybrid refers to a blending of traditional
categories of conflict and that hybrid approaches

May involve state adversaries that employ protracted forms of

warfare, possibly using proxy forces to coerce and intimidate, or
non-state actors using operational concepts and high-end
capabilities traditionally associated with states.46

The North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO) started using the term
hybrid warfare in some of their documents and official statements. A 2011
article on NATO’s use of hybrid threats suggested the following definition:

An umbrella term encompassing a wide variety of existing adverse

circumstances and actions, such as terrorism, migration, piracy,
corruption, ethnic conflict, and so forth. What is new, however, is
the possibility of NATO facing the adaptive and systematic use of
such means singularly and in combination by adversaries in pursuit
of long-term political objectives.47

Media reports have widely used the term hybrid warfare during the
Ukraine crisis of 2014 to describe Russia’s military and non-military
activities in relation to Ukraine. NATO particularly emphasized the role in
HW of propaganda for demoralizing populations and destabilizing
countries. According to NATO,

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[h]ybrid threats combine military and non-military as well as covert

and overt means, including disinformation, cyber attacks economic
pressure, deployment of irregular armed groups and use of regular
forces. Hybrid methods are used to blur the lines between war and
peace, and attempt to sow doubt in the minds of target populations.
They aim to destabilise and undermine societies.48

A particular concern at the time were Russia’s use of disinformation,

deceptive narratives, Internet propaganda (trolls), cyber warfare, the use
of energy as leverage, and the weaponization of migration, all of which are
not violent or traditional military activities and none of which amount in
themselves to an act of war. NATO even established in 2017 a Center of
Excellence for Countering Hybrid Threats in Helsinki. Interestingly, a
report of a NATO-sponsored workshop in Finland from 2016 concluded
that

the ‘hybrid warfare’ concept is not suitable as an analytical tool for

assessing Russian military capabilities or foreign policy intentions
and should therefore not be used as the basis for strategic decision-
making and defense planning.49

Hybrid war (in Hoffman’s original meaning) is an apt description of

NATO’s activities in response to the Russian military invasion of Ukraine
in February 2022. Not only are NATO members supplying Ukrainian
forces with billions of USD worth of conventional weaponry, including
rocket artillery, howitzers, and armored vehicles, but there is also an effort
to supply anti-tank missiles (and other small arms) to both government
and paramilitary forces in Ukraine. NATO combined these actions with
heavy sanctions, an attack on the Russian currency, and information
warfare.50

Gray Zone Conflict

Perhaps due to the shortcomings of the earlier theories of 4GW or 5GW or

HW—and the realization of a return to great power conflict on the world
stage since 2014—analysts have looked once again for a new theoretical
framework to grasp the new reality of conflict short of war. GZC is a term
that seems to have come in use in 2015 to replace or augment the earlier
term of HW. The concept was alluded to in the 2010 Quadrennial Defense

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 Krishnan: Fifth Generation Warfare, Hybrid Warfare, and Gray Zone Conflict

Review where it stated: “The future strategic landscape will increasingly

feature challenges in the ambiguous gray area that is neither fully war nor
fully peace.”51 The historical paradigm that GZC is based on is the Cold
War, which was long-lasting period of intense geostrategic competition
between the two superpowers.

The foundational analysis of GZC seems to be a U.S. Army War College

study written by Michael Mazarr in 2015. In this article Mazarr argued
that revisionist powers deliberately pursue tactics short of war that seek to
avoid a full-scale war and that “can substitute for traditional military
aggression.”52 He stated that “[t]hey maneuver in the ambiguous no-
man’s-land between peace and war, reflecting the sort of aggressive,
persistent, determined campaigns characteristic of warfare but without the
overt use of military force.”53

Gray zone conflict would have four key characteristics:

1) Belligerents pursue political objectives through integrated and

cohesive campaigns;
2) Belligerents use non-military and non-kinetic tools;
3) Belligerents avoid deliberate escalation; and
4) Belligerents rely on gradualism or “salami-tactics” to achieve
results.54

The think tank NSI Inc. held a virtual workshop in 2016.55 Experts
proposed the following definition of the gray zone as “a conceptual space
between peace and war, occurring when actors purposefully use multiple
elements of power to achieve political security objectives with activities
that are ambiguous or cloud attribution and exceed the threshold of
ordinary competition, yet fall below the level of large-scale direct military
conflict, and threaten US and allied interests by challenging, undermining,
or violating international customs, norms, or laws.”56

A RAND study co-authored by Mazarr suggests that the

…gray zone is an operational space between peace and war,

involving coercive actions to change the status quo below a
threshold that, in most cases, would prompt a conventional military

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response, often by blurring the line between military and

nonmilitary actions and the attribution for events.57

Aggressors would rely on covert or ambiguous actions that undermine the

interests of their adversaries to avoid a military conflict that they would be
unlikely to win. Opponents may use diplomacy, legal challenges,
espionage, propaganda, subversion, and military intimidation to get what
they want without fighting.

Gray zone conflict has suffered both scathing criticism and has enjoyed
heightened interest in recent years. Adam Elkus suggested that there is
nothing new to GZC and that “[g]ray zone wars seem to be a composite of
two well-known ideas in military strategy and political science: limited
wars and compellence.”58 He further pointed out

[t]he mechanism is not as important as the use or threat of armed

violence and other relevant means to get someone to do as we
please. We seem to have forgotten about these venerable ideas in
our headlong jump into the gray zone.59

At the same time, there are good reasons not to dismiss GZC too quickly.
Hal Brands, writing for the Foreign Policy Research Institute, explained
that

…gray zone approaches are indeed prevalent in today’s security

environment. Since 2014, Russia has destabilized and dismembered
Ukraine using armed proxies, volunteer forces, and
unacknowledged aggression. In Asia, China is using gray zone
tactics as part of a campaign of creeping expansionism in the South
China Sea. In the Middle East, Iran is using, as it has for many
years, subversion, and proxy warfare to destabilize adversaries and
shift the balance of power in the region. These are leading examples
of the gray zone phenomenon today.60

Brands has recently explored the history and current reality of long-lasting
major geostrategic competition in a book on the Cold War.61 Brands
advocates for embracing this “competition as a way of life” and that
although the idea of “indefinite struggle” was “depressing,” “it is the best

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 Krishnan: Fifth Generation Warfare, Hybrid Warfare, and Gray Zone Conflict

way to contain the new authoritarian challenges and prevent the

emergence of a darker future.”62

Comparison of the Theories

Donald Reed has developed a neat framework for understanding the new
features of 5GW based on four axis that define the generations of war.
Each axis addresses a different dimension of a mode of conflict:

• The geography of war (“what are the new domains of conflict?”),

• The belligerents and combatants (“what is the changing nature
of adversaries?”),
• The goals that belligerents pursue in a conflict (“what is the
changing nature of objectives?”), and
• The role of force (“what is the changing nature of force?”).63

Reed suggested that a theory of war must address these four dimensions
and must establish how all these dimensions relate to each other.

The Geography of Conflict

Fifth generation warfare expands the battlespace from the political domain
of 4GW to the cultural and cognitive domains. To quote a famous psywar
paper, “wars are fought and won or lost not on battlefields but in the
minds of men.”64 Fifth generation warfare makes the human terrain and
perception the primary battlefield, although war-like action can occur in
any domain. The objective of 5GW is to deeply penetrate a society,
rendering the established distinctions between a front and rear or
combatant and civilian obsolete, which is also true for HW. Hoffman has
outlined that HW has a particularly complex geography in the sense that
military operations can take place in all domains and that there could be
multiple battlefields that a unified strategy links together.65 Similarly, GZC
lacks a primary domain or a geography. According to Mazarr, “[i]t does
not aim at clearly defined engagements, and there is no identifiably
distinct battlefield.”66 The focus in GZC is not on where the fighting takes
place, but on the tools that belligerents use. All three theories share the
idea that the battlefield can be anywhere, and that conflict can take place
as much within societies as between them.

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The Belligerents and Combatants

Fifth generation warfare suggests that belligerents could be individuals or

networks of small groups held together by a unifying ideology and
empowered by advanced technology. A major idea in 5GW is to
manipulate others (proxies) into acting on their behalf and to confuse the
adversary who the real enemy is or even whether they are in a conflict.
David Axe suggested that

5GW is when a party exploits or encourages an existing or emerging

crisis to achieve strategic goals that those involved in the crisis are
not aware of. 5GW is a form of stealthy proxy war.67

Like 5GW, HW is usually proxy warfare, where a state actor might

empower nonstate irregulars to fight on their behalf. Hoffman suggested
that “Hybrid Wars can be conducted by state and nonstate actors.”68
However, since advanced technology employed by nonstate actors
typically originates from state actors, nonstate actors utilizing such
weapons would be dependent on state sponsors.

Gray zone conflict is primarily associated with major state actors such as
Russia, China, North Korea, and Iran.69 It is therefore the most
conventional of all the three theories in terms of focusing on states as they
are the main belligerents in GZC, although proxies can be employed as
well. Mazarr noted that GZC relies on “the use of civilian instruments to
achieve objectives sometimes reserved for military capabilities.”70 As a
result, GZC is the most state-centric of these theories and 5GW is the least
state-centric with HW occupying the middle ground. All three theories
suggest that increasingly civilians act as combatants, making the
distinction between combatant and non-combatants impractical.

New Objectives for Conflict

The objective in 5GW would “not be to conquer the state, or divide the
state [as in 4GW], but to undermine the state…If 5GW is successful, a
target state will have so lost its legitimacy that it cannot be certain of
anyone’s primary loyalty.”71 In this sense, the goals behind 5GW are
apolitical as the belligerents do not seek control over a state but rather
seek the subversion of the state and the existing political order.

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 Krishnan: Fifth Generation Warfare, Hybrid Warfare, and Gray Zone Conflict

In contrast, HW and GZC are still within the Clausewitzian paradigm, as

they assume that the objectives for war remain ultimately political in
nature. For example, Hoffman suggests that “[h]ybrid opponents…seek
victory by the fusion of irregular tactics and the most lethal means
available in order to attack and attain their political objectives.”72 Hoffman
seems to assume that HW is proxy warfare and that the objectives of US
adversaries are “to disrupt our freedom of action, drive up the costs of any
American intervention, and finally, deny us our objectives.”73

What motivates GZC is according to Mazarr revisionism by rising powers

that want to challenge to the U.S.-dominated world order.74 These
revisionist powers have recognized that “the costs of large-scale aggression
have become severe while the benefits have declined.”75 Hence, “[t]heir
interests and objectives in these revisionist campaigns are more limited.”76
5GW represents again the least conventional perspective of the three
theories by postulating that the main objective is to undermine the state
itself, while HW and GZC postulate much more limited political objectives
for those actors that use it.

The Role of Force

Proponents define 5GW as “moral and cultural warfare [that] is fought

through manipulating perceptions and altering the context by which the
world is perceived.”77 The objective in 5GW would be to alter the culture or
operational environment in a way conducive to the objectives of the
belligerents, which belligerents can achieve more efficiently without
kinetic force or even the awareness of the victims that they are in the
middle of a conflict. If belligerents need to resort to force, it is highly
dispersed and hence less perceptible. L.C. Rees stated: “Since 5GW is a
war of deception, it’s almost entirely a war of influence.”78

While HW proponents suggest that force is only one tool of many used, it
is still the key to victory, as the other non-violent tools are merely to
enhance the effectiveness of the use of (military) force. Andrew Mumford
wrote:

Arguably hybrid warfare fulfils two of Clausewitz’s three objects of

war: impose your will on the enemy and render them powerless (the

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other objective – use the maximum force available – of course runs

contrary to the centrality of ambiguity in hybrid strategies).79

In the spectrum of conflict HW would occupy the middle ground with

theater conventional war on one end of the spectrum and GZC at the other
end of the spectrum.80

In contrast, GZC is a strategy that relies on minimizing the use of force to

intentionally remain below the threshold of overt aggression. Hoffman
pointed out that

[h]ybrid threats ably combine various modes of fighting in time and

space, with attendant violence in the middle of the conflict
spectrum. Gray zone conflicts do not cross that threshold and use a
different mix of methods, entirely short of bloodshed.81

The objective in GZC is to deny the adversary the right to use force by
using aggression below the threshold of an act of force or to use force
covertly. Of all three theories the use of force is most central to HW and
least central to both 5GW and GZC.

Conclusion

All three theories of contemporary conflict share the same intellectual

roots and they have some commonalities, such as the idea that in future
conflicts the role of the military and the use of force would be small and
that the role of civilians and civilian instruments would be much more
pronounced. They also assume that conflict will take place in multiple
domains simultaneously and that the battlefield can be literally anywhere.
Then there are also notable differences.

Fifth generation warfare is a mode of conflict that manipulates the

perceptions and identity of the victim to the point that the victim may not
even understand that a belligerent has conquered them. Adversaries can
defeat 5GW campaigns by seeking control of the human terrain, including
public perceptions, ideologies, and narratives. Hybrid warfare is a strategy
used by states and non-sate actors that seeks to maximize the effectiveness
of force by combining regular and irregular tactics, as well as various
military and non-military instruments. Adversaries can counter HW by

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 Krishnan: Fifth Generation Warfare, Hybrid Warfare, and Gray Zone Conflict

way of an organizational adaptation and a whole-of-government approach

to hybrid threats. In contrast, GZC is a strategy of major powers to engage
in long-term campaigns that seek to weaken a usually more powerful
adversary while deliberately avoiding a military response. The solution
here would be to set red lines, strengthen deterrence, and develop effective
response options below the threshold of war.

Hybrid warfare and GZC are much more state-centric than 5GW. While in
HW there would typically be an observable (irregular) military conflict, no
state of open conflict would exist in 5GW or GZC. Unlike GZC, where the
range of potential belligerents is small and rivalries are relatively clear,
5GW is empirically most difficult to identify and study due to the great
emphasis of deception and stealth, as well as the fact that potentially
unknown networks of individuals and small groups may attack powerful
states and societies in ways that may not be recognizable as a threat.

All these theories of conflict in the space between war and peace have their
flaws as pointed out by their many critics. At the same time, these theories
deal with real and to some extent also new phenomena that characterize
strategic competition and conflict in our uncertain times. It is hence not
helpful to declare that these theories lack novelty so that one can cling to a
vision of war formulated in 19th century Europe. Only through intellectual
experimentation and careful observation can our understanding of war
and conflict be advanced enough to come closer to the infinitely complex
reality.

Endnotes

1 Derek Barnett, “The Fallacies of Fourth and Fifth Generation Warfare,” Small Wars
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2 Donald Stoker and Craig Whiteside, “Gray-Zone Conflict and Hybrid War – Two
Failures of American Strategic Thinking,” Naval War College Review 73, no. 1 (2020):
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3 Stoker and Whiteside, “Gray Zone Conflict and Hybrid War,” 20.
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5 Donald J. Reed, “Beyond the War on Terror: Into the Fifth Generation of War and
Conflict,” Studies in Conflict & Terrorism 31, no. 8 (2008): 691,
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28

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7 William Lind, Keith Nightingale, John Schmitt, Joseph Sutton, and Gary Wilson, “The
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8 Martin van Creveld, The Transformation of War (New York: Simon & Schuster, 1991),

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