Reforming xGW

Prior to attending RMC I was a strong proponent of xGW. Like so many of the military students I would meet over the next three years, I latched on to the latest and greatest. After a few months worth of study, I gained a wider perspective and became more critical of many aspects of xGW. Dan of tdaxp addresses some of my concerns, specifically causality. His proposal to change “generation” to “grade” is a good idea. Dan says:

Grade also has the benefit of not having the strict timeline implications of “generation” while not doing away entirely with the parts of the timeline of XGW that make sense.

This would be an advantage to reconciling xGW theory with mainstream military thought. Still though, I much prefer the categories of conflict that John Boyd proposed in his Patterns of Conflict (pdf, see slide 113).

These categories provided the basis for Lind’s later work on 4GW. The advantage to Boyd’s categories is the ahistorical aspect — there is no chain of causality. As mentioned by Dan above, this is one of the biggest criticisms of xGW. I maintain that xGW should abandon the timeline altogether.