Reforming xGW

Posted on 5/29/2008 by Younghusband

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”:http://www.tdaxp.com/archive/2008/05/27/the-terminology-of-xgw.html some of my concerns, specifically causality. His proposal to change “generation” to “grade” is a good idea. Dan says:

bq. 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”:http://d-n-i.net/boyd/pdf/poc.pdf (pdf, see slide 113).

Boyd’s categories of conflict

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.

About Younghusband

Sir Francis Edward Younghusband (1863-1942) was a British explorer, army officer, military-political officer, and foreign correspondent born in India who led expeditions into Manchuria, Kashgar, and Tibet. He three times tried and failed to scale Mt. Everest and journeyed from China to India, crossing the Gobi desert and the Mustagh Pass (alt. c.19,000 ft/5,791 m) of the Karakoram mountain range in modern day Pakistan. Convinced of Russian designs on British interests in India, Younghusband proactively engaged in the nineteenth century spying and conflict over Central Asia between the British and the Russians known as the Great Game. "Younghusband" is a Canadian who has spent a number of years bouncing back and forth between his home country and Japan. Fluent in Japanese and English with experience in numerous other languages from Spanish to Georgian, Younghusband has travelled throughout Asia. He graduated with an MA from the War Studies Department at the Royal Military College of Canada, where he focussed on the Japanese oil industry and energy security issues. He has recently returned to Canada from Japan, and is working in the technology sector.
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7 Responses to Reforming xGW

  1. Dan tdaxp says:
    5/29/2008 at 2:35 am

    Excellent post.

    Just one clarification: I think I, like you, was a fan of GMW (the Generations of Modern War). Further thought and discussion have made GMW unacceptable as an analytical tool. XGW has branched off from GMW.

    I think it is best to say that XGW is a response to GMW, that builds off GMW, and contradicts GMW.

  2. Benjamin Walthrop says:
    5/29/2008 at 9:07 pm

    Your thoughts on the naval aspects of the categories of conflict that you have brought to our attention would be appreciated.

    The US Navy in particular has had a component of manuever warfare and attrition warfare (especially at the founding of the nation through WWII). In WWII, I believe the Navy shifted to manuever conflict, and if the new maritime strategy is a guide the US Navy may have recently codified a shift to Moral Conflict.

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  4. Soob says:
    6/1/2008 at 10:21 pm

    “I maintain that xGW should abandon the timeline altogether.”

    Amen. The idea that strategy prior to 1GW (Napoleonic) should simply be relegated to “pre-modern” warfare is ridiculous and constrains the theoretical framework. The chronological aspect has always been the number one element of GMW that I’ve found inconsistent with reality.

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  6. purpleslog says:
    6/16/2008 at 7:23 pm

    Boyd is a good starting point, but it is not sufficient.

    Where does genocide warfare (aka primal warfare) fit in? It doesn’t in Boyd (or in Lind’s GMW). It has a place in XGW.

    Boyd’s Moral warfare is a subset of Lind’s GMS’s 4GW. There is not hint of the tools available in XGW’s 4GW in Boyd or Lind. Check out Unrestricted Warfare for an idea of the possible scope (perhaps though Unrestricted Warfare should be consider something separate from 4GW).

    Also, in Boyd there is no place for 5GW aka Secret War aka Invisible Warfare.

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