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Looking toward 7th and 8th

generation warfare

RAY ALDERMAN, VITA STANDARDS ORGANIZATION

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WARFARE EVOLUTION BLOG: “The supreme art of war is to

subdue the enemy without fighting,” wrote Sun Tzu in his
book "The Art of War."If you can convince your enemy that
his military efforts will all be in vain, then you can win
without fighting, which is where 7th and 8th generation
warfare (7GW and 8GW) will lead us.

Recently Russian leader Vladimir Putin wisely said that he does

not want a war with NATO and the U.S. over Ukraine. Russian
Generals Vladimir Slipshenko and Makhmut Gareev said in their
book “Future War”, after the U.S. victory in Iraq against Saddam
Hussein, any country would be stupid to fight against the
Americans with 3GW techniques. Chinese Colonels Qiao Liang
and Wang Xiangsui in their book “Unrestricted Warfare”, said
that China could not defeat the U.S. in an all-out war and should
explore other strategies. Those statements confirm that our 5GW
and 6GW concepts and weapons are superior and devastating to
our primary enemy’s — Russia, China, and Iran — existing 3GW
capabilities.

To read Warfare Evolution Blog Part 1 click here, for Part 2 here,
here for Part 3, for part 4 click here, for part 5 click here, and for
part 6 click here.

7th generation warfare

Seventh Generation Warfare is totally automated warfare. First,

we will shut down the enemy’s commercial and military
communications systems, their power grid, and their water
utilities with advanced electronic warfare (EW) systems and
cyberweapons, or even localized EMP (electromagnetic pulse)
weapons. That will consequently disable their economy and their
banking system. Think that is futuristic? On 31 March 2015,
Iranian military hackers shut-down the power grid to 44 of the 81
provinces in Turkey in retaliation after Turkey’s President
Erdogan made statements supporting the Saudi bombings of the
Houthi rebels in Yemen (who are supported by Iran). FYI, Iran
and Houthi are Shia, while Turkey and Saudi Arabia are Sunni.

Next, our enemy’s airspace will be controlled by swarms of our

flying autonomous weapons platforms, neutralizing their air
force. We do that now with manned fighters, creating no-fly
zones. Their ports and seacoast will be controlled by swarms of
autonomous naval surface vessels, unmanned underwater
vehicles (UUVs) such as smart torpedoes, and upward falling
platforms (UFPs), thereby eliminating their naval forces. If their
ground forces move toward their borders to attack, other swarms
of aerial and ground-based weapons platforms will neutralize
them.

Our satellite and unmanned aerial vehicle (UAV) intelligence

gathering systems will feed enemy movements and actions to
our autonomous weapons platforms from office buildings and
small trailers full of electronics on American soil, in Nevada and
Florida and Washington, DC. Not a single American boot will ever
touch enemy soil. We may lose a few of these advanced
platforms in the process, but not a single body bag will be
shipped back home to America. The objective of automated
warfare is to “subdue the enemy without fighting”, by eliminating
his ability to fight, thereby destroying his will to fight.

Finally, Sun Tzu’s “supreme art of war” will evolve to the point of
shortening or eliminating war as we know it. Yes, there will be
casualties on the enemy’s side in this scenario, but is it really a
war when only our enemy fills body bags?

8th generation warfare

Simple logic would take this one step further, and we’d have
8GW, where no one dies on either side of the conflict. That
suggests that we need the capability to temporarily incapacitate
our enemy’s forces and their population, similar to the effects of
a Star Trek phaser set on stun. Our troops would move in after
the enemy is zapped, collect their weapons, and destroy their
weapons-making capabilities. That could take some time, if the
zapped area is quite large. When the enemy wakes-up, they will
be totally defenseless and groggy with a headache. This could
work nicely though, on smaller localized areas of enemy
concentration.

Unfortunately, we are barely on the cusp of 7GW, and 8GW is a

pipe dream. Our present 5GW and 6GW weapons platforms,
while amazing to us now, are very primitive. We need to
integrate our intelligence, surveillance, and reconnaissance (ISR)-
platforms into our intelligence-analysis platforms. Then, we need
to integrate that advanced intelligence gathering-and–analysis
platform into our weapons platforms to make them totally
autonomous. In other words, we need to take the humans out of
the warfare loop and let the machines do their jobs unimpeded.

Today, it takes about 2 to 5 seconds for a command from a

Predator or Reaper UAV pilot in an electronic trailer in Nevada,
going through the ground and satellite communications systems,
to fire a Hellfire Missile at an identified and verified target in
Iraq. In the best case, it takes about 45 minutes, through the
military-political bureaucracy, to get permission to fire the
Hellfire missile at that target. The speed of light is the limitation
on the latency of commands to UAVs halfway around the world,
and can only be improved by a second or two with even the most
advanced electronics and optics.

The only true improvements in the “Kill Chain” must be in the

approval segment. If we can drop that from 45 minutes, to 2 to 5
seconds, we will then enter 7GW. With the integration of
intelligence gathering and analysis systems inside the weapon
platform, along with the platform’s autonomous authority to fire,
the entire kill chain can be reduced to a total of about 5 seconds,
maybe less. Are there some technical, legal, and ethical
problems to consider in this scenario? Yes, a few, and they must
be solved before we can enter 7GW.

Other than H. G. Wells “War of the Worlds” and some other

science fiction works, not much is written about potential real-
world applications of 7GW techniques. Futurist Ray Kurzweil says
that humans think linearly while technology moves
exponentially. Maybe that’s why we don’t see much said about
7GW. Or maybe we are well on the research and development
path, but the developing concepts are all top secret.

Think about holograms for a moment, and how they might be

used in PSYOPS (Psychological Operations) in 7GW and 8GW. In
2001, the Taliban destroyed the 1,500 year-old Budda statues in
Bamiyan, Afghanistan because they considered them false idols
in their Muslim world. The statues were huge, 115 and 175 feet
tall, carved into the side of a mountain, in alcoves in the rock. On
6 and 7 June of this year, a millionaire couple from China
scanned pictures of the larger 175 foot statue and recreated it as
a 3D hologram with computer-controlled lasers, in the alcove
where it once stood. Think of the effects of hordes of blood-
curdling gigantic monsters projected in the sky, coming down on
our enemy’s land or a giant image of the enemy’s political or
religious leader from horizon to horizon, chastising his people for
their actions from high up in the clouds.

7GW will be a mix of some previous-generation weapons and

techniques, along with some new things like holograms and high-
energy laser weapons and autonomous integrated intelligence-
analysis-weapons platforms as the anchors. But the primary
feature of 7GW will be that the humans are out of the loop, and
the machines will do the fighting. Only when we get to 8GW can
large-scale warfare come near to an end on this planet. That
doesn’t mean that we won’t have 4GW protracted low-intensity
terrorist warfare going on, like we have now, but 7GW weapons
and intelligence systems will hopefully limit and localize the
effects better than today. If Sun Tzu was correct in his statement
above, then by extension, the art of war is to put an end to war.

However, this is not the end of the Next Generation Warfare

series, if my evil masters see fit to let me write more here. There
are a number of military anomalies that have occurred in recent
times that need exploration and explanation. There’s also a bit
more history that needs to be recounted here, like the U.S. Air
Force’s “Big Safari” programs. There’s “Operation Aphrodite” in
World War II and the “Jasons,” a group of warfare scientists put
together in 1966. There’s “Task Force Alpha” and the electronic
fence they built in VietNam, and the sound surveillance system
(SOSUS) in the Atlantic Ocean. There’s a lot more to consider,
 both about the past and the future when it comes to warfare.
Maybe I’ll do a bibliography for those of you who want to dig
deeper into this topic as I have done. If you read this stuff (yes,
my masters track how many times these pieces are read on the
website), they will let me write more of it.

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Last updated: Sun, 08 Sep 2019 08:48:31 +0000 http://mil-embedded.com/guest-blogs/looking-toward-7th-and-8th-generation-warfare/