The Fifth System of War

I am leaning heavily on Brett Deveraux here, who extracts from John Keegan a way of referring to styles of warfare as systems. 

In my own simplifications, First System is raid-based, where the aim is exploitation/denial of resources (and the land that has them) through raids and attrition. This thinking dominated the Plains Indians even while the United States and Mexico had moved into the Civil War -- Second System warfare -- and arguably still holds in some forms of guerilla warfare in areas (like the mountains of Afghanistan) that are difficult for other than small lightly-armed groups to move in.

Second system arises with agriculture (another thing we can blame on agriculture!) and assumes fixed population centers where the exploitable resource is not just the fertile land but population that farms it, along with their infrastructure.

This is the Sid Meir's Civilization model, where control of cities is the aim. Armies become large if often seasonal because siege happens. And with armies and the static nature of siege, armies themselves clash -- again I refer back to Afghanistan, say the Retreat from Kabul, where an army designed to fight armies meets a force designed for raid-and-retreat.

What Brett variously refers to as Third System or Modern System is when technological advancement, particularly artillery and air power but well-heralded by the machine gun, makes forming up in the field a bad approach. This is almost a situational definition; the First Gulf War saw a fully equipped Third System army fall before a Third System army with a few more decades of technological advancement behind them, as if they were an artillery battery at Woking against a Martian Tripod.

He suggested, very tentatively, (and well prior to the invasion of Ukraine), a Fourth System, where drones and cyber-warfare come to the front. "If you can see it..." is replaced with "If you can hack it..."

Horizon Zero Dawn has a heartbreaking meeting of systems in this regard. Semi-autonomous robots and cyber-warfare were a mature technology in 2064. Self-replication, and hacking of opponents to suborn them, were big selling points of Ted Faro's "Chariot" line. In re the latter, Sobeck herself referred to the Hartz-Timor swarm as being an apex predator.

Which meant all of humanity ended up on the back foot of trying to fight conventionally, without any of the digital assistance they'd become used to, in the costliest delaying action of all history. Actually and implicitly handing out rifles to anyone who could lift one and throwing them into the meat grinder just to buy the Zero Dawn project the time it needed.

Which, as a fictional situation that bends a few things to make itself happen, leads to my facetious designation of a Fifth System. This is the implicit (and almost never explicit) premise behind, say, Halo, Star Wars, or, well, any number of games and movies.

You could call this the Sergeant Zim system of war; "if you can get a man with a knife into the same room with it..."

And I've made that implicit and recognized in-world for two of the novel concepts I've been playing with. In the vampire-werewolf-love-triangle (in space!) I was tinkering with, it is recognized as being the only thing that super-soldiers actually might be useful for. Even if the people who came up with the cyber-boosted genetically manipulated wolf-humans had no idea (they bought into the stupid idea that a physically strong but very expensive soldier would be a really good thing to have).

In the Blue universe, this is implicit in the currently low-intensity, rapidly involving situation, as well as the kind of technologies in play and especially the lack of mature military doctrines in the use of any of this.

But basically, this isn't a realistic strategy. Sure, you can recognize that just as with any hacking, the human layer is most vulnerable, followed by the physical layer. And you can suggest that a small infiltration force, which is highly trained and equipped in expensive ways, could get in to subvert or destroy the systems. This is in fact done all the time.

Enough so that any military force that isn't completely new to the game is going to have countermining against those sappers, close-in guns for those "small, agile snub fighters" and so on. Dropping in some SEALs is just smart strategy. Pinning your entire war plan on them personally bringing down the enemy's stronghold is not.

In a fictional setting, you could both handwave and lampoon by expressly considering this as a clash of systems. In far too much fiction, insurgency tactics (because the heroes are usually the underdogs) are remarkably successful. It is rare when it is recognized that the weight is sometimes more moral than strategically effective.

That, and in fiction this is almost never the plan anyone wanted. At best, it is a Hail Mary. More usually, the heroes just happen to be in the right place at the right time, and while the world is dependent on them pulling off this impossible stunt, it was never in anyone's war plans.

In any case, many of the depictions are a technological imbalance between more-or-less similar systems. James Bond simply has better gadgets than the guys trying to stop him...and it is a close enough battle that their Bonds often succeed in doing a lot of damage to "our" side.

Expanding from that idea of changes of system with changes of society and technology, this Fifth System arises when you are in a kind of cyber-trench warfare. And in fact, perhaps the biggest explicit depiction of Fifth System warfare in fiction was cold war spy exploits; No Man's Land here being the MAD doctrine and the fact that open warfare itself was impossible.

Any halfway-realistic setting that has casual interstellar travel is up in power levels that make actual warfare incredibly and mutually destructive. If there are counter-measures or defenses, they are themselves also technological, and thus both front lines (as it were) are complex enough that it becomes a theoretical impossibility to plug all the holes.

So warfare, whatever the actual form of it is, involves exploiting the inevitable vulnerabilities that show up as both sides continue to evolve and react to continue their technological detente. To lose the arms race is to be destroyed, but to continue the arms race opens up those vulnerabilities to special forces. And this atmosphere of constant technological change means the opportunities are constantly changing.

The first side to invent superheroes wins. For a few months -- then everyone has them and status quo returns.