Theme Parks for Fourth Generation War

That's the subhead for Bill Lind's recent article, The Sanctuary Illusion, about more of the same quixotic rice-cake-quality strategic thinking in some Washinton circles--that tribes and bonds care about borders. (Shades of Churchill and 1914 Iraq all over again.)

If you care about such things, try entertaining this before reading further: Real Estate--Land--has been the language of thought in the mind of man since forever. That mentaility--a physical, mechanized, mass mentality--is no longer salient when others are undermining you at subatomic levels, manipulating and leveraging the bonds between people; when they are perturbing things that a 4th ID org chart or Centcom powerpoint cannot calibrate against. (Ask Paul Van Riper)

Land made America what she is today, and that's pretty powerful reason to think in its limiting 3-dimensional mindspace. Land is pretty easily linked to any fortune of any Forbes 400 member. Another powerful reason. Land (aside from insult--an important intangible mental note, as you see below) has caused pretty much every war since hair. That long but narrow line of thinking doesn't help you anymore in 4th Gen warfare. But that doens't compute with a Purchasing-Agent-Pentagon and a Realtor-minded managerial class proficient at counting hills and munitions and other inventory, but totally retarded at sussing out why a proxy will throw himself on a hand grenade. Why a group "is," became so, and wants to stay so is beyond their ken.

Holding land--occupying it, governing it, whatever--no longer matters in terms of fettering Networked 4th Generation Warriors. This new-fangled series of tubes, mated with the flying apart of landed industries is merely civilian, "calm" proof of that. An old idea becomes new, which is another way of saying it's orbited around into view again: Sun Tzu may have been the first to specify the idea of Mind-fucking your enemy, what we call Psy-ops now. But Psy-ops is all existence, the beginning, middle and end of negotiation, conflict and cooperation. War is bonds, tightened or broken. But now, bonded people are not reliant on proximity or physical agency.

The "smart set" answer to this etheral challenge? More mass and rules. Heavier tools, higher density fences, more touchable inventory. 3-dimensional answers to 4th Generation War, steel instead of mentality to ward off demons and ghosts.