Fifth Generation Warfare, Hybrid Warfare, and Gray Zone Conflict: A Comparison

Abstract

Strategists have noted substantial changes in warfare since the end of the Cold War. They have proposed several concepts and theories to account for the fact that the practice of war has largely departed from a Clausewitzian understanding of war and the centrality of physical violence in it. Emerging modes of conflict are less focused on the instrumental use of force to achieve political objectives and are more centered on notions of perception management, narratives, asymmetry or irregular conflict, the adversarial uses of norms, and covert and ambiguous uses of force. This article aims to systematically compare three more recent theories of war or political conflict, namely fifth generation warfare (5GW), hybrid warfare (HW), and gray zone conflict. The article demonstrates that although they have the same intellectual roots, they are also different in terms of what they suggest about the nature of contemporary and near future conflict. Each of them can enrich our understanding of contemporary warfare, which will be the key to mastering these new modes of conflict short of (theater conventional) war.