Prosperity Pyramid: A Framework to Deal with 5G Warfare

“If you know the enemy and know yourself, you need not fear the result of a hundred battles. If you know yourself but not the enemy, for every victory gained you will also suffer a defeat. If you know neither the enemy nor yourself, you will succumb in every battle.”― Sun Tzu, The Art of War

The concept of 5th Gen warfare is new for many, the philosophy of this approach is grounded in the understanding, that cohesiveness is the prime strength of a nation and only this cohesiveness can guarantee the success of a nation. The basis of national cohesiveness springs from the ideology, vision and trust that citizens of a nation share within themselves. Therefore, the 5^th Gen wars focus more on the soft-structures of nations rather than the military hardware. The strategy is to analyse the social structure of the enemy and uncover the structural weaknesses and structural holes in the society. Then these fault lines are enhanced so that the society would breakup into smaller groups fighting against one another. The final result is that the society disintegrates under natural laws resulting in the victory of the aggressor.

5GW Educational Institute defines this new war approach as the use of “all means whatsoever”. It includes the appearance of super-empowered individuals and groups with access to modern knowledge, technology, and means to conduct asymmetric attacks in furtherance of their individual and group interests.

The tools for imposing 5GW on any country are similar to that may be used to defending the country. These tools are viewed more, as strategic analysis and planning tools while the implementation of these comes as the next step.

The National Security Strategy (NSS) of the US proposed “DIME” (Diplomatic, Informational, Military, Economy) to establish linkages between critical state institutions needed for functioning of a state. DIME represents Diplomacy, Intelligence, Military and Economics and we do see a strong coordination between these elements of national power in American decision making.

Another important model presented by NSS in the same perspectives is “MIDLIFE” which is further enhancement of the DIME to include the Military Intelligence, Legal and Financial institutions as instruments of national power. These National Security models establish that National Security is an outcome of state functions and in the emerging era, expecting military or security agencies to function in silos but yet provide effective national security is no longer valid.

There is a dire need for Pakistan to revisit its decision making process, at the highest level and update its dynamics for policy making to include the 5GW aspects. The economic development in Pakistan has not followed a smooth curve and the country has faced sharp fluctuations in growth from time to time during the past decades. Studying the dynamics of economic development from systems theory perspectives, it is proposed that the prosperity of a country may be viewed as dependent on a number of factors which may be visualized in a pyramid framework.

The framework views prosperity or wellbeing of a nation, as an outcome of a number of aspects interacting in the society. These aspects are visualized as six layers with the most essential or basic layer at the bottom followed by the next critical layer and onwards.

The pyramid structure indicates that sustained prosperity of the nation is considered as the desired outcome of the whole system, but this outcome would come from the interaction of the lower level layers. The stronger the base of the pyramid, the higher and more stable the pyramid would become. The framework considers education and health as the foundation layer of the national prosperity, as it is through education that a nation develops its coming generations to follow a certain ideology and vision of a nation.

Then starting from top of the pyramid, it is argued that sustained prosperity of a country cannot be obtained without a secure environment in a country, but security cannot be achieved in a global environment; by a country, without proper management of diplomatic aspects and international trade. Therefore, the diplomatic layer must come at a lower level than the security layer. It is also evident that a country cannot perform successfully in diplomatic affairs if the economic performance of a country is low and moving on, it is understood that economic performance of the country will depend on the societal and business environment of a country. Then comes the governance layer as it is assumed that without good governance, it would be impossible to expect a strong society that is progressive and growing. The base of all layers is the education and health layer as education is a must for performance of a democratic system and thus a good government. The layers are viewed as forming a pyramid, as the pyramid is a very stable structure and its stability at the apex increases as the dimensions of its base are increased.  It can be easily argued that all countries performing high on economic performance, security and democracy are ranking high on education and health and we cannot find any country outlying in this aspect. 

The Pyramid framework suggests that a stronger country, if interfering in any of the proposed layers of another country may actually be implementing 5GW strategies against it. Analysing the present scenario in Pakistan, external forces have been exerting extensive pressure over the years to exploit and create rifts between the states institutions, the critical most of which is military and civil divide. Then comes the religious and sub-religious divided groups which moves further into race divide in the different regions of the country.      

At the second level there is always present in all societies a dividing line between the rich and the poor, this gap is naturally further increased with inflation and economic slowdown. Increasing number of political parties and fresh interest groups are introduced by enemy to ensure that cohesiveness in the society can be prevented. This would mean that a large number of political parties with nearly the same political vision. The purpose is to ensure that society remain divided into smaller groups and for promoting further confusion among the masses.

In this perspectives, the art of maintaining balance by being neutral or committing negligence of duty by not providing necessary support to the other state institutions is a difficult decision for all stakeholders. Pakistan can enhance its National Security Policy and design initiatives based on integration of state institutions, based on the Prosperity Pyramid framework.