Editor’s Note: Retired Army Lietenant Colonel Dave Cloft as you would imagine, is a student of military history. In this 5-part series, he brings forth an old concept of revolution and sets it in modern times, with hyper-rapid communication. As the mid-term elections draw nigh, it behoves all of us to consider his words.
Ed.
In Part One, I talked about fifth-generation warfare, the Human Domain, and the uncomfortable reality that you don’t necessarily have to conquer a country anymore. You might only have to convince enough of its citizens that their elections are fraudulent, their courts are corrupt, their media lies, and their government has no legitimate right to govern.
That’s some scary new stuff.
Except it isn’t.
We Americans have been fooling around in this particular laboratory for a very long time.
And occasionally we’ve brought a checkbook.
The United States has spent billions of dollars around the world promoting democracy, independent journalism, election monitoring, civil society, political participation and governmental reform. Much of that has been perfectly public. USAID did it. The National Endowment for Democracy did it. Other American organizations did it.
And sometimes it worked.
Serbia in 2000 is particularly interesting.
Slobodan Milošević was no Jeffersonian democrat. After a disputed presidential election, hundreds of thousands of Serbians took to the streets and Milošević eventually surrendered power.
But Americans weren’t exactly sitting in the bleachers eating popcorn.
USAID’s own historical documents describe American assistance to independent media, civic organizations, democratic municipalities and political organizations. American money supported Otpor, the Serbian student resistance movement famous for its clenched-fist symbol and its “He’s Finished” campaign.
The Washington Post subsequently reported that the American effort included polling, opposition training, campaign advice, election monitoring, stickers and even thousands of cans of spray paint.
Yes.
Spray paint.
Somewhere in the federal government there was apparently a purchase order for revolutionary graffiti supplies.
I desperately hope the justification block simply said, “Freedom.”
Now here’s where things get interesting.
What do we call that?
From Washington’s perspective, it was democracy promotion. We were helping people living under an authoritarian government obtain competitive elections, independent information and the organizational ability to participate politically.
From Milošević’s perspective, the United States was funding organizations attempting to remove him from power.
Same dollars.
Very different PowerPoint presentation.
That doesn’t magically make Milošević the good guy. It merely illustrates something important about the Human Domain: legitimacy depends heavily upon perspective.
Then we get to the CIA.
This is normally where somebody hands me a roll of aluminum foil and tells me I’ve gone too far.
Unfortunately, the historical record makes the foil largely unnecessary.
The United States really has interfered in foreign elections.
Political scientist Dov Levin documented dozens of American interventions in foreign elections between 1946 and 2000. A Council on Foreign Relations report discussing his research identifies 81 U.S. interventions during that period, 53 categorized as covert.
Apparently election interference was bad.
Unless we were doing it.
Then it required a different acronym.
And covert political influence isn’t merely some dusty Cold War artifact involving trench coats, dead drops and guys named Boris meeting behind Viennese coffee shops.
American law still explicitly provides for covert action.
Title 50 defines covert action as activity intended to influence political, economic or military conditions abroad when the American government’s role isn’t intended to be publicly apparent or acknowledged. Such activities require presidential authorization and congressional intelligence oversight.
That doesn’t mean USAID is secretly the CIA.
It doesn’t mean every protest movement overseas was manufactured in Langley.
And it certainly doesn’t mean millions of Ukrainians, Georgians or Serbians were puppets incapable of having legitimate grievances against their own governments.
History is rarely that convenient.
But it does mean that influencing political conditions inside other countries isn’t something invented last Tuesday on an Internet conspiracy forum.
We’ve done it.
We’ve studied it.
We’ve funded parts of the political ecosystem around it.
And sometimes we’ve done it secretly.
Now consider Ukraine’s Orange Revolution in 2004.
A disputed presidential election produced enormous demonstrations. The Ukrainian Supreme Court eventually invalidated the contested runoff and ordered another vote.
Again, Ukrainians themselves drove the movement. But Western governments and organizations had spent years funding civil society, independent media, election monitoring and democratic development inside Ukraine.
Washington called that democracy assistance.
Moscow looked at the same activities and saw regime change.
Perhaps both descriptions tell us something useful about how great powers perceive the Human Domain.
Because imagine you’re sitting in Moscow or Beijing watching all this.
You watched Serbia.
You watched Georgia.
You watched Ukraine.
You watched American NGOs, election monitors, media programs and civil-society organizations operate around the world.
You watched American intelligence operations for decades.
Eventually somebody probably raised his hand and asked a fairly reasonable military question:
“Does this stuff work?”
Because if it does, building another aircraft carrier suddenly looks rather expensive.
Why invade the United States?
We have two oceans, an enormous military and several million Americans who own camouflage clothing for reasons even they cannot adequately explain.
Instead, attack trust.
You don’t have to invent American divisions. We’ve already manufactured those domestically.
Just amplify them.
Tell Republicans Democrats are destroying America.
Tell Democrats Republicans are destroying America.
Tell everybody elections are suspicious.
Tell everybody the courts are political.
Tell everybody journalists lie.
Tell everybody government statistics are fake.
Tell everybody the other half of the country secretly hates them.
Better yet, don’t convince Americans of one particular story.
Convince them that nobody knows what the truth is anymore.
That’s cheaper than a bomber.
And probably more effective.
This is where the chickens come home to roost.
For decades America demonstrated that information matters, political organization matters, civil society matters, elections matter and, above all, legitimacy matters.
We learned those lessons through the Cold War, counterinsurgency, psychological operations, democracy promotion, covert action, Iraq, Afghanistan and eventually our study of the Human Domain.
Our competitors were watching the same classroom.
Now nearly every American voluntarily carries a device containing a camera, microphone, television studio, newspaper, political rally, rumor mill and psychological warfare delivery system.
We call it a phone.
Maybe the great irony of fifth-generation warfare isn’t that someone invented a revolutionary new way to attack America.
Maybe nobody had to.
We spent decades demonstrating that political legitimacy is terrain, information can be ammunition and human perception can be a strategic objective.
Then we connected the entire population to the battlefield.
The chickens aren’t merely coming home to roost.
We may have taught them how to fly.
Which leaves one final question for Part Three.
If the Human Domain really is contested terrain, how does a free republic defend it without deciding that controlling what its citizens see, hear, say and believe is the solution?
Because that cure might be considerably more dangerous than the disease.
This article is 2nd in a 5 Part Series on 5th Generation Warfare. Links below go active on the dates indicated for this and subsequent parts:
September 28, 2026:5th Generation War Part 1: Don’t Capture the Capitol—Just Convince Half of them it’s Corrupt and Illegitimate
September 29, 2026: 5th Generation War Part 2: When the Chickens Come Home to Roost
September 30, 2026: 5th Generation War , Part 3: How Do We Save the Republic Without Committing Suicide?
October 1, 2026: 5th Generation War, Part 4: Rights, Privileges, and the Fine Art of Leaving Each Other Alone
October 2, 2026: 5th Generation War, Part 5: Who Gets to Decide What Is True?
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