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.
For most of human history, overthrowing a government was exhausting work.
You needed armies. Horses. Guns. Artillery. Supply lines. Somebody had to remember to bring enough beans and bullets. Eventually you had to seize the palace, arrest the king, occupy the radio station, and find some poor lieutenant willing to stand at a roadblock at three in the morning wondering whether the approaching truck was friendly.
Government overthrow was terribly labor-intensive.
Fifth-generation warfare offers a considerably cheaper possibility:
Don’t destroy the government. Destroy people’s belief in its legitimacy. Far cleaner and more professional. Humans are smarter today…
That ought to concern Americans regardless of whether there is an R, D, I, or small woodland creature after their name.
And here’s the interesting part.
We didn’t suddenly discover this when somebody invented TikTok.
We Were Studying This More Than a Decade Ago
Back around 2012, while the American military was digesting a decade of Iraq and Afghanistan, there was already considerable discussion about something we called the Human Dimension and, increasingly, the Human Domain.
The terminology wasn’t identical.
The Army’s Human Dimension work concentrated heavily on developing the soldier—the cognitive, physical, moral, cultural and social abilities necessary to operate in increasingly complicated environments. During Unified Quest 2012, TRADOC was explicitly examining the Human Dimension and how the Army should develop people for future warfare.
At roughly the same time, another idea was emerging from Army, Marine Corps and Special Operations thinking:
the Human Domain.
That was looking outward.
It asked a deceptively simple question:
What if terrain isn’t just hills, bridges, roads and cities?
What if the most important terrain is people?
By 2013, the Army War College’s Strategic Landpower work was describing the human domain as encompassing the physical, cultural and social environments influencing human behavior. Army, Marine Corps and Special Operations thinkers (planners and researchers) were studying the intersection of the land, cyber and human domains.
That’s remarkably important looking backward from 2026.
We were essentially recognizing that the new objective of warfare isn’t ultimately to kill people destroying things. While fun, that’s expensive and messy. The new objective is changing human behavior.
You can destroy every enemy tank in sight and still lose the war.
Iraq and Afghanistan provided some fairly expensive graduate-level instruction on that particular subject. Sometimes, I wonder, how we could have lost these valuable lessons learned… so quickly.
Today we routinely discuss warfare across land, sea, air, space and cyberspace. We even created a new branch of the military.
Sensors talk to shooters. Satellites talk to aircraft. Drones talk to artillery. Computers talk to computers.
Wonderful. That’s cool, and looks great on the evening news.
But eventually a human has to decide what all those machines are supposed to accomplish. And ultimately, all warfare seeks some change in human behavior.
Convince the enemy commander to surrender.
Convince the population not to support the insurgency.
Convince an ally to remain in the coalition.
Convince an adversary that attacking isn’t worth the cost.
Convince a government to change its policy.
Or convince a population that its government no longer deserves their obedience.
That’s the bridge between the old Human Domain discussion and what we now loosely call fifth-generation warfare, an element of 5th Generation Warfare (5GW).
The technology changed.
The target really didn’t.
The target was always human will. We can force the Uncle Sam’s will upon you…
Clausewitz would probably recognize the concept immediately. He just didn’t have Twitter and a smart phone.
Here is where things get uncomfortable.
In 2012, Facebook had about a billion users, Twitter was still something politicians occasionally embarrassed themselves with, TikTok didn’t exist, and most Americans hadn’t yet voluntarily installed a continuously connected psychological warfare delivery device approximately six inches from their face.
Today we call that device a smartphone.
It knows what frightens you.
It knows what makes you angry.
It knows what keeps your attention.
And algorithms learned something every propagandist in history would have sacrificed a small European country to possess: anger creates engagement.
Now combine that technology with the Human Domain.
An adversary doesn’t necessarily need to convince Americans of one particular political narrative.
That’s old-fashioned ancient propaganda.
The more sophisticated objective could simply be destroying our ability to agree upon which sources of information are trustworthy enough to establish reality.
Tell half the country the election was stolen.
Tell the other half that questioning election procedures itself represents an attack on democracy.
Tell one group the courts are corrupt.
Tell another that the police are corrupt.
Tell everyone Congress is corrupt.
That last one may require considerably less sophisticated technology, already common sense to most American’s.
Then amplify every real mistake, every dishonest politician, every bureaucratic failure, every questionable ballot procedure, every inflammatory video and every idiot with a microphone.
You don’t have to invent the divisions. You simply exploit the ones already there.
This is where the color-revolution concept becomes relevant.
Historically, color revolutions (think Yugoslavia, Ukraine, Krygyzstan) generally involved disputed elections, mass political mobilization, opposition movements, civil-society organizations and challenges to governmental legitimacy. Some may have even received outside assistance (Ukraine…Clinton and Biden?), although scholars disagree sharply about how important foreign or US involvement was in those particular cases.
But look at the mechanism rather than arguing about the label.
The center of gravity is legitimacy.
Once enough people conclude that elections cannot resolve political disagreements legitimately, street politics becomes way more attractive.
If courts aren’t trusted either, another safety valve disappears.
If journalism isn’t trusted, citizens can’t even agree about what happened.
If police aren’t trusted, enforcement becomes political.
If the military ever becomes identified with one political faction, we have entered extremely dangerous territory.
That is how a political disagreement can become an immediate legitimacy crisis.
We already ran this experiment once.
In 1860 Abraham Lincoln won an election under the constitutional system. The underlying sectional conflict had developed over decades and centered overwhelmingly upon slavery and its expansion, but Lincoln’s election became the immediate trigger for secession.
Eventually the disagreement wasn’t about who should be president.
It became a disagreement over which government possessed legitimate authority.
Then… Americans started shooting Americans…
Approximately 160 years later, perhaps we shouldn’t assume that human nature received a software update. That’s why election legitimacy may be among the most valuable terrain in modern 5GW information and psychological warfare.
Not because every election dispute is a conspiracy.
Not because every protest is a color revolution.
And not because questioning government makes someone an enemy of democracy.
Quite the opposite.
A resilient republic requires transparent elections, auditable procedures, functioning courts, aggressive investigation of credible allegations and citizens willing to follow evidence even when the evidence disappoints their political tribe.
Trust cannot simply be ordered.
It has to be earned.
But citizens have responsibilities too. The losing side must believe another legitimate election is coming. The winning side must preserve a system in which it might lose that next election.
Because the Human Domain lesson we were wrestling with more than a decade ago remains brutally simple:
Wars are ultimately contests of human will.
Land matters.
Sea matters.
Air matters.
Space matters.
Cyber matters.
But every one of those domains eventually intersects with a human mind.
And in fifth-generation warfare, that is the decisive terrain. That roughly six inches between the human ears.
An enemy might never have to capture Washington.
The Capitol can remain standing.
The flag can still fly.
Congress can still meet.
Courts can still issue decisions.
Elections can still occur right on schedule.
Everything can look perfectly normal.
Except nobody believes any of it anymore.
And once a nation loses enough confidence in the institutions that peacefully settle political disagreements, the enemy may not need to conquer it.
We may eventually do the job ourselves for them.
This article is 1st 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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