I do wish papers would reserve “war” for actual wars; while I would be appalled if this goes all the way through, a note saying “we want to have a chat and this is why” is slightly further from even a metaphorical war on encryption than Farage is from an actual war on Brussels.
Every generation of warfare [1] looks completely indistinguishable from the previous one.
5th generation warfare [2] is "war" in every sense of the 1st principles of war. However, it manifests in a way that is unrecognizable in traditional surface-level manifestations of war. If anything, "not looking like a war" is a primary goal of 5th generation warfare.
> But the next generation of war – the so-called "fifth-generation" – won't feature armies or clear ideas. It will be what U.S. Army Major Shannon Beebe, the top intel officer for Africa, calls a "vortex of violence," a free-for-all of surprise destruction motivated more by frustration than by any coherent plans for the future. [3]
> the fifth-gen fighters' weapon of choice is political "stalemate," contends Marine Lt. Col. Stanton Coerr, in a new piece in Marine Corps Gazette.
> 5GW fighters will win by ... point[ ing ] out the impotence of secular military might. ... These fighters win by not losing, while we lose by not winning."
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Generations_of_warfare
[2] http://www.tdaxp.com/archive/2005/07/20/dreaming-5th-generat...
[3] https://www.wired.com/2009/01/how-to-win-a-fi/
[3]
My experience is from Northern Ireland. The IRA and other republican paramilitary groups would never defeat the British military but would rather make the British government's position untenable through various acts of violence against a variety of target classes.
The republican motivation was as much frustration with the rights of the catholic population in northern Ireland as anything else.
The targeting was not quite free for all though.
There are fewer of those than you likely realise. Countries that we'd think of having a dozen wars in the last century may only have declared one or even none. The Geneva Conventions for example smartly do not hinge on declarations of war, they rely upon the idea of "armed conflict" which is an observable fact.
How can a call to 'stimulate a discussion' somehow get characterized as declaring war?
This looks to me like the EU doing its typical thing of issuing memos to generate more memos, that will then generate more memos ...
Last time we had this shit, we ended up with Article 13. EU parliament has historically been rather unimportant so many parties, especially the conservatives, took pride in using the parliament (and the commission, see Oettinger) as dumping ground for toxic waste politicians or for party soldiers who needed a stable income.