Perpetual Motion War Machine
5GW: The undeclared World War where your mind is the battlefield
War wasn’t declared, but it’s raging. Not with tanks or Spitfires, but in your head. Defense contractors bankroll think tanks, think tanks write the script, media mouthpieces perform it, and governments cash the cheque. That’s Fifth Generation Warfare: the perpetual motion machine of conflict, perception, and profit.
Look at the chart. Really look.
It’s not a football scores table. It’s not a balance sheet from PwC. It’s the blood map of the Western mind-war.
On the left, five corporate giants—the Pentagon’s favourite sons and daughters: Northrop Grumman ($5.6M), Lockheed Martin ($2.6M), Mitsubishi ($2.1M), RTX, née Raytheon ($1.8M), and Airbus ($1.6M). The world’s biggest bomb merchants.
On the right, the “think tanks” — polite, oak-panelled parlours in Washington where “serious people” gather to set the tone of the age: CNAS ($3.6M), Atlantic Council ($3M), Brookings ($2.3M), CSIS ($1.2M), Hudson ($1.4M), and the Council on Foreign Relations ($880K). In between? A rainbow of cash flows, millions sluicing from weapons dealers into the mouths of intellectual courtiers who churn out the white papers, the TV appearances, the PowerPoints that justify the next war, the next budget, the next “existential threat.”
That, in short, is 5GW—fifth-generation warfare. Not tanks on your lawn. Not Spitfires over the Channel. It’s subtler. It’s in your head. It’s in the air you breathe. The war is narrative. And you’re the battlefield.
The Perpetual Threat Machine
Northrop Grumman dominates. Nearly six million dollars. That kind of money will buy a lot of PowerPoint decks — and a lot of “independent experts” on the BBC at 10 p.m. telling you that China is poised to invade Taiwan before next Christmas.
Meanwhile, over in a Suffolk pub, I find myself sat opposite a bloke in a hi-viz jacket, half-cut on Greene King IPA. He leans across the table and tells me - word for word — what I’d read in a CSIS brief the week before:
“We’ve got to outspend the Chinese on hypersonics, mate, otherwise we’re finished.”
He’s never been east of Felixstowe. But the script is in him. The machine has played its tune, and he hums it like a football chant.
War Without Declaration
This is World War Three, but not the one you expect. There are no Churchillian speeches, no ticker-tape parades. This war was never declared. It’s raging in your mind, your newsfeed, the panel shows and op-eds that “frame” how you are supposed to see the world.
Enemies change by the day. Yesterday it was ISIS. Today it’s Russia. Tomorrow it’s China. The narrative machine doesn’t need a fixed villain — only a rotating gallery of bogeymen to keep the fear alive and the contracts signed.
And you — yes, you — are the instrument being played. Your outrage, your tribal loyalties, your sense of safety. You’re the orchestra. They’re the conductor.
Meanwhile, Back Home…
Step outside the pub and the car park is full of rusting Fords and Vauxhalls, finance payments missed. Half the crowd inside is living off overdrafts and Klarna. Yet the UK government just signed another cheque to boost “defence capability.” Meanwhile, in Washington, Brookings cashes a $2.3M chit from the arms merchants and publishes a study arguing that “strategic stability” requires — you guessed it — more missile defence.
Ordinary people live paycheck to paycheck, shackled by credit and rising taxes. Nation states themselves are drowning in deficits, yet there’s always money for new missiles.
Who’s in Control?
Is Russia truly the Big Bad Wolf, or is that just a convenient script? Is China plotting world domination, or simply biding its time while the West eats itself alive?
Or — as Catherine Austin Fitts whispers in the shadows — are we seeing the rise of a breakaway civilisation? A class of financial-military mandarins who live off perpetual war and perception control, with no endgame except feeding the machine?
Do they even know what they’re doing? Or are they themselves trapped in the ouroboros — a snake eating its own tail, devouring the very society it claims to defend?
Your Net Worth in the Machine
Here’s the most bitter truth: in the calculus of this perpetual war economy, your life is a rounding error. A millionaire in Mayfair? Pennies to the state. A farmer in rural India on the poverty line? Even less. Expendable, all of us.
The war isn’t fought for you. It’s fought through you. Your fears, your patriotism, your tax money, your children drafted into uniform or debt. The war is perception. 5GW is perception management. And the enemy is anyone who still thinks.
Curtain Call
Hunter S. Thompson once said: “When the going gets weird, the weird turn pro.” Well, it’s gotten weird.
I flick on Newsnight. An “independent expert” from CSIS is explaining, with grave authority, that Britain must double its drone fleet. The host nods. Nobody asks who’s paying his wages. Back in the pub, hi-viz jacket man is still parroting it like gospel. The tune carries.
We are professionals now, in a theatre we never chose, where the script is written by arms dealers and performed by think tanks. Innocent people die in real wars, but the rest of us die by inches — consumed in the great orchestra pit of narrative.
The music plays on. And the machine feeds.
Yep and that was Intentionally Set that way.
Learning to navigate this reality...