5GW includes information dominance and manipulation, social engineering, economic coercion, cyber sabotage, and hybrid influence operations. It thrives on ambiguity, exploiting vulnerabilities without traditional combat. In 5GW, the lines between war and peace are blurred. No declarations, no clear enemies, just a relentless assault on stability. The goal is not to conquer land or destroy armies, but to cripple a nation’s spirit, economy, and infrastructure from within.

One of the most potent asymmetric tools of 5GW is economic manipulation. Palau, a serene archipelago of over 500 islands, were untouched by war until 2017. Palau dared to reject Beijing’s “One China Policy.” This move sent shockwaves through its fragile economy in the form of economic strangulation. In a masterstroke of economic coercion, China’s state-backed tour operators erased Palau from the Web.

Travel agencies stopped selling trips. Online searches yielded no results. Palau’s tourism industry, which accounted for 45 percent of gross domestic product (GDP), collapsed. Hotels emptied, airlines shut down, and the once-thriving economy suffocated.

This was not an anomaly, but a pattern. In 2016, South Korea agreed to facilitate the American THAAD missile defense system. China retaliated not with weapons but with economic muscle. Mysterious “fire and safety” violations suddenly appeared in South Korean businesses across China. A nine-month ban on Chinese tourism cost Seoul $6.5 billion. Retail giants like Lotte crumbled, thousands lost jobs, and yet, no war was declared.

The more interconnected the world economy becomes, the more vulnerable nations are to economic blackmail. Even Venezuela, despite its fiery anti-American rhetoric, was bound to the US economy. In 2018, despite Washington branding Nicolás Maduro a dictator and Caracas calling the US a “white supremacist regime,” the two nations still had $24 billion in trade, a quarter of Venezuela’s GDP.

Yet, when Washington imposed sweeping financial sanctions, Venezuela’s economy shrunk by 35 percent in a single year. After all, the United States does not just impose sanctions; it controls the very financial system that runs the world. The US dollar is the bloodline of global trade, and those who defy it find themselves cut off from international markets, unable to access capital or even conduct basic transactions. However, economic warfare breeds resistance.

Russia and China saw the writing on the wall. Between 2017 and 2020, Moscow slashed its holdings of US Treasury securities from $105 billion to just $3.8 billion and shifted towards China’s Cross-Border Interbank Payment System (CIPS), sidestepping American financial hegemony.

The true commanding heights of global dominance lie at the intersection of technology, finance, and unchecked ambition. China is not just selling 5G networks, it is embedding itself into the nervous system of global communication. On the other hand, the US does not just dominate finance, it controls the SWIFT banking system, ensuring economic warfare is just a sanction away. Similarly, corporations do not just innovate, they monopolize, influence, and quietly dictate policy behind closed doors.

“Surge forward, killing as you go, to blaze us a trail of blood.” A battle cry? Indeed. Not from a general on the battlefield, but from Ren Zhengfei, the founder of Huawei, a company waging a war not just against competitors but against entire nations. Britain’s telecom networks are suspected to have Chinese backdoors.

Information is now what oil was in the 1970s, a critical commodity to be controlled. Today, data is the new crude, and the battle to monopolize its flow has already begun. Quantum computing, AI, and machine learning are the new oil rigs, and the nations that dominate these technologies will dictate the future. Unlike oil, information is easily stolen, manipulated, or even weaponized in ways no physical resource ever could.

The first lethal autonomous drone strike in Libya, recorded in March 2020, was a grim reminder of what is to come. A suicide drone, powered by AI, needed no human command—just a target. Fire and forget was the name of the game. Imagine the next phase: terrorist organizations deploying AI-powered swarms, able to strike with precision, invulnerability, and zero risk to human operatives. They would not negotiate, would not retreat, and would prove hard to stop.  

In a world where biological warfare is outlawed, the selective control of food, aid, and healthcare has replaced mass destruction with slow, calculated suffocation. Nations can now deny access to the very essentials of life to break their adversaries in a siege without walls and a war without battlefields. Over 40 percent of the world’s population faces water scarcity, and by 2030, drought could displace 700 million people. The Turkish-backed militias that had control over the Alouk water station in Syria in 2020 was a stark reminder—when resources are weaponized, suffering becomes policy.

Interestingly, the battle of perception is gaining momentum more than ever. In an era of clickbait headlines and disinformation campaigns, lies travel faster than truth. The Massachusetts Institute of Technology found that false news spreads 70 percent faster than real news. From the Soviet KGB planting the rumor in the 1980s that the US government created AIDS to modern deepfake propaganda, deception is the new artillery.

Even culture is not immune. Hollywood exported American ideals, Bollywood spread Indian influence, and K-pop turned South Korea into a global powerhouse. For instance, the Cold War was not just won by missiles, it was won when a West German band sang “Wind of Change,” which then became the anthem of the Berlin Wall’s collapse.

If hunger, water, and financial systems hare already weaponized, the next battlefield is clear—space and the seabed. Subsea communication cables are responsible for carrying 97 percent of global data traffic and are the arteries of the modern economy. They enable over $10 trillion in financial transactions every single day. Yet, these vital lifelines remain shockingly unprotected and are vulnerable to sabotage, espionage, and strategic disruption. A targeted attack on just a handful of these cables could cripple stock markets, paralyze banking systems, and sever military command structures—all without a single warship being deployed.

Meanwhile, the race for space dominance is accelerating. From $63.66 billion in 2024 to an estimated $74.4 billion by 2028, the global military satellite market is growing, fueled by the realization that power no longer lies in boots on the ground, but in eyes in the sky. Satellites provide precision-strike capabilities, secure communication, and real-time battlefield intelligence. The Pentagon warns that the US is already vulnerable, with China and Russia developing anti-satellite (ASAT) weapons.

In this realm, one can say that modern states wage wars without battlefields, where the goal is not to destroy but to subdue—crippling economies, infiltrating cyber networks, and manipulating narratives without a single shot fired. What is never openly begun is rarely officially ended. In 5th-generation warfare, silence is a weapon, perception is the battlefield, and survival means accepting that war never truly ends.

Syeda Fizzah Shuja is a Research Associate at Pakistan Navy War College and an Mphil scholar in Peace and Counter Terrorism. Her work focuses on hybrid warfare and maritime terrorism. She can be contacted at fizzasyed2k@gmail.com.

The 5GW Playbook: Silent Wars and Invisible Battlefields was originally published on Global Security Review.

Both sides subsequently took steps to militarize the border and there was talk in New Delhi of following a more aggressive policy towards the Chinese. It was quite a surprise, therefore, that before the 2024 BRICS (Brazil, Russia, India, China, and South Africa) summit at Kazan, India announced that it reached an agreement with the Chinese on how to patrol the border without clashes. Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi and Chinese President Xi Jinping also had a bilateral meeting in Kazan. Several factors led to this turn of events.

The Indians knew for some time that to dislodge the Chinese from the positions they occupied in the Himalayas would lead to an expensive war where India would likely not succeed in achieving its objectives. The alternative was to negotiate a settlement on resuming patrolling along the border and move towards improving the relationship in other areas, as the Chinese had suggested, notably by increasing trade and foreign direct investment in India.

The first sign that a policy shift was taking place came when the Ministry of Finance’s publication, “The Economic Survey of India,” called for seeking Chinese foreign direct investment to boost the economy. Such a statement could only come with the approval of the prime minister’s office signaling a change in thinking in New Delhi. While India’s bureaucratic and military establishments wanted a hard line towards China and to move closer to the United States, India’s three major business houses—Ambani, Adani, and Tata—all wanted closer economic ties with the Chinese, as did others in the business community. China provides the necessary equipment for Indian industry as well as the much-needed middle managers for India’s bourgeoning high-tech industries.

Further, while the United States was engaged in discussions with India it could not provide anything concrete and meaningful to New Delhi. Foreign direct investment from the United States was not forthcoming in significant amounts. Militarily, Washington was not providing the high-tech weaponry that India badly needed—at least not without terms and conditions that India found onerous. On the other hand, India lacked the financial resources to pay for the more advanced technology it wanted.

In terms of the Quadrilateral Alliance (Australia, India, Japan, and the United States), the Indians were always the outliers since their military technology could not operate seamlessly with the American, Australia, and Japanese systems. Moreover, the Indians were cautious about the extent to which they wanted to aggravate the Chinese, worrying about Beijing’s potential to complicate the security environment in South Asia.

The budding bilateral alliance between Beijing and Moscow also worried New Delhi. Beijing and Moscow are moving towards a much closer political and economic relationship that is partly aimed at transforming the dollar-dominated international financial system.

Militarily, the emergence of closer military ties between China, Russia, Iran, and North Korea (CRINK) is worrying not only to the West but also to India since Russia is a major supplier of weaponry to India and New Delhi does not want to see this supply chain disrupted because Moscow decides to favor Beijing and reduces supplies to India.

Moreover, within BRICS there is a move towards accepting the Beijing-Moscow position on an alternative world order—the Law Based International Order—that while India accepts it, it is also concerned that it would be dominated by Beijing (and India would be shut out of framing the new narrative). All these reasons required mending fences with the Chinese.

Outcomes

             At the very least, this move is welcome because it is going to lead to a lowering of tensions along the border, which helps the internal position of the incumbent prime minister. Narendra Modi was weakened in the May-June 2024 general elections where his party went from having an absolute majority to being forced into a coalition with untrustworthy partners.

In such a situation, a bad military outcome along the border would severely weaken Modi’s internal standing and lead to calls for him to be replaced. Stabilizing the border, therefore, removes an irritant in domestic politics.

India needs foreign direct investment and despite all the talk from Tokyo and Western capitals, China is the most likely source of such financial resources. Chinese companies, despite the downturn in India-China relations, now control over 70 percent of the country’s cellphone market with companies like OnePlus, Redmi, Oppo, and Vivo outselling Apple, Samsung, and Sony.

Huawei and Hisense are making inroads in India’s white goods market while Chinese electric scooters (or ones powered by Chinese batteries) are becoming the ride of choice for young Indians. Paytm, the mobile payment service, has a Chinese majority share in its ownership and it is one of the leading players in the Indian market.

All of this has happened while relations between the two countries were sour. There is, therefore, considerable room for growth if the political climate between the two countries improves significantly. There is talk, in fact, that China may do a substantial foreign direct investment in India because, unlike Pakistan and Sri Lanka, there is less worry about nonperforming loans in India.

Some worry that the Indian rapprochement with China could have an adverse impact on US policy toward the Indo-Pacific and will give greater momentum to a BRICS-inspired move to de-dollarize the global economy. The Indians have a residual distrust of China and, therefore, are not going to bail out of Western-directed initiatives in the Indo-Pacific just because New Delhi is now the recipient of Chinese largesse.

Instead, India will encourage the development of Western-crafted institutions in the Indo-Pacific and participate in them particularly if they lead to economic growth. As far as de-dollarization is concerned, the Indians want to go to payments in one’s own currencies within BRICS but are not talking of displacing the dollar. In part, this is because the alternative could be the yuan or a Chinese-dominated BRICS currency.

The rapprochement between the two countries is good because it deescalates tensions and makes room for investment that India badly needs to reinvigorate its economy. At the same time, it does not shift India into the Chinese camp since New Delhi is a long way from trusting Beijing and entering into an anti-Western partnership with it. For the West, the best move is to wait and see, while remaining on good terms with India.

Amit Gupta is a Senior Advisor to the Forum of Federations Ottawa. The views in this article are his own.

Why India Made Up with China at the BRICS Summit was originally published on Global Security Review.