The operational fabric of Fifth Generation Warfare (5GW)

Atlas: Decentralized, software-defined infrastructure

This is the first guest essay on FYSA, courtesy of Adyton’s Head of Product Andrew Ehrlich. Andrew is a proud Marine Corps veteran who brings a warfighter mindset to technology. He specializes in product management, strategy, and execution with a track record of building and scaling zero-to-one products across B2B, B2C, and B2G verticals.

0. Modern war

In the last FYSA essay, James Boyd wrote about The Stack of Power. It is the mental model through which the reality of modern war can be understood: the idea that war is confined to declared hostilities, uniformed forces, or discrete phases of peace and combat is, as James wrote, “a foundationally insufficient view of and expression of power. “

Instead, it unfolds continuously across civilian infrastructure, administrative systems, information environments, partner forces, and public institutions. This often happens long before the first shot is fired.

Advantage no longer accrues solely to the actor with superior weapons or platforms. It accrues to the actor whose systems remain coherent under pressure: whose people can communicate, coordinate, and decide even when networks are degraded, trust boundaries are unclear, and centralized control is contested.

This is Fifth Generation Warfare (5GW): conflict defined not just by capability, but by resilience of coordination.

I view Fifth Generation Warfare through the combined lens of an operator and a product builder. After nearly seven years in the Marine Corps, I’ve seen how quickly coherence breaks down when communications fragment and decision authority blurs. In the private sector, building products at Amazon, Spotify, and Blend Labs, and now as Head of Product at Adyton, I’ve learned how resilient systems are intentionally designed: how identity, trust, synchronization, and user workflows must be architected, not assumed.

The defining challenge of 5GW is not just tactical lethality alone. It is maintaining system coherence under pressure. That is a product challenge as much as it is a military one.

5GW cannot be addressed with role-specific or phase-specific tools. It requires a single operational fabric capable of functioning across the full spectrum of modern conflict — from steady-state operations to the tactical edge, and into the society in between.

It is important that technologists who are building for the Department of War do so in a manner that delivers products to warfighters that align with the modern national security mission. To that end, I want to provide transparency into what we’re building at Adyton and why, against the backdrop of James Boyd’s Stack of Power and within the broader context of Fifth Generation Warfare.

5GW isn’t hypothetical. Its defining characteristics are on display in Europe, a living laboratory of “all-of-society” conflict. Observing these realities, we’ve built AOK to enable military forces, partners, and public safety institutions to operate as a coherent system, even in the face of persistent competition.

1. Fifth Generation Warfare and the collapse of phase-based conflict

Fifth Generation Warfare fundamentally shifts how conflict is manifested and how power is contested.

Unlike earlier generations of warfare — defined by maneuver, firepower, or information dominance — 5GW is characterized by ambiguity, civilian-military entanglement, and systems disruption.

Conflict is no longer bounded by clear transitions between peace and war. It does not begin with mobilization orders or end with ceasefires. Instead, it unfolds continuously across economic systems, information networks, administrative processes, and civilian institutions. The objective is not the seizure of terrain, but the erosion of cohesion: trust in institutions, confidence in leadership, and the ability of societies to act collectively under pressure.

In this paradigm, traditional distinctions collapse. Civilian and military systems are interdependent by default. Logistics, communications, and personnel workflows — once considered rear-area functions — become active surfaces of conflict.

Adversaries operating in this space seek advantage not through decisive engagements, but through exploitation at the seams: Between organizations, between authorities, and between centralized command structures and decentralized actors. The more fragmented the system, the greater the opportunity to disrupt it.

Critically, 5GW expands the cognitive dimension of conflict. Human decision-makers now operate alongside autonomous systems, sensors, and unmanned platforms that continuously generate, relay, and act independently on information, augmenting how decisions are formed, distributed, and executed. Perception, coordination, and tempo are decisive. The challenge is no longer access to data, but the ability to integrate human intent with machine-generated insight across a dynamic battlespace.

In 5GW, advantage accrues not to the actor with the most advanced tools, but to the one whose systems are unified across the conflict spectrum.

1.1 From total war to “all-of-society” defense

The idea that societies must mobilize in wartime is not new. During the industrial wars of the twentieth century, victory depended on the ability to convert civilian industry into military capacity. Factories became arsenals; logistics networks became lifelines.

Today, the nature of mobilization itself has changed.

In modern conflict, resilience is no longer generated primarily through industrial output. It is generated through coordination, trust, and collaborative operations across military, civilian, and private-sector systems. The battlefield has expanded into society, and deterrence depends on whether that society can absorb shocks without fragmenting.

This reality has driven a shift toward all-of-society defense models across NATO and allied nations. Under these frameworks, civilian government agencies, private infrastructure operators, public safety organizations, and partner forces are no longer supporting actors. They are operational participants.

Public safety agencies, emergency responders, and infrastructure operators now operate under conditions that increasingly resemble contested environments: Intermittently degraded communications, incomplete information, high time pressure, increased tempo, and overlapping authorities. These actors are targeted by cyber operations, disinformation campaigns, and infrastructure sabotage whether or not they are formally part of a military response.

Despite this recognition, operational tooling has not evolved at the pace necessary to succeed in a 5GW environment. Military systems remain optimized for hierarchy and assumed connectivity. Civilian systems prioritize availability but lack security and interoperability. Partner forces and public safety organizations are integrated slowly, through bespoke arrangements that do not scale under pressure.

Doctrine has evolved toward all-of-society defense.

However, the operational product architecture that these participants use on a daily basis has not.

1.2 Europe: Proof that 5GW is here

Europe today exists in a persistent state of contestation. It is neither at peace nor engaged in declared war, yet it experiences continuous pressure across its infrastructure, information environment, and public institutions.

Rail networks are disrupted. Energy pipelines and undersea cables are damaged or threatened. Communications systems are probed and attacked. Disinformation campaigns target public trust and political cohesion. Drones routinely test sovereign airspace. These actions are deliberately ambiguous, distributed, and deniable —designed to remain below traditional thresholds of military response while imposing real costs on society.

The significance of these activities lies not in their individual tactical impact, but in what they reveal about modern conflict. The primary targets are not military formations. They are societal systems that underpin modern life: logistics networks, communications infrastructure, administrative processes, and public confidence.

These attacks exploit fragmentation that arises from operational architecture that is neither cohesive nor resilient. Civilian and military authorities often operate on separate systems. Public safety agencies lack secure, interoperable coordination with defense organizations. Partner forces remain digitally isolated. Centralized, legacy technologies struggle to extend trust and authority into degraded environments.

Compounding this challenge is cognitive friction. The problem is not a lack of information, but the dispersion of information across multiple disconnected platforms and institutions. Human operators must assemble situational awareness manually, under time pressure and degraded connectivity.

Delay and confusion are not side effects; they are intended outcomes.

Europe demonstrates a central truth of Fifth Generation Warfare: vulnerability is not rooted in weak militaries, but in fragmented and fragile systems. This is the operational gap modern adversaries exploit — and the one any credible 5GW architecture must close.

2. The operational gap: Fragmentation and fragility as a strategic liability

Despite broad recognition that conflict has expanded beyond traditional battlefields, the systems used to manage operations and communicate remain deeply fragmented. Military, civilian, and public safety organizations operate on a patchwork of disconnected toolsets — each optimized for narrow roles and implicit assumptions that connectivity and control will be continuous and readily available.

Military systems are typically designed for hierarchical command and continuous reach-back. Civilian platforms emphasize scale and availability, often at the expense of security and interoperability. Partner forces are integrated through bespoke mechanisms that are slow to establish and brittle under stress. Critically, these systems that inherently prioritize different functionality do not work in concert with one another.

When these systems inevitably break down, operators use what works: commercial tools like Signal and WhatsApp. These tools succeed not because they are compliant or secure by military standards, but because they are fast, intuitive, and frictionless.

The challenge is not to prohibit such tools, but to render them unnecessary by elevating military technologies to similar standards of speed and intuitiveness.

Administrative friction degrades readiness long before kinetic contact. Uncertainty in personnel accountability, ambiguity in logistics, and breakdowns in command signal create latent vulnerabilities that adversaries can amplify through disruption and narrative manipulation. When kinetic contact comes, its impact is magnified because of administrative failures. When connectivity is contested, centralized systems fail first, forcing ad hoc workarounds that fracture trust and situational awareness.

This is not a failure of doctrine or intent. It is a failure of architecture.

A credible response to 5GW requires moving beyond collections of role-specific tools toward a unified operational fabric — one that maintains usability while embedding security, trust, and operational context by design.

2.1 Atlas: Decentralized, software-defined infrastructure from steady-state operations to the tactical edge

The Adyton Operations Kit (AOK) is the unified product suite. Atlas is its decentralized infrastructure layer. The Atlas Application is its tactical expression built on that infrastructure. Together, they operate across the full spectrum of modern conflict.

The Atlas Platform is the decentralized, software-defined infrastructure for edge and autonomous systems and human-machine teaming in DDIL environments. Atlas resiliently and securely connects people, sensors, effectors, and autonomous systems from any vendor into a resilient, infrastructure-independent network, ensuring the mission is maintained even while disconnected.

By unifying partner force interoperability and human-machine operations in contested environments, Atlas delivers sustained decision advantage and mission success. Built on decentralized cryptographic identity, end-to-end encryption, dynamic multi-transport mesh networking, and offline authorization, Atlas treats infrastructure failure as the base case, not an edge case.

Atlas can be used through its own application, the Atlas Application, or via its embeddable SDK to integrate with other systems such as the TAK ecosystem to enable true, human-machine teaming at the edge.

Together, the Adyton Operations Kit (AOK) and Atlas represent a unified product suite that operates across the full spectrum of modern conflict. Using a shared trust, identity, and data foundation, AOK supports core operational workflows — such as personnel, logistics, and command communications — while Atlas enables tactical execution and human–machine teaming at the edge across disparate forces, without requiring separate systems or re-establishing trust as environments degrade.

Our products are built on the premise that modern conflict does not allow for clean transitions between systems, roles, or phases, a premise being born out of 5GW. Steady-state operations, crisis response, and tactical execution are contiguous parts of a single operational reality.

Warfighters should use the same technology in garrison, on a ship, or in the field.

Adyton’s products reflect this reality by providing one operational fabric whose capabilities adapt to context while the underlying system remains consistent.

Identity, security, and data models are preserved as users move across environments. What changes is not the system itself, but how its capabilities are expressed based on operational need.

AOK is authorized for use within Department of War environments and is deployed through existing accreditation pathways, allowing organizations to adopt the platform without bespoke authorization processes. The Atlas Application, too, is deployed with users down range in EW-denied environments, pressure-testing our technology’s ability to support the warfighter regardless of connectivity, no matter where they are in the world.

2.2 Architectural foundations: Built for degradation, not assumptions

Atlas is designed around the expectation that modern operating environments are unstable by default.

Operational data is secured and written locally at the endpoint, enabling continued operation during network disruption. Information is shared peer-to-peer when local transports are available and synchronized opportunistically as connectivity returns. This approach avoids single points of failure while preserving operational continuity.

Security is enforced at the endpoint rather than at the perimeter. Identity is bound to users and devices, access is scoped by organization and mission context, and data remains protected from end to end, at rest and in transit, using standards-aligned cryptographic controls. This allows Atlas to support cross-organization collaboration without shared domains or centralized trust dependencies.

Atlas does not rely on a central server for identity, authorization, or data availability. This architectural choice reduces operational fragility and enables resilience under contested conditions.

2.3 Adyton technology in steady-state operations

In steady-state environments (e.g., garrison), AOK is used. AOK structures the workflows that generate readiness long before conditions deteriorate: personnel accountability, equipment visibility, logistics tracking, and command communications. In operational use, these workflows have reduced personnel accountability timelines from hours to minutes during real-world incidents, eliminated recurring equipment reconciliation failures, and materially reduced administrative burden during deployment preparation.

These functions are not administrative overhead. They are foundational.

Operational clarity enables tempo, and friction in these systems represents a latent vulnerability long before kinetic engagement begins.

2.4 Atlas at the tactical edge

At the tactical edge, the same operational fabric is expressed through different products. Atlas is the underlying architecture, the serverless, decentralized, fully interoperable software-defined infrastructure between humans and machines, machines and machines, and humans and humans built for DDIL environments.

Organizations can deploy Atlas to connect disparate endpoints into any UI via protocol adapters. Vendors can define custom protocols via Atlas’s SDK that can run directly on device firmware, using Atlas’s unified schema or their own defined schema and protocols. Atlas then manages the transport, identity, and sync layer.

For organizations that want even more out of Atlas, they can leverage the Atlas Application. This is Atlas “out of the box,” a geospatial application built on top of our software infrastructure with customizable tactical workflows that have been pressure tested in the field.

The Atlas Application provides operators at the edge with tactical workflows including secure chat, voice and video, customizable templates for structured reporting, and a map-based geospatial common operating picture with layers, tracks, and support for offline navigation — all of which are mission-capable in DDIL environments.

The Atlas Application is engineered to function reliably in contested, denied, and degraded environments because it is built on Atlas’s serverless infrastructure. Data is secured at the endpoint, synchronized opportunistically, and shared peer-to-peer as needed — enabling decentralized execution aligned with higher-level intent.

The Atlas Application also supports human–machine interoperability in active operations. Features such as DroneStat, an example of templatized reporting, are already in use to coordinate distributed drone teams, capturing structured, real-time operational data and aggregating it across units. AI and machine learning can surface availability, status, and constraints — reducing cognitive overhead while preserving human decision authority.

2.5 One system, context-dependent expression

Across steady-state and tactical environments, Adyton’s products remain one unified product suite. The distinction is contextual, not architectural. As users move closer to the edge, workflows in Adyton become more immediate and coordination more time-sensitive. As they move back toward steady-state operations, workflows emphasize continuity, accountability, and long-term visibility.

Adyton Operations Kit (AOK)and Atlas provide continuity across the conflict spectrum. In steady-state environments, it structures readiness and accountability. At the tactical edge, it sustains coordination and situational awareness. Across all Adyton products, trust and decision quality are preserved as conditions change. Human–machine teaming reinforces this continuity by protecting human judgment under pressure — not replacing it.

3. Partner forces and public safety: Extending trust without fragmentation

Fifth Generation Warfare is coalition warfare by default. Partner forces, host-nation units, and public safety organizations are operational actors whether or not they are formally designated as such.

Atlas enables rapid extension of the same operational fabric to these actors through scoped trust, data visibility, and authority. “Partner force in a box” is not a separate system — it is Atlas operating with constrained policies and mission-specific boundaries.

Public safety agencies face many of the same conditions as military units in gray-zone conflict: degraded communications, incomplete information, and high-stakes decision-making. Adyton’s products do not militarize these organizations. They provide secure coordination and situational awareness when conventional systems fail.

4. The Infrastructure of Modern Defense

Fifth Generation Warfare is not a future scenario. It is shaping global security today.

We must embrace the concept of war that extends from the battlefield and permeates civilian spaces — financial systems, social media networks, economic capacity, transportation systems, and information information networks.

In this environment, fragmented systems fail first. Organizations that cannot maintain coordination and decision-making under degraded conditions cede advantage before kinetic conflict begins.

Adyton provides the infrastructure required for modern defense: a unified operational fabric that unifies partner force interoperability and human-machine operations together, enabling America and her allies to act clearly and decisively.