NATO Adapts to More Subtle Warfare Techniques
NATO Adapts to More Subtle Warfare Techniques by Julian E. Barnes, Wall Street Journal
The North Atlantic Treaty Organization is developing a new strategy to speed decision-making and improve its response to the kind of unconventional warfare the West says Russia has used in Crimea and eastern Ukraine.
NATO is hoping to complete the strategy in time for a July summit of alliance leaders in Warsaw. In a new effort at cooperation, officials have been working with the European Union, which is putting together its own plans…
A new hybrid warfare playbook would attempt to lay out the kind of assistance the alliance would provide should a member state come under outside pressure from Russia or another country. Such support could include sending cyber experts to help respond to computer hacking attacks, communication specialists to counter propaganda or even the deployment of NATO’s rapid reaction spearhead force…
Russia doth protest too much. (2d para in the quote)
Excerpt:
QUOTE Even after determining a hybrid attack is occurring, deciding to move the spearhead force wouldn’t be easy, officials said. In many situations, allies could worry such a move would risk the alliance being seen as the aggressor. NATO officials said it is critical for the alliance to craft a measured public relations strategy to go alongside any deployment of the force.
Russian officials say that NATO is too quick to see the hand of Moscow in legitimate political uprisings.They also argue NATO risks destabilizing Europe if it lowers the threshold of the alliance’s collective defense to include responding to so-called hybrid threats.
Russian Ambassador to NATO Alexander Grushko said the alliance was using the threat of hybrid warfare “to find justifications for the alliance’s activities on its ‘eastern flank.’’’ END QUOTE
This is all well and great from NATO but right now there is absolutely no US leadership to be seen especailly when it comes to non linear warfare and the if necessary use of force by Obama…..
Syria the second Russia and Iranian non linear warfare front is the best example of Obama in non action…..
Can the dismal failures of both Obama and Kerry get any worse..yes they can and will……
Syria has been the bloody graveyard of American conviction: America’s Syrian Shame
http://nyti.ms/1UXEozf
The Opinion Pages | Op-Ed Columnist
America’s Syrian Shame
Roger Cohen FEB. 8, 2016
Quote:
The troubling thing is that the Putin policy on Syria has become hard to distinguish from the Obama policy.
Sure, the Obama administration still pays lip service to the notion that Assad is part of the problem and not the solution, and that if the Syrian leader may survive through some political transition period he cannot remain beyond that. But these are words. It is President Vladimir Putin and Russia who are “making the weather” in Syria absent any corresponding commitment or articulable policy from President Obama.
Aleppo, Syria’s largest city, is now virtually encircled by the Syrian Army. A war that has already produced a quarter of a million dead, more than 4.5 million refugees, some 6.5 million internally displaced, and the destabilization of Europe through a massive influx of terrorized people, is about to see further abominations as Aleppo agonizes.
Aleppo may prove to be the Sarajevo of Syria. It is already the Munich.
By which I mean that the city’s plight today, its exposure to Putin’s whims and a revived Assad’s pitiless designs, is a result of the fecklessness and purposelessness over almost five years of the Obama administration. The president and his aides have hidden at various times behind the notions that Syria is marginal to core American national interests; that they have thought through the downsides of intervention better than others; that the diverse actors on the ground are incomprehensible or untrustworthy; that there is no domestic or congressional support for taking action to stop the war or shape its outcome; that there is no legal basis for establishing “safe areas” or taking out Assad’s air power; that Afghanistan and Iraq are lessons in the futility of projecting American power in the 21st century; that Syria will prove Russia’s Afghanistan as it faces the ire of the Sunni world; and that the only imperative, whatever the scale of the suffering or the complete evisceration of American credibility, must be avoidance of another war in the Middle East.
Where such feeble evasions masquerading as strategy lead is to United States policy becoming Putin’s policy in Syria, to awkward acquiescence to Moscow’s end game, and to embarrassed shrugs encapsulating the wish that — perhaps, somehow, with a little luck — Putin may crush ISIS.
Obama’s Syrian agonizing, his constant what-ifs and recurrent “what then?” have also lead to the slaughter in Paris and San Bernardino. They have contributed to a potential unraveling of the core of the European Union as internal borders eliminated on a free continent are re-established as a response to an unrelenting refugee tide — to which the United States has responded by taking in around 2,500 Syrians since 2012, or about 0.06 percent of the total.
Syria is now the Obama administration’s shame, a debacle of such dimensions that it may overshadow the president’s domestic achievements.
Obama’s decision in 2013, at a time when ISIS scarcely existed, not to uphold the American “red line” on Assad’s use of chemical weapons was a pivotal moment in which he undermined America’s word, incurred the lasting fury of Sunni Gulf allies, shored up Assad by not subjecting him to serious one-off punitive strikes, and opened the way for Putin to determine Syria’s fate.
Putin policy is American policy because the United States has offered no serious alternative. As T.S. Eliot wrote after Munich in 1938, “We could not match conviction with conviction, we had no ideas with which we could either meet or oppose the ideas opposed to us.” Syria has been the bloody graveyard of American conviction.
It is too late, as well as pure illusion, to expect significant change in Obama’s Syria policy. Aleppo’s agony will be drawn-out. But the president should at least do everything
in his power, as suggested in a report prepared by Michael Ignatieff at the Harvard Kennedy School, to “surge” the number of Syrian refugees taken in this year to 65,000 from his proposed 10,000. As the report notes, “If we allow fear to dictate policy, terrorists win.”
Putin already has.
Kind of sums up Iranian non linear warfare..so NATO needs a much larger “view of nlw”……
This goes to the term..”transnational Shia jihadists” developed and deployed first by Khomeini……and now Khamenei
Khamenei.ir
@khamenei_ir Martyred defenders of shrines devoted their lives to defend country, nation, religion and the Islamic Revolution.
Notice the term “Islamic Revolution”…I take heat everytime I use that term here from some SWJ commenters…..but if one looks at the 50 odd years of articles and stratements made by Khomeini it is all there to read…and this WH never saw it coming?????
More from the Iranian non linear warfare front that NATO does not address….
“Moderate Rouhani”: If IRGC was not in #Iraq& #Syria,we had no security& couldn’t do #IranDeal.
Not to mention that ever important Iranian land corridor to Hezbollah…….
In the New/Reverse Cold War of today, much as in the Old Cold War of yesterday, one finds:
a. An expansionist superpower (the U.S. today; the USSR then) seeking to (1) alter the international order more in its favor; this, by (2) liberating populations from their oppressive regimes and by (3) transforming states and societies more along the expansionist superpower’s own unique political, economic and social lines. And
b. Other entities (Russia, China, Iran, etc., today; the U.S./the West back then), for their part, (1) adopting a defensive mode and (2) working to prevent these such (from their perspective) unfavorable/negative liberations and transformations from occurring.
In this regard, the U.S./the West — in the Old Cold War of yesterday and then being in the defensive mode — using “unconventional warfare”/”hybrid warfare,” etc., to thwart our opponents’ such expansionist efforts, attempts and designs.
http://warontherocks.com/2015/04/america-did-hybrid-warfare-too/
In the New/Reverse Cold War of today, it is our opponents who now appear to have adopted a defensive mode and who, like we ourselves in the Old Cold War, appear now to be using “UW”/”hybrid warfare,” etc., to thwart, in our case today, our such expansionist efforts, attempts and designs.
Thus to see such things as “unconventional warfare” and “hybrid warfare” — in the light offered above — as a defense operations?
And, likewise in the light offered above, to view such things as “counter-UW” and “counter-hybrid warfare” as means/measures undertaken by the expansionist power to:
a. Overcome such resistance as is being offered by one’s defensive opponents and to, in spite of such defensive/resistance efforts,
b. Achieve one expansionist designs anyway?