Breedlove: Allies Must Prepare for Russia ‘Hybrid War’
Breedlove: Allies Must Prepare for Russia ‘Hybrid War’ by John Vandiver, Stars and Stripes
NATO must help allies in the east bolster first-line defenses to counter any aggression from Russia, whose unconventional tactics in Ukraine could pose special challenges if deployed on alliance turf, Gen. Philip Breedlove, NATO’s top military commander, said Thursday.
Before the incursion of what Western officials say are regular Russian troops into Ukraine, Moscow stirred unrest in other ways during the early stages of the crisis, Breedlove said during an Atlantic Council event that coincided with the start of NATO’s two-day summit in Wales.
Russia’s utilization of troops without national uniforms — the so-called “little green men” — and perhaps “the most amazing information warfare blitzkrieg we have ever seen in the history of information warfare” were part of the first Russian push in Ukraine, Breedlove said…
SACEUR knows that we need to be able to counter political and unconventional warfare. The Latvians and Poles have described Russia’s new generation warfare (Latvia) and Russian information warfare (Poland) the best in their reports this past spring
QUOTE: NATO members, especially the Baltic states that border Russia, must take into account such tactics as allies prepare for future threats, he said. That means steps should be taken to help build the capacity of other arms of government, such as interior ministries and police forces, to counter unconventional attacks, including propaganda campaigns, cyberassaults or homegrown separatist militias.
“What we see in Russia now, in this hybrid approach to war, is to use all the tools they have … to stir up problems they can then begin to exploit through their military tool,” said Breedlove, NATO’s supreme allied commander.
By building up pre-crisis capabilities to deal with such tactics, nations will be better able to assign responsibility to an aggressor nation, which is key to triggering NATO involvement in a crisis, Breedlove said.
“When you cannot attribute (to an aggressor), this causes problems,” Breedlove said. “But the moment we attribute these actions to an aggressor nation, now this is Article 5. So we need to build the nations’ ability to fight through that first onslaught, attribute to an aggressor nation, and then NATO Article 5 kicks in.” END QUOTE
I hate to beat a dead horse but we should pay attention to our own George Kennan who described this in 1948:
•Political warfare is the logical application of Clausewitz’s doctrine in time of peace. In broadest definition, political warfare is the employment of all the means at a nation’s command, short of war, to achieve its national objectives. Such operations are both overt and covert. They range from such overt actions as political alliances, economic measures (as ERP–the Marshall Plan), and “white” propaganda to such covert operations as clandestine support of “friendly” foreign elements, “black” psychological warfare and even encouragement of underground resistance in hostile states.
http://academic.brooklyn.cuny.edu/history/johnson/65ciafounding3.htm
Russia is a state, so as a state Russia can be deterred. We need to first focus on updating our deterrence of Russia as a state from doing things we do not believe serve our interests well.
We also need to update how we think about prevention of conflict, which is a very different thing than deterrence.
Deterrence is cost/benefit manipulation in the mind of some decision maker. It is making them believe that the cost of some action or actions does not merit the potential gain. Russia reasonably sees tremendous gain for their own interests in regaining greater control over their western flank, so the costs must be tremendous as well.
Prevention is not, IMO, the denial of conflict. In fact, I think prevention in many times encourages or allows small conflicts to occur. Think of prevention in the context of how we prevent other naturally occurring things. Prevention of cancer. Prevention of wildfire. It is about understanding what makes for a healthy ecosystem and then treating that ecosystem over time in a manner that is most likely to keep it healthy. Efforts to simply stop something perceived as bad, such as fire in a forest ecosystem, or conflict in a governance ecosystem (think Clausewitz’s social trinity model of Government-Army-People as a simple description of such an ecosystem) is more likely than not to make the ecosystem unhealthy, or to destroy the natural balance.
Are the ecosystems of the former Soviet states along Russia’s western border healthy? Probably not. To simply seek to “stabilize” them in that unhealthy condition is likely to contribute to conditions that make conditions even less healthy. Once that happens one sets conditions for a major disaster. Fear of the small problem and overly working to stop something of minor bad from happening in ecosystem management too often leads to a cataclysmic destructive event.
This does not mean that we let Russia do as they please. Russia must be deterred. This also means that we must not work to simply freeze the current border states in some sort of political-social amber. These states must be allowed to evolve to a naturally sustainable balance. It is highly doubtful we in the US know what that is. But we can help create conditions for that balancing to occur.
This is equally true in the region where the states of Syria and Iraq used to reside. ISIS is now a government of a state (whether we choose to recognize that or not). As such, they can be deterred. We need to deter state action and at the same time conduct a form of conflict prevention that recognizes that small conflict is often necessary to prevent larger ones.
To inherently and fully understand the new Russian military doctrine of New Generation Warfare which is really a UW strategy in support to political warfare.
We must learn and have available via translations some of the insights being stated by Russian General Officers concerning this new doctrine and the impact it has had in the Ukraine.
This following link is a translation of a top Russian Generals’ views towards and about that new doctrine–a really worthwhile read as it spot on in his assumptions.
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/robert-coalson/valery-gerasimov-putin-ukraine_b_5748480.html?utm_hp_ref=tw
The first two paragraphs of the translation are as the younger generation states “a hammer” and the national command authority better fully understand it and have long term strategy to counter “The New Generation Warfare” as it is now part and parcel of Russian doctrine which has been now fully field tested in the Ukraine.
Taken from the article:
Here is my translation of key portions of General Gerasimov’s article, which appeared on “Military-Industrial Kurier” on February 27, 2013
In the 21st century we have seen a tendency toward blurring the lines between the states of war and peace. Wars are no longer declared and, having begun, proceed according to an unfamiliar template.
The experience of military conflicts — including those connected with the so-called colored revolutions in north Africa and the Middle East — confirm that a perfectly thriving state can, in a matter of months and even days, be transformed into an arena of fierce armed conflict, become a victim of foreign intervention, and sink into a web of chaos, humanitarian catastrophe, and civil war.
I don’t quite understand what all the complicated talk is about. Regular Russian forces, paid by the Russian government and subject to Russian (Vlad the would be Great) government authority are shooting Ukrainians dead, lots of them, in an attempt to conquer Ukraine or part of it. The extent of their subtrifuge (sic) is to say (in Russian with a Russian accent) “I’m not Russian” when asked, take the patches off their uniforms and hire mercenaries. That’s it. What the heck is so complicated or novel about that? If all it takes to pixillate the West is to deny who you are and not mark the uniform we got problems. Big problems. And it appears that is all it takes to completely mystify our “elites”.
The conflicts within which the United States finds itself involved today — in the Russian borderlands, in the Middle East, and elsewhere — can best be understood within the context of “threats to identity/defense by identity.”
The United States has moved aggressively, post-the Cold War, to “open up” other states and societies — to our way of life, to our way of governance and to our foundational values, attitudes and beliefs.
This has caused populations and leaders of certain nations and civilizations, thus threatened by the West, to adopt a defensive posture, illustrated, for example, by this quote:
“The pragmatic political fixer of the 2000s (Putin) now genuinely believes that Russian culture is both exceptional and threatened and that he is the man to save it. He does not see himself as aggressively expanding an empire so much as defending a civilization against the “chaotic darkness” that will ensue if he allows Russia to be politically encircled abroad and culturally colonized by Western values at home.”
http://www.foreignpolicy.com/articles/2014/04/21/putin_s_empire_of_the_mind_russia_geopolitics
It is in this exact same light (defending one’s civilization) that we might see the actions, thinking and motivations of certain actors in the Middle East and in other areas of the world. (Thus, they do not see themselves as aggressors and imperialists per se, but, rather, as defenders of their unique — and in their minds exceptional — identities, ways of life and civilizations.)
Here, in a nutshell I would suggest, is where we are at today.
So as “we” use our identity in an “offensive” mode, “they” have come to use their national and cultural identities to defend against our such actions.
Questions regarding how to deal with such defenders (prepare for hybrid war; use Article 5?) — who use cultural conservatism/cultural defense as their primary weapon — to be addressed within the “threats to identity/defense by identity” context offered by me above?