Discussion about this post

User's avatar
Matt Armstrong's avatar

Sent. By the way, I suggest listening to the audio for Session One, Panel 1 for Filimonov's presentation: https://soundcloud.com/warstudies/kcsc-panel-1?in=warstudies/sets/kcsc-conference The PPT I sent (to the at the mac dot com address I have) was his.

Expand full comment
David Ronfeldt's avatar

Illuminating article, Matt. Timely too. Bezmenov’s warnings from years ago about “ideological subversion” help to confirm and clarify my growing concern that America is under a corrosive slow-motion below-the-radar cognitive attack — a systematic attack from within and afar — in ways you and Bezmenov note, in accord with his four stages of a subversion strategy: 1) demoralization, 2) destabilization, 3) crisis, 4) "normalization.”

My sense, however, is that the strategies and tactics that Russia is using today go beyond and are broader than ”information warfare” and “political warfare.” They reflect what Arquilla and I called “netwar" in our old RAND analyses — netwar being an information-age mode of conflict short of war in which the protagonists use network forms of organization, doctrine, strategy, and related technologies.

I gather (but lack sufficient sources to fully verify) that sometime last decade or earlier Russian theorists and strategists, after first attributing the so-called Color Revolutions and Arab Spring movements to U.S. usage of Gene Sharp's non-violent pro-democracy playbook, later claimed explicitly that U.S. applications of “net-centric” and “netwar” strategies were what lay behind the collapse of the Soviet Union and the diminution of Russia during the late 1990s and into the early 2010s.

Today, Moscow seems to be replicating netwar strategies, including through political warfare, in its efforts in order to amplify our homegrown disarray and to cultivate cohorts near and far. And they are doing so in the slow-moving sub-rosa ways you and Bezmenov illuminate.

I agree with you that “Someday this nation will recognize that global non-military conflict must be pursued with the same intensity and preparation as global military conflicts.” Now is the time to do so, and yet it’s still puzzlingly anguishingly difficult to make a case that gets heard and acted upon.

Onward.

Expand full comment
5 more comments...

No posts