Al-Qaida chief Ayman al-Zawahiri The Coordinator 2016 Part 19-122-Russia-10-73-Nonlinear War

C de Waart; CdW Intelligence to Rent [email protected] In Confidence

Al-Qaida chief Ayman al-Zawahiri The Coordinator 2016 Part 19-122-Russia-10-73- NonLinear War

Experts and policy makers agree that NATO is in need of more situational awareness in the High North, but faced with urgent security threats from the South and the East, NATO is reluctant to engage further in the Arctic.NATO’s role in the Arctic was the topic of an event hosted by the Norwegian Institute of Foreign Affairs (NUPI), The Norwegian Atlantic Committee, The German Marshal Fund of the United States (GMF) and the US Mission to NATO in Oslo recently. The experts and policy makers discussed what Norway and NATO’s priorities should be after the 2016 Warsaw Summit and how NATO can strengthen its maritime strategy in the North. Experts and policy makers agree that NATO is in need of more situational awareness in the High North, but faced with urgent security threats from the South and the East, NATO is reluctant to engage further in the Arctic.NATO’s role in the Arctic was the topic of an event hosted by the Norwegian Institute of Foreign Affairs (NUPI), The Norwegian Atlantic Committee, The German Marshal Fund of the United States (GMF) and the US Mission to NATO in Oslo recently. The experts and policy makers discussed what Norway and NATO’s priorities should be after the 2016 Warsaw Summit and how NATO can strengthen its maritime strategy in the North.Grading Gerasimov: Evaluating Russian Nonlinear War Through Modern Chinese DoctrineV. Morris“Wars are not declared, and having begun, proceed to an unfamiliar template,” stated General Valery Gerasimov, the Chief of the General Staff of the Russian Armed Forces, during a closed speech at the Russian Academy of Military Sciences. The primary topic of this speech was “The Role of the General Staff in the Organization of the Defense of the Country in Correspondence with the New Statute about the General Staff Confirmed by the President of the Russian Federation.”This speech given in late 2013 was crucial because it enumerated and elucidated the strategies that would develop Russian nonlinear military doctrine in 2014, which is known as “Gerasimov Doctrine”. Russian Foreign Policy Reviews, State Security Strategies and “Gerasimov Doctrine” combined with Russian political views codify nonlinear war as the emergence of a new kind of war. This new form of warfare is facilitated by 21st century technologies and multiple actors employing combinations of conventional and unconventional instruments. In short, “the very rules of war have been fundamentally changed” and, according to General Gerasimov, non-military means have surpassed the power of force to achieve strategic and political goals. The current situation in Ukraine and, to some extent in neighboring former Soviet republics (primarily Baltic States), highlights the application of nonlinear war.

1The farther back you can look, the farther forward you are likely to see. –Winston ChurchillCees de Waart: CdW Intelligence to Rent Page 1 of 14

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Is it working?In order to adequately assess current and future threats to European security and the methods to counter such threats, this article intends to “grade”, or evaluates, specific applications of nonlinear war in Ukraine based on Chinese military doctrine, geopolitical strategies and conflicts in Europe.Russia’s Road to Nonlinear War: Cold War, 1979-PresentUnrestricted war is a war that surpasses all boundaries and restrictions. It takes nonmilitary forms and military forms and creates a war on many fronts. It is the war of the future.-Colonel Qiao Liang and Colonel Wang Xiangsui, Unrestricted War, Beijing, 1998“Gerasimov Doctrine” contains particular similarities to the Chinese doctrine outlined in Unrestricted Warfare published in 1999, and historical roots in previous Russian doctrine. Both strategies involve using proxies, or surrogates, to not only exploit vulnerabilities in low intensity conflict, but to also prepare for future operations, which may involve high intensity conflict. Other strategies involve applying both low and high tech asymmetrical means, and also engaging in several forms of war. For example, Unrestricted Warfare describes 13 forms of “total war” and methods to consciously mix “cocktails” on the battlefield, or to employ combinations of forms of warfare in order to find innovative and effective approaches. In Ukraine, the notion of consciously “mixing cocktails” to produce effective nonlinear strategies highlights the unpredictable effects that these tactics may have on the organs of government. Regardless of the particular nonlinear strategies applied, destabilization and exploitation of vulnerabilities are the results. Therefore, the assessment tool for this article is the effective application of warfare combinations in four categories to reach specific long-term political outcomes.In continuing to approach this assessment within an academic metaphor, this article imagines Russia as a student. Russia has studied nonlinear war since the Cold War (called Active Measures) and Afghanistan through the 1980s, and continued these studies with interventions in Moldova and Lithuania in the early 1990s. Furthermore, from 1994 to 2009, Russia double majored in nonlinear war during the First and Second Chechen Wars. While completing Undergraduate degrees, Russia entered the workforce by engaging Georgia with espionage in 2006, conducting cyber attacks against Estonia in 2007, and completing “counterterrorism” campaigns in Chechnya in 2009. The Russo-Georgian War in 2008, however, is an exemplary case first, of the evolution of nonlinear or hybrid capabilities; secondly, of the application of indirect instruments in order to destabilize a country; and thirdly, of the volatile effects of such tactics that persist until today. Moreover, during and after this conflict, Russian tactics also combined cyber warfare with both informational and conventional means. Currently, through the lens of this article’s academic metaphor, Russia is further developing its nonlinear war practices by pursuing a Master’s Degree in Ukraine. This program involves subjects like gaining and maintaining popular support, military mobilization, refinement of nonlinear approaches to war and preparation for future unconventional conflicts.21st Century WarfareWhat we see in Russia now in this hybrid approach to war, is the use of all the tools that they have to reach into a nation and cause instability.-General Philip M. Breedlove, Munich Security Report 2015“New generation, ambiguous, hybrid, nonlinear, unrestricted, irregular, unconventional and asymmetric” are all terms associated with 21st century warfare. Warfare is typically defined in two general forms: Traditional and Irregular, where the latter can apply hybrid threat strategies to reach mutual benefitting effects. Irregular Warfare is defined as a violent struggle among state and non-state actors for legitimacy and influence over the relevant populations. Irregular Warfare favors indirect approaches and asymmetric means. A central component of Irregular Warfare is unconventional warfare, which employs “activities conducted to enable a resistance movement or insurgency to coerce, disrupt, or overthrow a government or occupying power by operating through or with an


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underground, auxiliary, and guerilla force in a denied area”. Another definition of Irregular Warfare outlines the achievement of “strategic objectives by avoiding an adversary’s conventional military strength while eroding an adversary’s power and will, primarily through the use of indirect, non-traditional aspects of warfare.” The former application of unconventional warfare relies on external parties aiding indigenous actors against governments. Some examples of aid involve training, equipping, advising and employing kinetic action to seize terrain or increase the advantage of irregular forces. The term “irregular forces” refers to State and non-State military or paramilitary forces. Nonlinear warfare directly or indirectly employs non-military and military instruments through the following means: diplomats, intelligence agencies, professional soldiers, special operations forces, insurgents, guerillas, extremist groups, mercenaries and criminals.Contemporary hybrid warfare, hybrid threat and hybrid aggression have all been used to describe potent and complex variations of warfare in the 21st century. Although this type of warfare is not new, contemporary threat actors are redefining the application by employing 21st century technologies and combinations of diplomatic, intelligence formation, militaristic, economic and humanitarian means, and in various domains to include cyberspace. What further complicates this form of warfare is the persistent fluctuation and manipulation of political, informational and ideological conflict-- key aspects of hybrid warfare which extend past traditional coercive diplomacy and unconventional war. This article utilizes the term “nonlinear war” in the same way as defined by Russian military doctrine: as a means to reach desired strategic orientation and geopolitical outcomes primarily using non-military approaches.Making the GradeToday’s wars will affect the price of gasoline in pipelines, the price of food in supermarkets, and the price of securities on the stock exchange. They will also disrupt the ecological balance and push their way into every one of our homes by way of the television screen-Alvin TofflerAs previously outlined, the grading process considers the effectiveness of warfare combinations and their ability to reach their intended outcomes. In the case of Ukraine, probable intended outcomes are summarized first, as destabilizing both the region specifically and the European Union as a whole and secondly as preventing NATO military infrastructure near Russian borders, and thirdly as preventing NATO membership expansion. Political ideology involving Eurasianism and dividing the west are also possible objectives. The following assessments are based on how well the Russian Federation conducts various operations in conflicts with regard to four combination categories as outlined in Chinese unrestricted warfare doctrine: supra-national, supra-domain, supra-means and supra-tier.Supra-national Combinations are a synthesis of national, international and non-state organizations. In the 21st century, global powers must borrow multinational and non-state powers in order to expand their own influence. One of the most recent examples of this combination involves the creation of the Eurasian Economic Union (EEU) and its competition with Ukrainian European integration, which eventually led to the 2014 Ukrainian Revolution. This union operates through supranational and intergovernmental institutions which include a mutual defense alliance. Possible Russian objectives for the EEU involve growth into a powerful, supra-national union of sovereign states analogous to the European Union in order to form a unilaterally beneficial bridge between Europe and Asia. Intermediate competitive objectives may involve enlarging the Customs Union to post soviet states, which could eventually involve breakaway regions of Georgia, Moldova and Ukraine whose parent countries have already signed association agreements with the European Union. Ukraine is strategically important because it has the second largest economy of any of the 15 former republics of the Soviet Union. The EEU is the probable mechanism for waging current and future non-military forms of warfare with regard to international law, finance, economics and resources. This fact is made evident by the recruitment efforts of the EEU on one side, imposition of sanctions, northwestern


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European defense cooperation, and oil production by Middle Eastern States, on the other. Another example of the concise application of supra-national combinations is the perceived manipulation of the world’s largest security intergovernmental organization, known as the Organization for Security Cooperation in Europe (OSCE). This organization is responsible for monitoring ceasefires in Ukraine, including the Minsk Protocol which collapsed in early 2015, and the ceasefire currently in effect. Historically, the Russian Federation has accused the OSCE of being a tool for Western states to advance specifically western economic and political interests. Recently, allegations have surfaced that the OSCE has a pro-Russian bias, which explains the organization’s failure to monitor the Minsk Protocol and the subsequent ceasefire and subversive combat operations. This view is consistent with the fact that International Warfare’s objectives are to subvert and sabotage the rule of law. Grade: DSupra-domain Combinations involve employing or merging combinations beyond the domains of the traditional battlefield. Russia’s ability to overlap all domains to include activities in cyberspace to create political and military effects offers a prime example. The combinations that Russia has employed under this model involve: Media and Fabrication, Cultural warfare (defending compatriot diasporas abroad and leveraging historical memory), Psychological warfare, and Network warfare (dominating or subverting media). Additionally, Russia has emphasized influence operations in the informational domain to reduce the requirement for military forces, which is exercised through: subversion, disinformation campaigns and false narrative control, English and Russian language propaganda, protests and disruptive “trolling” and Twitter.com activities online. Although disinformation campaigns erode over time, employing a whole of government approach using information operations and attacks in the cyber domain supports the overall nonlinear, destabilization efforts in Ukraine as a key component of this type of new warfare. Grade: ASupra-means Combinations unite aspects of military and non-military means to reach desired objectives. This category can be directly applied to the initial destabilization of Ukraine and the annexation of Crimea. The Crimea operation was a decisive application of nonlinear warfare for a variety of reasons. It illustrates nonlinear warfare phases involving initial destabilization, deception, information operations and limited military intervention, all with local population support. Supra-means Combinations are also visible in the current conflict in Eastern and Southeastern Ukraine involving pro-Russian conventional, irregular and special operations forces that employ blended tactics supported by a malicious information campaign. This initial assessment alone, however, does not adequately address the applications and compounding effects of the more complex combinations in this category. Combinations of technological, resource and economic aid warfare must also be assessed. The technological assessment focuses on having an advantage that involves superior conventional military equipment and weapons of mass destruction capabilities; Russia currently has both. Conversely, pro-Russian separatists currently do not have full control of the Donetsk and Luhansk oblasts of Ukraine and Sea of Azov access. Therefore, it is clear that this group is not completely successful in combining militaristic, cultural, resource and economic aid warfare at that level. This particular lack of success in turn affects the same combinations on the supra-national level, but with a different degree of intensity. These intermediate objectives involving territorial control may be further met through cease-fire agreements giving concession to separatists, or overt deployment of military forces into the Donbas region if recognized as a Russian State.Conversely, the result may be a sustained de-centralized insurgency or “frozen conflict” with ineffective mission command from Russian military and political actors further destabilizing both countries economically. International military aid and assistance to Ukrainian security forces and internally displaced persons are also possible long term outcomes creating further instability in the region. Operating through the entire depth of the enemy territory is one of the specified objectives included in “Gerasimov Doctrine”, which ultimately results in territorial defense related political


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objectives. Grade: CLastly, Supra-tier Combinations melds all levels of conflict in each campaign. For instance, the Ukraine campaign for Russia melds tactical, strategic and operational levels of conflict in the region. This category’s assessment is based on “beyond-limits” war in Unrestricted Warfare, where both decentralized and man-machine combinations perform multiple functions. These functions span regional ground tactics to international political level effects. Conventional and unconventional operations involving naval fleets, commercial airliners, armed civilians, tanks, air defense and artillery weapons employment, drone operations, abductions, assassinations and electronic warfare are all examples of how, in Eastern Europe, tactics from this category continue to blur the traditional lines of war. Grade: BReport Card ConclusionThe above grades are a snapshot in time or “academic term”, and undoubtedly fluctuate based on measures taken by domestic and international partners to counter nonlinear war in both Ukraine and in neighboring countries. This assessment is designed to highlight the approaches and combinations employed during nonlinear war, and more importantly, how these tactics are evolving to become more innovative and effective. By no means, does the article downplay the severity of the conflict in Ukraine and loss of life as a result. If Russian doctrine and military modernization programs continue to evolve based on nonlinear war experience and limitation assessments, international actors will be presented with an increasingly unconventional threat in future conflicts. In order to counter nonlinear and unconventional approaches to war, and identify vulnerabilities, one must first understand and assess these approaches to preempt crippling and irreversible political effects.ReferencesUnrestricted Warfare1 Counter Unconventional War White Paper (USASOC)1 Munich Security Report 20151 JP 3-26 CounterterrorismTC 7-100 Hybrid Threat

Nine Lessons of Russian PropagandaRoman SkaskiwAfter visiting repeatedly, I moved to Ukraine from the United States in 2012. My parents had been born in Ukraine and taught me some of the language during my childhood in Queens, NY.Being so close to Ukraine's Maidan revolution and the subsequent Russian invasion gave me perspective on American perception of these events. The audacity and effectiveness of Russian propaganda has left me in utter awe. After two years of close observation, some strategies and motifs of Russian propaganda have become evident. Hopefully these lessons will lend some clarity on the information war which overlays the kinetic one.1. Rely on dissenting political groups in Western countries for dissemination. Kremlin talking points appear with uncanny similarity in most alternative political movements in the West, including communist, libertarian, nationalist, and even environmentalist, whose protests occasionally overlap with anti-NATO protests.I had an especially close look at the libertarian community as I have long been a part of it. Rampant misinformation led me to write these three increasingly horrified essays about what some prominent libertarians were saying about Russia and Ukraine: Putin's Libertarians, When Your Former Libertarian Hero Calls You a Nazi and The Latest Libertarian Shillery for Russia.The persistence of demonstrable lies and their almost word-for-word repetition in radical left media was uncanny and put into perspective only after I discovered the Active Measures interviews and the Deception was My Job interview of Yuri Bezmenov. KGB agents who had defected to the United


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States in the 1970s and 80s all said the same thing. Espionage was a minor consideration of Russian intelligence. Their focus was controlling the message and it often happened through influencing media and political movements in freer societies.Russian intrigue with dissenting groups even makes an appearance in Joseph Conrad's fantastic 1907 novel The Secret Agent.Their impressively broad appeal is evidenced in their recruitment of both Western neo-Nazis and Western communists who claim to be fighting for World Communism to support the war in Eastern Ukraine.Radical Kremlin ideologue Alexander Dugin articulates this strategy fairly explicitly: "The most important factor should not be whether these groups are pro-Russian or not. What they oppose is of much greater importance here. The enemy of my enemy is my friend. It is simple and easy to understand. If we adopt such an attitude in order to appeal to all possible allies (who either approve of us or who do not) more and more people will follow suit – if only due to pragmatism. In doing so we will create a real functioning network – a kind of Global Revolutionary Alliance."Much of Dugin's work attempts to explaining why groups with diametrically opposed beliefs should unite to oppose the United States and, if only implicitly, support Russia. Demonizing the United States and "Atlanticism" underpins his rhetorical strategy, just as demonizing capitalism and the bourgeois class underpinned communism's (and also placed Russia as first among equals in a "Global Revolutionary Alliance").Dugin's Anti-Atlanticism is a cargo cult for the reach and influence that Moscow had through Communism, but the centuries old influence that Moscow has among the West's dissenting political movements remains palpable.2. Domestic propaganda is most important. Marquis de Custine, a French travel writer, wrote in his 1838 book, "The political regime here would not survive 20 years of free communication with Western Europe."The long term viability of Russian autocracy is more threatened by the standard of living in Finland, Estonia, Lithuania, and Poland, than by any foreign military. This fear of facing their own poverty and oppression also echoes throughout the troubled history of Russia's relations with Ukraine:In his book, The Cossacks, historian Shane O'Rourke writes: "[The Cossacks] demonstrated to those masses that an alternative and viable social order did indeed exist. This was to prove far more threatening to Poland-Lithuania or Muscovy and the Russian Empire than the cossack swords and muskets on their own could ever be."This is why the Kremlin so frantically saturates the Russian public with paranoia and a siege mentality. Their society does not compare favorably to that of their neighbors.The Kremlin's sway over Russian public opinion cannot be underestimated. I know more than one Ukrainian who received a phone call from relatives in Russia after the Maidan revolution to confirm stories about people murdered in the streets of Kyiv or Lviv for speaking Russian, and to urge them to escape. No such thing ever took place. Russian was and is spoken every day. The term "zombified" as entered the Ukrainian lexicon to describe acquaintances under the sway of Russian propaganda.Russian media diligently puts the world in context for the Russian public. It would be unconscionable to allow Russians to believe Ukraine's 2014 revolution was a populist uprising against corruption, and absolutism. It needed re-branding: not a revolution but a coup, not driven by a desire for rule of law, but by a hatred of Russians, not Ukrainian but CIA-Jewish-Nazis. The broad range of villains in their contradictory narratives reflects the range of ideologies to which they attempt to appeal. Amazingly, they have some success.The American diplomat's handing out of cookies, and Ambassador Nuland's off-hand insult of the EU were the grains of truth upon which the Russian propaganda machine built monstrous, menacing narratives of American and/or Nazi conspiracy.


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It was not true, but it was extremely interesting, and that was enough, at least for the Kremlin's myopic thinking.3. Destroy and ridicule the idea of truth. Many people, including Peruvian statesman and Nobel Prize winning author Mario Vargo Llosa, have observed that Russian propaganda destroys meaning.They pursue several tactics including the false moral equivalences of "whataboutism," polluting the information space (more below), and hosting seemingly objective discussions that give equal play to the truth alongside the most ludicrous distortions, making the truth seem like the least interesting of many possible narratives.The West isn't completely innocent when it comes to truth telling, but while Western propaganda attempts to construct a narrative and convince people of it, Russia propaganda often seems to strive for contradiction and dissonance.For example, just days after signing a ceasefire in Syria, the Russian military bombed at least five medical facilities in Syria. While doing so, their ministry of foreign affairs tweeted about humanitarian aid shipments.Regarding the Budapest Memorandum, Russia's Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov said ". . . we have not violated it. It contains only one obligation—i.e., not to use nuclear weapons against Ukraine." This is outrageously untrue, and cannot be an accident.The dissonance is part of their strategy. They need chaos and confusion, and actively strive for it.Peter Pomerantsev, a British-Russian Journalist from London with access Russian media described its thuggish manipulations of reality and the Russian public's seeming susceptibility. The title of his scathing memoir could easily be the rallying cry for all Russian propaganda: "Nothing Is True and Everything Is Possible."George F Kennan, an American diplomat in Moscow in 1944 observed, "Here, men determine what is true and what is false."There is a Russian expression: умом россію не поймешь ("intelligently, you cannot understand Russia"), which comes from a 150 year old quatrain by Russian poet Fyodor Tyutchev. The poem concludes, "in Russia you can only believe."The bias against comprehension is deep seeded.4. "Putin is strong. Russia is strong." This message permeates all Russian information efforts.Power is the perception of power, and the Kremlin understands this very well. They constantly allude to or directly threaten invasion and nuclear war with everyone from their neighbors to Turkey to the United States.In 2013, the Russian Air Force ran a mock nuclear strike against Sweden.Former Russian MP and political party head Vladimir Zhirinovsky, sometimes referred to as the Kremlin's court jester, is frequently the mouth piece for the most bombastic threats. He is nominally a part of the opposition, but in actuality seems to be the Kremlin's platform for radicalism of any sort, creating headlines in foreign countries, exciting the public, testing ideas, and nominally acting an the opposition to create the illusion of Democracy, and providing an extreme reference point to moderate perception of Putin's policies.When the American military conducted joint exercises with Estonians, Zhirinovsky said the US tanks will end up in a Russian museum. He once threatened a female journalist to have his bodyguard rape her.He received 6.2% of votes in the 2012 Presidential election. One of his campaign commercials showed him in a sleigh shouting "the whole country got stuck . . .", then whipping donkeys harnessed to the sleigh and shouting "Go! Go! Go!" Think of this in the context of Custine's 1838 observation: "they are intoxicated with slavery."Regarding Turkey, he said: "You just chuck one nuclear bomb into the straits, and there’d be a huge flood. The water would rise by 10-15 meters and the whole city would disappear."


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It is impossible for serious Western journalists to ignore such threats, so the Kremlin gets a message inserted into foreign societies, exciting those voices who seek to avoid conflict, while maintaining a degree of separation from the messenger.A similar vivid but scientifically dubious threat was made against the United States by Konstantin Sivkov of the "Academy of Geopolitical Problems":"Geologists believe that the Yellowstone super-volcano could explode at any moment. . . . it suffices to push the relatively small [nuclear weapon], for example the impact of the munition megaton class to initiate an eruption. The consequences will be catastrophic for the United States, a country just disappears."There's a joke about an old Russian woman carrying buckets of water through the mud. Her husband died in a famine. One of her sons was killed in a war, and the other exiled to Siberia. Suddenly, a Mig Fighter jet flies over her. The sonic boom kocks her over into the mud. The water spills. But she looks up at the jet and thinks: "Wow. I'm so big and powerful."The Kremlin needs to distract its public from the needless economic hardship and rampant corruption.The I'm a Russian Occupier propaganda video is a great example of this: "I occupied the Baltics and many factories and power plants were built on their farmland. The Baltics used to produce high quality radio equipment and cars, famous perfumes and balms. I was asked to leave. Now they sell sprats [herring] and some of their people clean toilets in Europe. "The distortions and lies directed domestically seem especially crude, testifying to the low standard of truth. A 2009 survey indicated that a slight majority of Russians never used the internet. (Usage is now estimated at 61%.)Occasionally, Russian propaganda misses the mark, like the "bros" workout video featuring Putin and Medvedev.When faced with sanctions, Russia could not allow itself to be seen as the victim. They immediately issued counter sanctions and flooded both the news and comment sections with stories of how Polish apple growers and other European producers were suffering without the Russian market.I know from a friend in the trucking business that Polish apples were merely re-routed through Belarus, likely with tacit approval from the Kremlin who took the opportunity to enrich an oligarch of their choosing.The same was at least partially true with Russian sanctions against Turkey. The black market through Azerbaijan mitigated their effects. Sanctions are bombastically announced, and quietly done away with.As is usually the case, headlines were more important than reality.5. Headlines are more important than reality, especially while first impressions are forming.During recent protests by Russian truck drivers, Russia's transport minister staged a meeting with counterfeit truckers before the media. They also seem to have invented Syrian opposition leaders with whom they held negotiations.It did not matter that the "humanitarian aide" convoys to Eastern Ukraine were eventually revealed to the whole world as ammunition resupplies. For two weeks coverage of the war focused on Russia's "humanitarian aide."First impressions are known to be extremely sticky. They persist even after subsequent evidence is conclusive. Consequently, Russian propaganda seems to fight hard for the first impression and then relent.When opposition politician Boris Nemtsov was assassinated, they quickly spun several elaborate theories which played on Russian news.Their propaganda about neo-Nazis dominated coverage of Ukraine's revolution, even after multiple statements and an open letter from the leaders of Ukraine's Jewish community. In support of the Nazi narrative, Russian state television even reported fake results of Ukraine's 2014 election, stating that


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now-President Poroshenko lost the race to Right Sector leader Dmytro Yarosh. (In reality Yarosh received about 1.5% of the vote.) Obviously, anybody paying attention would find out this was nonsense within days, if not hours, but being proved wrong does not seem to matter to them.Perhaps the consider distant half-interested parties as their target audience -- people who cannot devote enough attention to the issue. Such people will see an initial chaos of contradictory information and conclude the situation is too complicated to understand, and that the truth is probably somewhere in the middle.They're remarkably successful. No matter audacious, Russian lies delivered from semi-official sources succeed in muddying the waters, and preventing the formation of clear impressions that recognize the reality of what is happening.6. Demoralize. During both the 2009 war with Georgia, and the 2014-present invasion of Ukraine, Russian propaganda very effectively showed pictures of dead, dying, and tortured Georgian and Ukrainian soldiers. They were on the news, and all over the internet.One largely unnoticed parallel between the annexation of Crimea and invasion of Eastern Ukraine is that both began with the kidnapping of a local activist, followed by his, torture, murder, and then discovery of the body, Tartar activist, Reshat Ametov, and local, pro-Ukrainian politician, Volodymyr Rybak. This tactic seems informed by Lenin’s infamous 1918 hand-written hanging order: "Do it in such a fashion that for hundreds of kilometers around the people might see, tremble."This strategy extends to Western society and is discussed explicitly in the Active Measures interviews of former KGB agents. There seem to be seem to be libertarian organizations only interested in libertarianism when it intersects with anti-Americanism. It is easy to imagine why magnify Western corruption and weakness is in Russia's interest.7. Move the conversation. No matter how ridiculous their propaganda, no matter how many times it is proven to be false, it succeeds in shifting the conversation. Western journalists were consumed with determined if Russia was invading Ukraine, that they had little space left to examine how Russia was invading.The propaganda dominated the conversation at the expense of the actual invasion.Only a few journalists noticed that Russia's proxies in Ukraine publicly encouraged their forces to engage in atrocities. An online instruction manual included the advice: "Don’t pass up any opportunity to engage in some atrocity that can be blamed on the junta’s fighters," a strategy they seemed to follow.The exploitable bias of Western journalists is that each side has its perspective and the truth is somewhere in the middle.8. Pollute the information space. One of the strangest examples of Russian disinformation is the Columbia Chemicals Plant Explosion Hoax in which it seems that either the Kremlin or a close ally orchestration a chorus of reports about an unfolding terrorist attack in the United States that never actually happened:"It was a highly coordinated disinformation campaign, involving dozens of fake accounts that posted hundreds of tweets for hours, targeting a list of figures precisely chosen to generate maximum attention. The perpetrators didn’t just doctor screenshots from CNN; they also created fully functional clones of the websites of Louisiana TV stations and newspapers. The YouTube video of the man watching TV had been tailor-made for the project. A Wikipedia page was even created for the Columbian Chemicals disaster, which cited the fake YouTube video. As the virtual assault unfolded, it was complemented by text messages to actual residents in St. Mary Parish. It must have taken a team of programmers and content producers to pull off. And the hoax was just one in a wave of similar attacks during the second half of last year."Russian opposition politician Alexei Navalny said about the polluting strategy in Russia:"... the paid trolls have made it impossible for the normal Internet user to separate truth from fiction.


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The point is to spoil it, to create the atmosphere of hate, to make it so stinky that normal people won’t want to touch it. You have to remember the Internet population of Russia is just over 50 percent. The rest are yet to join, and when they join it’s very important what is their first impression.”Domestically, they want to ruin the one media which they don't control. Internationally, they want to sow confusion and paranoia.9. "Gas lighting" -- accuse the enemy of doing what you are doing to confuse the conversation.After American generals began using the term "hybrid war" to describe Russia's planned, deliberate scaling of hostilities from pseudo-civilian protests to military formations, a Russian general, without irony, accused the United States of hybrid war against Russia.While Russian proxies were burning Ukrainian books, and flags, destroying monuments to Ukraine's great famine, the Holodomor, Crimea Tartar cultural centers, and everything else that wasn't strictly Russian, they were accusing Ukrainians of hostility toward Russian culture, even though nothing of the kind had taken place. The accounts Russians who struggled on Maidan alongside Ukrainians were ignored.It was Ukraine's leadership who eventually had to give reassurances on the international stage that the rights of minorities would be respected, not Russia's and not the leaders of their Proxies, despite harsh crackdowns on Ukrainian culture, Tartar institutions, Catholic and Protestant churches, and everything else that wasn't Russian.ConclusionThere may be several explanations for the strangest strains of Russian propaganda -- the dissonant messages that seem to create chaos and confusion for its own sake.Both in business and war, Russian institutions are structured much more vertically, and would normally be outperformed by high-trust Western institution that more readily delegate authority and initiative. Russian corruption and distrust prevents them from restructuring their institutions, but perhaps under a miasma half-truths and confusion, Russian vertical power structures have the best chance of being competitive.Secondly, Russian aggression is very opportunistic (see my previous essay). Chaos creates exploitable opportunities, including exploitable dissenting parties among your opposition.Lastly, as Russian opposition politician Alexei Navalny speculated, the Russian regime fears what Marquis de Custine described almost 200 years ago: "The political regime here would not survive 20 years of free communication with Western Europe." They are deliberate polluting the information space in anticipation of the remaining 40% of Russians starting to use the Internet, because they fear the truth want to pollute and discredit all the information platforms they don't directly control.But for all the cleverness and pervasiveness of their propaganda, the gravity of people's individual preferences does not seem to be on the side of Russian autocracy. Right now, the Kremlin makes is very hard for Russians to feel good about themselves without also embracing Russian militarism and expansionism as part of that identity. There are great examples in Russian history like the remarkably individualistic Republic of Novgorod, and a frontier spirit in their east sometimes referred to as the "Siberian Paradox."The more the West leads by example, demonstrates rule of law, creates a prosperous contrast to Russian society, imposes costs for ban behavior (as recommended by the Heritage Foundation), and forces the Russian public to countenance their poverty and corruption, the more Russians will be able to reject the siege mentality and construct a better narrative for themselves from the best aspects of their history.

The Ties That Bind: Chairman Mao, Che Guevara, and Al QaedaJeff WongMao Tse-tung borrowed the revolutionary vanguard from Vladimir Lenin, Ernesto “Che” Guevara


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liked Mao’s ideas about sanctuaries, and Al Qaeda valued Guevara’s focoist approach to global insurgency. At first glance, the revolutionary strategies of Mao, Guevara, and the intellectuals who devised Al Qaeda’s doctrine for jihad have much in common. They integrated violence into the greater political struggle, viewed the support of the people as essential to the revolution, and stressed the importance of an intellectual vanguard to lead the revolt and ensure military ways and means aligned with political ends. A closer look, however, reveals differences in how Mao, Guevara, and Al Qaeda tailored their approaches to suit the unique needs of the rebellions they led and the strategic environments in which they fought. A deeper assessment also develops a fuller understanding of revolutions and insurgencies, and inform an approach to fighting the Islamic State, or Daesh.Mao, Guevara, and Al Qaeda revealed their beliefs about revolutionary warfare in their writings. Mao outlined his thoughts in two seminal documents, On Guerrilla Warfare and On Protracted War, both of which detailed his strategy to unite China and defeat Japan in the 1930s and 1940s. Guevara wrote Guerrilla Warfare: A Method to guide his post-Cuba revolutionary efforts in Bolivia and the Congo in the 1960s. Three authors – Abu ‘Ubeid Al-Qurashi, Abu Mu’sab al-Suri, and Abu Bakr Naji – provided the backbone to Al Qaeda’s approach to global jihad in essays published in the early to mid-2000s.Mao, Guevara, and Al Qaeda agreed that violence should support the revolutionary struggle, but they disagreed about whether it should be the most important factor fueling the rebellion. In the initial stage of the revolt, Mao viewed political agitation as being the main effort, with military action in a supporting role.[i] The movement needed to first build the infrastructure by organizing, consolidating, and securing base areas before guerrillas could launch attacks against regime forces as part of a counteroffensive.[ii] Coherent political action needed to be a precondition for the armed struggle, according to Mao. “Without a political goal, guerrilla warfare must fail, as it must if its political objectives do not coincide with the aspirations of the people and their sympathy, cooperation, and assistance cannot be gained,” he wrote.[iii] Mao argued that a revolutionary war could not be constrained into military action alone – the rebellion also required complementary economic, social, and psychological elements that allowed the revolutionaries to establish a new state structure.[iv]Like Mao, Guevara and Al Qaeda viewed violence as essential to the revolution. Unlike Mao, they saw violence as the primary effort in the early part of the revolt, setting the conditions to provoke a wider rebellion.[v] Guevara used military action as a form of “armed propaganda,” in the words of Regis Debray, that triggered a reaction from the regime, with the backlash providing a sharp contrast between the regime’s repressive, abusive power and the guerrillas fighting for the people’s freedom. The foco, the small guerrilla center or base, would spark the revolution.[vi] “Violence is not only for the use of the exploiters; the exploited can use it too, and what is more, ought to use it at the opportune moment,” Guevara wrote.[vii] Similarly, Al Qaeda saw military action as a tool to foment its political movement. In The Management of Savagery, Naji devoted a chapter to the primacy and characteristics of violence in the jihad. “If we are not violent in our jihad and if softness seizes us, that will be a major factor in the loss of the element of strength, which is one of the pillars of the Umma of the Message,” he wrote.[viii] Naji also justified brutal tactics such as burning to death captured enemy forces, apostates, and infidels because the subsequent shock value deterred opponents and attracted new fighters to the cause.[ix] Through the use of small, dispersed bands of focoist guerrillas, Al Qaeda fought a global insurgency that used violence to control territory and radicalize the people.[x] “Every military battle,” Qurashi concluded, “is a speech that aims at increasing revolutionary awareness.”[xi]Mao, Guevara, and Al Qaeda recognized the importance of popular support, but their differing conceptions of what constitutes a people’s war are notable. Mao and Guevara customized their revolutionary narratives to the agrarian realities of China and Cuba, respectively, reframing a Marxist-Leninist proletariat revolt into a rural uprising to capitalize on the grievances and additional


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manpower the latter could provide. Guevara even deemphasized the plight of the urban proletariat. “No matter how hard the living conditions of the urban workers are, the rural population lives under even more horrible conditions of oppression and exploitation,” Guevara wrote.[xii] After continuous attacks by rural guerrillas diminished the ranks of regime forces, the working class and urban masses could eventually join the revolution and participate in a decisive battle, according to Guevara. Al Qaeda also subscribed to Mao’s conception of a people’s war, attempting to leverage social, political, and economic grievances to recruit more fighters to the jihad. Qurashi wrote that the mujahidin could not be defeated “because they are part of the people and they hid among the masses. This strategy is enough to end the superiority of advanced weapons, which are primarily designed for use in open areas with well-defined features.” As a result, “stateless nations” have the ability to defeat nation-states, Qurashi concluded.[xiii] Writing about the mujahidin fight against Soviet occupation in Afghanistan, Naji stressed the need to revive “dogma and jihad in the hearts of the Muslim masses,” particularly after witnessing “the example and model of these poor, Afghani people – their neighbors – in jihad. They were able to remain steadfast in the face of the strongest military arsenal and the most vicious army (in the world) with respect to the nature of its members at that time.”[xiv]Guevara and Al Qaeda agreed that people living within the foco do not necessarily need to be on the side of the rebellion at the beginning of the struggle, and that it might be necessary to build the revolution externally, using foreign fighters, to spark the revolution and spur neutral locals to the cause. Guerrilla violence – and the oppressive regime’s response to the violence – could radicalize neutrals living in rebel sanctuaries. “We should not be afraid of violence, the midwife of new societies; only such violence should be unleashed precisely at the moment when the people's leaders find circumstances most favourable,” Guevara wrote.[xv]Yet both Guevara and Al Qaeda encountered significant problems trying to harness local grievances to their focoist approach. Guevara and his Cuban vanguard failed to inspire a larger revolt in the Congo in 1964 and struggled to gain local support from the local populace in Bolivia in 1965 – the latter campaign ending with Che’s capture and execution at the hands of government forces.[xvi] Similarly, Al Qaeda has had difficulty aligning myriad local grievances into a global jihad.[xvii] “Political, economic, social and geographic conditions differ radically across the Muslim world,” wrote Mark Stout. “Hence, it is difficult to imagine that a generic blueprint for revolution will work in all countries.”[xviii]Mao, Guevara, and Al Qaeda all stressed the need for an intellectual vanguard to lead the revolution, educate the masses, and ensure military actions aligned with political objectives. Both Mao and Guevara discussed the importance of synchronization of military and political objectives. Without any irony, they prescribed the use of political elites to lead revolts with the ultimate goal of a dictatorship of the proletariat and equality among all people. “The war that we are fighting today for the emancipation of the Chinese is a part of the war for the freedom of all human beings, and the independent, happy, and liberal China that we are fighting to establish fighting today will be a part of that new world order,” Mao wrote. “A conception like this is difficult for the simple-minded militarist to grasp and it must therefore be carefully explained to him.”[xix] Guevara also defined the relationship between the political elites leading the revolution and the rural guerrillas who provide the bulk of the manpower and support from the foco. “The peasantry is a class which, because of the ignorance in which it has been kept and the isolation in which it lives, requires the revolutionary and political leadership of the working class and the revolutionary intellectuals,” Guevara wrote. “Without that it cannot alone launch the struggle and achieve victory.” The vanguard bears a special responsibility to ensure the people are aware of the political objectives for which they are fighting, according to Suri. “It is necessary that an elite bears the costs of reviving the jihad in people’s reality after it has been completely forgotten,” he wrote.[xx] Al Qaeda’s vanguard would design a military campaign that exhausted enemy forces and drained regime coffers, as well as a media strategy that


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recruited new jihadists and marginalized those who refused to join, according to Naji.[xxi] “The people will be patient with us as long as we are in the vanguard of those who are patient,” he wrote. “But if we begin to complain, lament, and worry from now on, then the people have the right to be worried (about us).”[xxii]Mao, Guevara, and Al Qaeda each developed a framework for revolution and guerrilla warfare shaped by their respective experiences in China, Cuba, and parts of the world where totalitarian Islamism thrived. Although Mao himself never tried to export revolution beyond Asia, his ideas found receptive audiences among rebellions around the world. Guevara borrowed the chairman’s ideas about political action, violence, popular support, and an intellectual vanguard to fit the conditions of his revolts in Cuba, Latin America, and Africa. Both Mao and Guevara influenced Al Qaeda’s leading thinkers, who stressed the primacy of violence in setting the conditions for the revolution and the value of brutal tactics that shocked opponents into obedience and radicalized new members. Although Mao, Guevara, and many of Al Qaeda’s leaders and thinkers are dead, their ideas have lived on to shape Daesh the next generation of revolutionaries.BibliographyGuevara, Ernesto “Che.” “Guerrilla Warfare: A Method.” Cuba Socialista (September 1963).Mao, Tse-tung. On Guerrilla Warfare, trans. by Samuel B. Griffith. New York, NY: Praeger Publishers (1961).Mao, Tse-Tung. On The Protracted War (May-June 1938). https://www.marxists.org/reference/archive/mao/selected-works/volume-2/m...Naji, Abu Bakr. The Management of Savagery: The Most Critical Phase Through Which the Ummah Will Pass, trans. by William McCants. John M. Olin Institute for Strategic Studies, Harvard University (May 2006).Payne, Kenneth. “Building the Base: Al Qaeda's Focoist Strategy.” Conflict & Terrorism 34, no. 2 (2011).Stout, Mark. “The Makers of Jihadist Strategy.” War on the Rocks book review of Michael W. S. Ryan’s Decoding Al Qaeda’s Strategy: The Deep Battle Against America (February 4, 2014). http://warontherocks.com/2014/02/the-makers-of-jihadist-strategy/End Notes[i] Kenneth Payne, “Building the Base: Al Qaeda's Focoist Strategy,” Conflict & Terrorism 34, no. 2 (2011), 125.[ii] Mao Tse-Tung, On The Protracted War (taken from a series of lectures given by Mao Tse-tung in May-June 1938), paragraphs 36-37. https://www.marxists.org/reference/archive/mao/selected- works/volume-2/mswv2_09.htm[iii] Mao Tse-tung, On Guerrilla Warfare, trans. by Samuel B. Griffith (New York, NY: Praeger Publishers, 1961), 43.[iv] Mao, On Guerrilla Warfare, 7.[v] Ernesto “Che” Guevara, “Guerrilla Warfare: A Method,” Cuba Socialista (September 1963), 9-10.[vi] Payne, “Building the Base: Al Qaeda's Focoist Strategy,” 125.[vii] Guevara, “Guerrilla Warfare: A Method,” 8.[viii] Abu Bakr Naji, The Management of Savagery: The Most Critical Phase Through Which the Ummah Will Pass, trans. by William McCants (John M. Olin Institute for Strategic Studies, Harvard University, May 2006), 73[ix] Naji, The Management of Savagery, 74-75.[x] Payne, 124.[xi] Ibid, 130.[xii] Guevara, 7-8.[xiii] Payne, 129.


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[xiv] Naji, The Management of Savagery, 30.[xv] Guevara, 9.[xvi] Payne, 127-128.[xvii] Ibid, 128.[xviii] Mark Stout, “The Makers of Jihadist Strategy,” War on the Rocks book review of Michael W. S. Ryan’s Decoding Al Qaeda’s Strategy: The Deep Battle Against America, February 4, 2014 (accessed March 20, 2016). http://warontherocks.com/2014/02/the-makers-of-jihadist-strategy/[xix] Mao, On Guerrilla Warfare, 40.[xx] Payne, 132.[xxi] Naji, 50-51.[xxii] Ibid, 105-106.


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