[tonyz]

Some snippets from materials...Russia, China, North Korea, Iran, non-State actors...potentially combining intentionally or unintentionally creating political division/dissent, distraction, instability...are we seeing this strategy on steroids? The division in DC is obvious...the cultural divide is among the deepest since the 1960s...interesting.


“However, Russia believes that the pattern of forced U.S. sponsored regime change has been largely supplanted by a new method. Instead of an overt military invasion, the first volleys of a U.S. attack come from the installment of a political opposition through state propaganda (e.g., CNN, BBC), the Internet and social media, and nongovernmental organizations (NGOs). After successfully instilling political dissent, separatism, and/or social strife, the legitimate government has increasing difficulty maintaining order.

As the security situation deteriorates, separatist movements can be stoked and strengthened, and undeclared special operations, conventional, and private military forces (defense contractors) can be introduced to battle the government and cause further havoc. Once the legitimate government is forced to use increasingly aggressive methods to maintain order, the United States gains a pretext for the imposition of economic and political sanctions, and sometimes even military sanctions such as no-fly zones, to tie the hands of the besieged governments and promote further dissent (figure 2).

Eventually, as the government collapses and anarchy results, military forces under the guise of peacekeepers can then be employed to pacify the area, if desired, and a new government that is friendly to the United States and the West can be installed (figure 3).

This theory may sound far fetched to U.S. ears but is a very common view throughout the former Soviet Union. This narrative also sheds some light on the Russian government’s hostility toward NGOs. Though there are usually no allegations of NGOs being directly or indirectly controlled by foreign governments, most Russian reporting on NGOs purports that they are simply being funded because they have an objective to influence a particular government in a given way, or to just cause general instability.

<snip>

The leveraging of all means of national power to achieve the state’s ends is nothing new for Russia, but now the Russian military is seeing war as being something much more than military conflict. As the graphic from Gerasimov’s article illustrates (figure 4), war is now conducted by a roughly 4:1 ratio of non-military and military measures. These nonmilitary measures include economic sanctions, disruption of diplomatic ties, and political and diplomatic pressure. The important point is that while the West considers these nonmilitary measures as ways of avoiding war, Russia considers these measures as war (figure 4).”