Excerpt From: Sebastian Gorka. “Why We Fight.”
“Today’s Russia may not be the Soviet Union. It is not an existential threat to the United States. But it is an anti-status quo actor and a spoiler controlled by a thuggish former KGB officer who called the dissolution of the USSR the “greatest geostrategic calamity of the twentieth century.” Moscow is therefore committed to re-establishing its unchallenged dominance in Central and Eastern Europe and beyond. Its invasion of the sovereign nation of Ukraine and the annexation of Crimea were masterly demonstrations of how to conduct irregular warfare in a post–Cold War and post-9/11 world. Its exploitation of the vacuum left by the withdrawal of American combat forces from Iraq in 2011 shows how ambitious the Kremlin is to reshape the geopolitics of the Middle East as well.
How has Russia done this? Some have argued that it has developed a new mode of “hybrid war.” This is not true. Moscow has simply further developed and recalibrated old Cold War tools, employing them in a way that emphasizes a less direct and more subversive approach to war that Sun Tzu would have instantly recognized.
Some of the most important work showing the world how Russia is winning its wars without recourse to conventional means is coming from the Baltic nations of Estonia, Latvia, and Lithuania, which are under the greatest threat since the invasion of Ukraine. The best English-language summary of the revamped Russian approach to war can be found in the 2014 report of the National Defense Academy of Latvia’s Center for Security and Strategic Research. Titled Russia’s New Generation Warfare in Ukraine: Implications for Latvian Defense Policy, it identifies eight ways the Russians are adapting their strategy for conflict in the twenty-first century:
• From direct destruction to direct influence. From direct conflict to “contactless war.”
• From direct annihilation of the enemy to subverting it internally.
• From war with kinetic weapons and an emphasis on technology and platforms to a “culture war” attacking the will of the enemy.
• From war built around conventional general-purpose forces to sub-conventional war using special forces and irregular groupings and militias.
• From the traditional three-dimensional perspective of the battle space to an emphasis on information operations, psychological operations, and the “war of perceptions.”
• From compartmentalized war to a “total war,” including the targeting of the enemy’s “psychological rear” and population base.
• From war focused on the physical environment to war targeting human consciousness, cyberspace, and the will of the enemy to fight.
• From war in a defined period to a state of “permanent war.” War as the nation’s natural state.”