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What can the Australian Army learn from Russia and Violent Extremists?

During February and March of 2014 Ukraine’s Crimea region was annexed by Russian ‘Little Green Men’. The internet and news media were awash with images and reports of these Russian speaking soldiers who carried Russian arms and equipment driven in Russian plated vehicles. Russian state media rarely showed any notice, only referring to them as “volunteers” or local “self-defence groups”. Whilst ostensibly recognised as a quiet Russian invasion and occupation of Crimea, little was done about it at the time. Given the absence of a clear and acknowledged nexus between these ‘little green men’ and their Russian state sponsor, NATO and Europe had little to do in response to this invasion.

The concept of Maskirovka, or active information actions to ‘tell your enemies what you know they wish to hear while doing the opposite’ while seemingly novel is actually not new. It echoes earlier Soviet era invasions of Afghanistan, as well as ‘interventions’ into Lithuania, Chechnya and Georgia. Arguably it is this sort of approach, articulated by Sun Tzu as winning without fighting, that is being developed and deployed through Chinese and Russian political warfare campaigns. Essentially, it involves rendering the adversaries' plans for battle irrelevant and removing them from their allies without having to attack a nation's armies or cities. Extremists favour another approach that similarly aims to degrade an adversary’s will to fight. They tend to employ terror tactics to invoke fear by murdering and mutilating civilians, delivering a statement of intent. Islamic State terrorists are well known for amplifying their narrative through brutal and barbaric public executions broadcast on social media. In both of these approaches the actors attempt to overcome or overwhelm their adversaries will to fight.

An evolution of this approach is to attack an adversary's perceptions of reality. As outlined by Dr Matthew Sussex in a previous Cove Talk, this strategy is often described in colourful terms such as the firehose of falsehoods. Like Maskirovka, this emergent trend has the same intended outcome of prevailing over an adversary without fighting. The difference is, however, that it aims to do so without the target even realising they are being subjugated to another’s will. In the contemporary security setting, the ubiquitous reach of information technology enables malignant actors to spread misinformation and to manipulate populations by coordinating inauthentic identities and behaviours in the online world. This causes many people to distrust information published by experts and institutions despite having more access to knowledge than at any time in history. In this approach, the adversary is attempting to bypass their adversaries will to fight.

Malignant actors may seek to exploit these trends to erode popular will to resist threats. At the lower end of the threat spectrum, this reticence could manifest in populations being unwilling to tolerate hardships in support of national efforts. At the other end of the scale, populations may become divided against themselves or against their governments. Passive or active resistance to national efforts to counter identified threats may see individuals and groups seeking to remove themselves from government authority through succession, insurgency or revolution.
As military professionals, we can further our own education and understanding of the profession of arms by engaging with topics of military and security significance to better understand how they may impact on our missions.

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