Presentation for the Baltic Defence College Annual Conference on - - PDF document

• Presentation for the Baltic Defence College Annual Conference on Russia

Non-linear warfare: The Russian Challenge Panel IV: Euro-Atlantic responses to Russian nonlinear warfare

• Taking Away the Open Battlefield:

Breaking the cycle of Russian success in nonlinear warfare

• February 17, 2017
• Molly K McKew
• “War was now understood as a process, more exactly, part of a process, its acute phase, but

maybe not the most important.” — Vladislav Surkov, “Without Sky”

• Essentially, what you’ve been hearing for the last day is: The West is already at war,

whether it wants to be or not. It may not be a war we recognize, but it is a war. — This bears repeating. To respond to the war, we first must acknowledge the war.

• We also need to think who is going to fight this war, and how we train and arm them.

Building a nonlinear army. I have been working against Russian nonlinear tactics for the last 9 years, in Georgia, Moldova, Ukraine, and the Baltic states. It got a lot less terrible when I actually knew what I was looking at.

• I’ll try to cover some aspects of nonlinear warfare in this presentation that I don’t think

will be covered by others here — particularly since I come at this as a civilian, and a private citizen, working from the private sector.

• ———
• How does Russia fight in ways that we do not?
• — First, it’s all one war. Syria, Ukraine, the Baltics the Arctic, Libya. It’s one continuous

front in a permanent war on the West. — Second, it’s all one war machine. [Gerasimov.] For Russia, military, technological, information, diplomatic, economic, cultural, criminal, and other tools are all controlled by the state and deployed toward one set of strategic objectives. — Third, Russian information warfare is not about creating an alternate truth, but eroding our ability to distinguish truth. — Fourth, Russia does not aspire to be like us, or to make itself stronger than we are. Rather, its wants the West—and specifically NATO and America — to become weaker and more fractured until we sink to their level. — Fifth, hard power matters. There is no denying that Russia is willing to back up its rhetoric and policy with deployed force.

——-

• With subversion, disruption, and upheaval, Putin has transformed what should be

tremendous weakness into considerable strength — a kind of global imperialist insurgency, using state assets in disruptive ways.

• ———
• Nonlinear warfare is war by process, and it is a new system of political control. How do

you fight political control? This is the new war.

• It is happening in the way that it is for a reason. Russia’s hard power usage challenges
• ur systems. The other elements of its hybrid warfare aim to take us apart. It’s an

effective combination — attacking from without and from within. Subversion is uncomfortable to understand. As an American, I think I can say this more than most right now. Overall, we don’t identify this shadow war fast enough to be effective in stopping it.

• Examples of how far behind we are:
• — The information war isn’t hacking and leaks and it isn’t fake news. It is an elaborate

information architecture created within our own media and information space to manipulate views via active measures and reflexive control. Georgia, Brexit, Trump, next France and Germany and the Netherlands. It’s a pattern of the Kremlin believing they have the right to subvert our societies. We should have a serious problem with

• that. But we barely talk about what it is. Americans are beginning to ask why their

elected leaders have failed to protect them from this direct threat. Other electorates will too.

• — On economic warfare — we talk about gas and energy, sanctions and embargoes.

But we don’t talk about the creeping poison of Russian money, and how the Kremlin has weaponized corruption, and how they have stolen from their citizens and nearly bankrupted themselves to buy their way into our societies. The export of kleptocracy is the new ideological war. Kleptocracy is the core of economic subversion, and the essential foundation of Russian nonlinear warfare — Russia laundered billions through Moldovan courts into banks in Latvia. This saturated Moldova with illicit cash. Everyone, everyone, from the elite was roped in — and that was just an afterthought of moving their money into the EU banking system. — In Washington, Russian banks and companies and oligarchs will hire lobbyists and law firms and others not because they want them to do anything, but just to buy their silence and conflict them out of working against Russia. Don’t think the same isn’t happening in London and Brussels. It is.

• These are only a few examples of applied nonlinear warfare. They seem obscure and

small — but that is why I bring them up. The fabric of Russian nonlinear warfare is thousands of these initiatives.

• ——-
• What response has there been? There hasn’t.
• Mostly we don’t even see this war. We have only begun to respond in small tactical
• ways. We need a new strategic and operational framework to fight this war.
• ———
• On conventional threats, we are better able to identify them, and we prepare to respond

to them. We see the Russians priming and conditioning us with exercises and

• verflights. We see them putting their forces on war-footing and using military

intimidation as a psychological tool against us. But we can look at A2AD systems and know how we can counter them. We can ramp up resistance training in the Baltics to counter the psychological effects.

• On nonlinear threats, we don’t have these reflexes conditioned. We need to spend a

lot more time wargaming the shadow war.

• The more likely scenario for most NATO allies isn’t domination, but subversion, and we

need to devote as much energy and resources to planning the shadow war. This starts by training our military and security and political class to see the war clearly, and by developing response cells and battle drills and an arsenal of mechanisms.

• ——-
• What does that response look like?
• We need 2 fundamental paradigm shifts to fight this war
• 1) We need a hardening of the leadership landscape within the Western alliance. Where

there is no political will, there are few resources to do anything. We need leaders who will take responsibility for this generational step and who will rebuild the moral core of the alliance.

• 2) We need to make 28+2 into a nonlinear response machine — one that understands

nonlinear responses are law enforcement and internal mechanisms more often than

• military. We are too compartmentalized. The different national militaries stationed in the

Baltics don’t even share intelligence between themselves easily or efficiently. What happens when you need to involve 5 times as many actors?

• Once we get out of the military, everything gets slower, because it is less practiced and

less streamlined, and the lines of effort and lanes of authority are unclear. We need to close that gap. We also need to allow our militaries to operate in new lanes with civilian

counterparts so we can benefit from their insights on the threat and their long term thinking and planning.

• There are difficulties in fighting nonlinear war as a democracy. We have to acknowledge

them — but also acknowledge that these values and the laws are our strength and not a

• weakness. We can, and must, fight as democracies. We’ll need people working on legal

authorities, especially for how we cooperate and share information. We need to work together to overcome caution, because the learning curve and operational curve are counterintuitive in nonlinear war.

• ——-
• The new Russian way of war is intentionally designed to be outside of our mechanism
• f response.
• Our approach requires going back to the fact that this is a war. We still start every
• fficial statement on Russia by talking about how we should cooperate where we can,

etc.

• We can't. Not right now.
• That is the first step of the nonlinear response. There are no pure motives or actors

from The Kremlin or Kremlin money. Everything has a string.

• ———
• Let's look at a few specific areas of response
• — Intelligence — We need to improve intelligence sharing and integrate our response.

We need to see that Russia knows how to use our systems. Which is why there is currently a Russian helping to run Interpol. We need to understand that Russia has gotten very good at putting bad intelligence into our systems. Often this is to discredit the people most able to lead the fight against them. Every time, we respond as expected — equivocation.

• — Cyber — To bolster defenses against attacks we need real time information-sharing

between allies, and after-action reporting. Who is targeting what and why? What does this mean about what is next? — The war is online and that’s where we need soldiers — Estonia’s idea of cyber conscripts is an excellent one. They can also be used for information operations. It’s a model others should look at as well.

• — Information warfare — The Kremlin knows we don’t centrally coordinate our

potential resources for information warfare and operations, or counter attacks to

• theirs. This is as good as not having one.

— First, on defense. We’re still allowing Russia to broadcast its information operations into our countries, and pay for supplements in our own media. That has to stop. — Then, we need to slow the usefulness of the Russian information architecture. Social media companies and google etc need to rewrite advertising algorithms to de-fund propaganda and disinformation sites. — We also need to be smarter about what is in front of us, and not aiding the Russians with our openness. Kaspersky lab example: contest to predict threats to next generation

• f election software. Getting our best and brightest to voluntarily give information to

Russian intelligence on how to attack our systems. This was genius.

• — Then, on offense. We need funded, faster teams working to expose disinformation —

and funded, faster teams who can predict and pre-empt the ramping up of narrative distribution through Russian content architecture. We need a data-driven approach to this response. — We need to understand that noise and volume matter, and we need our own "elves" and bots amplifying real narrative and news. — we need to reinforce TV and Radio stations with values-driven content. This isn't eroding the fourth estate. It's saving our ass, and reminding our people who we are and what we stand for and why it matters. Reminding them what our alliances and freedoms do for us. — We need a basic public awareness campaign to explain to people how their information space is being manipulated and why. What is the purpose. Arm people with the right tools for when they want to see. — We need to pay attention to the rapid evolution of this landscape, and respond -- for example, we see the clear export of Russian-sponsored “trump trolls” to France and Germany information spaces. We need to block their efforts. — And we need to devote resources to some specific subcategories of the Kremlin’s information warfare, like the Kremlin's rewriting of history, and develop strategic information responses to these campaigns

• We need our own information architecture, we need values-driven content, and

we need to give our citizens the tools to defend themselves.

• — Economic warfare: We have to get smart on threat finance. Money is bullets for

large parts of the shadow war. Corruption, like propaganda, is a weapon and it has a

• vector. We have to do better using financial and economic instruments against the

Russian money. Seize assets. Don’t let them buy our strategic assets. Don’t let them buy half the Bulgarian coastline. — All of our countries and economies will take a hit by exposing the creeping poison that is Russian money, everywhere. But we must. — On the other side of this: our companies need to stop providing strategic services for Putin’s Russia. No more Rheinmettal special forces training. No more Silicon Valley

• cooperation. If it’s a war, this is aiding and abetting the enemy.
• — Finally, “soft power”. We have been slow to admit that all Russian soft power assets

are an element of nonlinear war. There’s no such thing as an art gallery in London

funded by VTB bank that just wants to promote cultural understanding. Those travel apps may seem so helpful — but they have GRU coding embedded in them more often than not. Those endowed academic chairs at universities are teaching a next generation

• f Western students that Russia has every right to be “suspicious” of the West.

— Soft power assets seem like more acceptable partners. But you don’t have to scratch the surface very hard to find recruitment, data harvesting, and the infiltration of structures and influence networks that the Kremlin has exploited to buy silence and consent for their worst impulses.

• ———
• These are just a few examples of places we aren’t devoting enough strategic thinking.
• Some of this response is EU/NATO.
• But in reality, we use the mobilization of a “NATO” response as an excuse to do nothing
• urselves. This begins at a national level. As Estonia has done, for example, we must

all fight for home first to make our contribution to the whole better. But we should coordinate these efforts, and be focused on that bigger apparatus.

• We should find new ways for civilians to serve, and to build new reserves for cyber,

information, legal, economic, and other elements of this war.

• The new difficulty in fighting the Kremlin is that they have made themselves a political

issue in our societies. If we want to begin to buffer against this, we need to be clear that they are a threat to us.

• This is the new deterrence and the new defense, and it requires a transformation and

revolution in our thinking. But we must be up to this challenge. We cannot leave the battlefield open to the Russian advance when we have so readily seen what the cost will be.