![Hybrid Wars: The Indirect Adaptive Approach To Regime Change by [Korybko, Andrew]](https://images-na.ssl-images-amazon.com/images/I/51M-GfzEUqL.jpg)
In “The Age of Neutralisations and
Depolitications”, Carl Schmitt in 1929 observed that Central Europe lives sous
l’oeil Russe - under the Russian eye - meaning scrutinised with a
specifically Russian “psychological gaze”. It “sees through (European) great
words and institutions”, writes the German legal philosopher and evokes cool
motionless Slavic X-ray eyeballs pervading idealistic Western surface politics
to excavate raw ossified power structure.
How little has changed then roughly 90
years later, with the West still submitted to Russia’s unswerving, unpleasant
and often embarrassing critique. The short 1990s global honeymoon of
mob-looting Russia’s industrial assets and flooding it with Pepsi imports gave
way to the slow and painful reconstitution under Putin I including of the
legendary Soviet psychological warfare apparatus. Slowly and awkwardly at first
but with increasing single-minded sophistication, Russia’s state-funded global
propaganda giants RT and Sputnik have fast-track-reindustrialised Russia’s
critical faculties against Western governments by providing a platform for
popular left and right-wing Western dissidents shunned by their respective
domestic mainstream media. In return, these pundits further the Russian
perspective also pervasively whispered across the non-Western world: Of Western
powers as essentially exploitative and aggressive actors in international
relations. More specifically, according to disenchanted Russia, the Cold War
never ended in 1990 and the West and Nato have only sought different means to
catalyse Russia’s dislocation while inexorably positioning their military bases
ever closer to Russian borders through the installation of friendly governments
in post-Soviet and post-Warsaw Pact territory via so-called colour revolutions.
Contemplating the ensuing political instability and fragmentation in Europe,
Central Asia and beyond, Vladimir Putin once famously called the collapse of
the Soviet Union the “greatest geopolitical catastrophe of the 20st century”.
Andrew Korybko’s book “Hybrid Wars” (2015)
published by the Moscow-based Institute for Strategic Studies and Predictions
appears in this legacy of a materialist and geopolitical perspective that must
seem unpleasant and alien to Western transcendental sensibilities, given the
virulence with which the angle is avoided in Western discourse. Analysing international relations like a
chessboard and zero-sum game of an expansion of military bases and missile
deployments, of course, in its very aesthetic undermines Western idealist
communications. Media takes of regime change as struggles for
self-determination supported as a result of Western humanitarian concern are
cut short by a bottom-line view on results: the de-facto proliferation of
Western friendly governments, trade partners, military cooperation agreements
and bases.
Korybko thus sets the stage by providing a
theoretical background of the classical geopolitical themes and literature- the
ugly suspicion that continues to haunt international relations. According to the
discipline birthed in the late 19th century with Alfred Thayer
Mahan’s “The Influence of Sea Power Upon History” and Halford Mackinder’s “The
Geographical Pivot of History”, the world is divided into a world island,
offshore islands and outlying islands. Control of the world
island, of Eurasia - the “Heartland”, essentially equals “command of the world”
and thus becomes something of a persistent object of concern and desire in
geopolitics for the rulers of the offshore islands and outlying islands – roughly
the Anglo-American Sea powers and Japan. Regardless of whether such a
perspective suffices to explain international politics, it is at least
remarkable how little the fundamentals of the discipline have changed when
reading more recent and influential tracts on geopolitics like “The Great
Chessboard” (1997) by Zbigniew Brzezinski, the eminence grise Polish-American
strategist who advised numerous US administrations from LBJ to Carter and
Obama and only passed recently in 2017.
Having set the conceptual stage to explain
the fierceness of ongoing and persistent US-Russian rivalry, which is
counterintuitive[1], Korybko’s
continues by tracing the recent evolution of Western warfare strategy by piling
up popular American warfare manuals. Readers learn about incisive paradigm
shifts such as William Lind’s Fourth Generation Warfare (1989)
postulating an evolution from large mass armies towards fluid, decentralised
and asymmetrical forms of confrontation. It is complemented by Steven Mann’s
“Chaos Theory and Strategic Thought” (1992) and an integration of internet
communications into tactical strategy as early as in 1996 with Arquila and
Ronfeld’s “The Age of Netwar” and Admiral Cebrowski’s and Garska’s “Network
Centric Warfare” (1998). Warfare hence
becomes reinvented. It transforms from clunky mass military strategy towards
today’s lean, fluid, decentralised[2],
digitised precision tactics either as exhibition corps complemented by private
military contractors or led-from-behind/outsourced to regional actors discretely
infused by quasi-invisible imperial thanato-supply- and assistance chains.
It is along these vectors that a
contemporary form of hybrid warfare has developed. “At its core, Hybrid War is
managed chaos”, Korybko summarises the theme, which should be an eye opener
given that the literature of the manuals analysed mirrors the de-facto
situation of never ending military operations in Iraq and Afghanistan and
increasingly in other states such as Libya or Yemen. Low level conflict becomes
the seeping wound of status quo, withdrawals are ever rescheduled but never
accomplished, private contractors alternate with covert presences of special
forces and military instructors. The appearance of “managed chaos” in US
military manuals of course also casts doubt on whether there had ever been any
genuine will of the US to create stable political destinies in any of the
states crushed by its war machine in recent years.
Meanwhile, exploitable chaos is only at the
endpoint of a continuous gradient which commences with civil technologies of
regime change. Korybko attributes a decisive influence to the teachings of Gene
Sharp dubbed “The Macchiavelli of Non-Violence” and his manual “From
Dictatorship to Democracy: A Conceptual Framework for Liberation” a sort of hands-on
and go-to resource which has influenced non-violent resistance strategies from
Serbia (2000) to Georgia (2003), Ukraine (2004), Kyrgisztan (2005), Lebanon
(2005), Iraq (2005) to Iran (2009) and the more recent “Arab Spring” events:
they have been termed colour revolutions for their similarity in using
branding-like tactics supported by networks of Western influence.
Hybrid Wars meanwhile go beyond the
organisation from abroad of regime change through peaceful and non-violent
tactics. Rather, colour revolutions are a first stage and only in the case of a
failure to achieve objectives, warfare is escalated by integrating
unconventional warfare tactics as recently in Syria and Ukraine, where direct
full-scale US intervention would have risked large scale military confrontation
with Russia. US Lieutenant Colonel Brian Petit defines unconventional warfare
as “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 underground, auxiliary and
guerilla force in a denied area.”
Korybko presents the US Army’s “Special Forces
Unconventional Warfare” classified training document 103 as one of the pillars
of hybrid war tactics. The document, also known as TC 18-01, was leaked by a
whistleblower and eventually published on NSNBC International’s webpage in
early 2012. The objective for the interfering state becomes “to degrade the
government’s security apparatus (the military and police elements of national
power) to the point where the government is susceptible to defeat.” From the
perspective of unconventional warfare, every civil movement and unrest in a
country thus becomes a potential prelude to escalating conflict for the sake of
weakening or toppling a government or creating managed chaos. Warfare becomes a
malign virus precision-infiltrated into fragilised social tissue proliferating
in a weakening host state that becomes vulnerable to external political and
military will. The state has to expend increasing resources draining itself and
binding its external political capacities, becomes politically eliminated from
the international scene.
After an extensive review of literature and
its synthesis, Korybko concludes with surprising brevity offering only two
short recommendations to defend against foreign-led subversion. On the one
hand, he alludes to governments facilitating popular identification via common
goals which might be read as a good omen for populism - as a cultural immune
system against hybrid warfare. Common goals, Korybko explains, will lead to
pro-government hive mind capable of countering the protesters in times of
crisis. Secondly, on the level of infrastructure, Korybko advocates the
creation of national internets and countries taking control of social media
services. These recommendations have already been largely implemented by
Russia, China, Iran and North Korea all with their own forms of authoritarian
and partly or wholly nationalised internet infrastructure. China has even
recently emerged as a champion of exporting its authoritarian model of the
internet[3] and
services: a promising business model given states’ increasing dual-use
suspicions against Western global internet services with their proprietary
algorithms and intransparent policies.
Korybko warns
that national internet must not to be confused with censorship: The reason for
this, he suggest, is that such a policy would have detrimental effects for
Russia’s soft power prestige. Instead, Russia
should focus on the promotion of its own services. Meanwhile, he is aware of
the organisational difficulty and ambitiousness of such an endeavour which
might still result in censorship as in the case of China: Freedom of
information risks becoming the collateral of hybrid warfare. While Western internet
freedom policies have arguably always been tied up with Western interests, they
have also provided an outlet for critical information both against
authoritarian regimes and Western governments themselves. This informational
liberalism currently seems in decline in the West and elsewhere with dominant
US platforms becoming more subservient to the explosion of censorship demands
by governments and their non-governmental fronts. States meanwhile seem content
with the alibi of foreign subversion enabling them to blame domestic dissent on
outside actors (as in the hysteric plethora of US “Russiagate” accusations or
in France on the occasion of the Gilets Jaunes protests). While the involvement
of foreign actors is hard to rule out, its extent and impact remains subject to
often wild and disingenuous speculation.
In return, what is certain is that hybrid
wars postulate a strategic evolution that will preoccupy states in the years to
come: the emergence of warfare taylored
to the open society. Korybko reminds that it is a development that was and
continues to be heralded by the United States. With the sophistication of
strategies and the saturation of the public sphere with partisan information
warfare, it becomes questionable whether states will continue with their policy
of open information systems in the future. The spectre of hybrid warfare is an
incentive for states to proceed with a nationalisation of services and a
territorialisation of the internet in the process sacrificing the availability
of a diverse range of information.
In all, Korybko’s Hybrid Wars must thus be
seen as an important contribution and an eye-opening overview of the evolution
of modern warfare tactics. Despite its four years of age, it serves as a
valuable resource and analytical guide of the latest manifestation of
Clausewitz’s chameleon such as in Venezuela.
Whether, sceptical readers in general and
Western readers in particular will take serious the Russian geopolitical
narrative and military perspective meanwhile remains questionable. They ignore
it at their own peril: The existence of
this interpretation alone, along with the military conferences it inspires, is
a solid argument for an increase in attention and vigilance towards this novel
form of warfare. Korybko’s “Hybrid Wars” should then be understood as an
opportunity - For Westerners to endure the frighteningly bleak and calculating
Russian gaze and discover their own reflection in the black abyss of its pupil.
[1] Counterintuitive because China’s vastly superior economic prowess
should make it the main rival
[2] Compare also with Weizman’s exploration of Israeli strategy using
Deleuze’s “Thousand Plateaus” http://eipcp.net/transversal/0507/weizman/en
