Valery Gerasimov

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The Perfect Weapon: War, Sabotage, and Fear in the Cyber Age by David E. Sanger

active measures, air gap, autonomous vehicles, Bernie Sanders, Big Tech, bitcoin, Black Lives Matter, Bletchley Park, British Empire, call centre, Cambridge Analytica, Cass Sunstein, Chelsea Manning, computer age, cryptocurrency, cuban missile crisis, disinformation, Donald Trump, drone strike, Edward Snowden, fake news, Google Chrome, Google Earth, information security, Jacob Appelbaum, John Markoff, Kevin Roose, Laura Poitras, Mark Zuckerberg, MITM: man-in-the-middle, mutually assured destruction, off-the-grid, RAND corporation, ransomware, Sand Hill Road, Sheryl Sandberg, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley ideology, Skype, South China Sea, Steve Bannon, Steve Jobs, Steven Levy, Stuxnet, Tim Cook: Apple, too big to fail, Twitter Arab Spring, undersea cable, unit 8200, uranium enrichment, Valery Gerasimov, WikiLeaks, zero day

Rarely in human history has a new weapon been adapted with such speed, customized to fit so many different tasks, and exploited by so many nations to reshape their influence on global events without turning to outright war. Among the fastest adapters has been Putin’s Russia, which deserves credit as a master of the art form, though it is not the only practitioner. Moscow has shown the world how hybrid war works. The strategy is hardly a state secret: Valery Gerasimov, a Russian general, described the strategy in public, and then helped implement it in Ukraine, the country that has become a test-bed for techniques Russia later used against the United States and its allies. The Gerasimov doctrine combines old and new: Stalinist propaganda, magnified by the power of Twitter and Facebook, and backed up by brute force.

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“President Trump has used just about every lever you can use, short of starving the people of North Korea to death, to change their behavior.” CHAPTER VII PUTIN’S PETRI DISH In the twenty-first century we have seen a tendency toward blurring the lines between the states of war and peace. Wars are no longer declared and, having begun, proceed according to an unfamiliar template. —Valery Gerasimov, chief of the general staff of the Russian Federation Armed Forces, on Russia’s hybrid warfare strategy, 2013 In the last days of June 2017, Dmytro Shymkiv was 4,600 miles from Ukraine, dropping off his kids for summer camp in upstate New York. It was the family’s annual summer break from life in Kiev, a capital that still lives uncomfortably between the tug of old Soviet culture and the lure of new Europe.

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They became the Möbius strip of twenty-first-century conflict, one continuous band, with surfaces that seem to blend seamlessly into each other. Putin showed the world how effective this strategy, what the Pentagon terms “hybrid warfare,” can be. The strategy was hardly a state secret. In fact, Valery Gerasimov, the chief of the general staff of the Russian Federation armed forces, described it in a much-quoted 2014 article in a Russian defense journal (the wonderfully named The Military-Industrial Courier) articulating what is now widely known as the Gerasimov doctrine. Gerisamov described what any historian of Russian war fighting knows well: a battlefield war that merges conventional attacks, terror, economic coercion, propaganda, and, most recently, cyber.

Messing With the Enemy: Surviving in a Social Media World of Hackers, Terrorists, Russians, and Fake News by Clint Watts

4chan, active measures, Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, barriers to entry, behavioural economics, Bellingcat, Berlin Wall, Bernie Sanders, Black Lives Matter, Cambridge Analytica, Chelsea Manning, Climatic Research Unit, crowdsourcing, Daniel Kahneman / Amos Tversky, disinformation, Donald Trump, drone strike, Edward Snowden, en.wikipedia.org, Erik Brynjolfsson, failed state, fake news, Fall of the Berlin Wall, false flag, Filter Bubble, global pandemic, Google Earth, Hacker News, illegal immigration, information security, Internet of things, Jacob Silverman, Julian Assange, loss aversion, Mark Zuckerberg, Mikhail Gorbachev, mobile money, mutually assured destruction, obamacare, Occupy movement, offshore financial centre, operational security, pre–internet, Russian election interference, Sheryl Sandberg, side project, Silicon Valley, Snapchat, Steve Bannon, the long tail, The Wisdom of Crowds, Turing test, University of East Anglia, Valery Gerasimov, WikiLeaks, Yochai Benkler, zero day

They also required less resistance to cement themselves among targeted Western populations and to generate grassroots support. Active measures could and would work; the timing just wasn’t right—until the advent of the internet. * * * Almost a year before Russia invaded Crimea in 2014, the chief of the general staff of the Russian Federation, General Valery Gerasimov, authored an article laying out his vision of future warfare based on his interpretation of recent Arab Spring protests across North Africa and the Middle East. Gerasimov noted: The very rules of war have changed. The role of non-military means of achieving political and strategic goals has grown, and, in many cases, they have exceeded the power of force of weapons in their effectiveness. . . .

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(December 2009) 1–24. https://www.cia.gov/library/center-for-the-study-of-intelligence/csi-publications/csi-studies/studies/vol53no4/pdf/U-%20Boghardt-AIDS-Made%20in%20the%20USA-17Dec.pdf. 4. Robert Coalson, “Top Russian General Lays Bare Putin’s Plan for Ukraine,” The Huffington Post (November 2, 2014). https://www.huffingtonpost.com/robert-coalson/valery-gerasimov-putin-ukraine_b_574 8480.html. 5. “Russia to create ‘cyber-troops’–Ministry of Defense,” RT (August 20, 2013). https://www.rt.com/news/russia-cyber-troops-defence-753. 6. Eric Lipton, David E. Sanger, and Scott Shane, “The Perfect Weapon: How Russian Cyberpower Invaded the U.S.,” The New York Times (December 13, 2016). https://www.nytimes.com/2016/12/13/us/politics/russia-hack-election-dnc.html. 7.

Sandworm: A New Era of Cyberwar and the Hunt for the Kremlin's Most Dangerous Hackers by Andy Greenberg

"World Economic Forum" Davos, air freight, air gap, Airbnb, Bellingcat, Bernie Sanders, bitcoin, blockchain, call centre, Citizen Lab, clean water, data acquisition, disinformation, Donald Trump, Edward Snowden, false flag, global supply chain, Hacker News, hive mind, information security, Julian Assange, Just-in-time delivery, Kickstarter, machine readable, Mikhail Gorbachev, no-fly zone, open borders, pirate software, pre–internet, profit motive, ransomware, RFID, speech recognition, Steven Levy, Stuxnet, supply-chain attack, tech worker, undersea cable, unit 8200, uranium enrichment, Valery Gerasimov, WikiLeaks, zero day

In 2013, the Russian-language journal Voenno-Promyshlennyi Kur’er, or Military-Industrial Courier, had published a two-thousand-word article with an absurdly dry title: “The Value of Science in Prediction.” It was based on a speech given by the chief of the General Staff of the Russian military, General Valery Gerasimov. The article was little noticed in the West, but Mark Galeotti published a translation in his blog a year later. “In the 21st century we have seen a tendency toward blurring the lines between the states of war and peace,” the article began. “Wars are no longer declared and, having begun, proceed according to an unfamiliar template.”

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In the spring: “MH17—Russian GRU Commander ‘Orion’ Identified as Oleg Kannikov,” Bellingcat, May 25, 2018, www.bellingcat.com; and “Third Suspect in Skripal Poisoning Identified as Denis Sergeev, High Ranking GRU Officer,” Bellingcat, Feb. 24, 2019, bellingcat.com. It was based on a speech: Valery Gerasimov, “The Value of Science Is in the Foresight: New Challenges Demand Rethinking the Forms and Methods of Carrying Out Combat Operations,” Military-Industrial Courier, Feb. 27, 2013, translated and reprinted in Military Review, Jan./Feb. 2016, usacac.army.mil/. The article was little noticed: Mark Galeotti, “The ‘Gerasimov Doctrine’ and Russian Non-linear War,” In Moscow’s Shadow, Feb. 27, 2013, inmoscowsshadows.wordpress.com, archived at bit.ly/2G2NsEK.

Army of None: Autonomous Weapons and the Future of War by Paul Scharre

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Russian companies’ boasting of autonomous features has none of the hesitation or hedging that is often seen from American or British defense firms. Senior Russian military commanders have stated they intend to move toward fully robotic weapons. In a 2013 article on the future of warfare, Russian military chief of staff General Valery Gerasimov wrote: Another factor influencing the essence of modern means of armed conflict is the use of modern automated complexes of military equipment and research in the area of artificial intelligence. While today we have flying drones, tomorrow’s battlefields will be filled with walking, crawling, jumping, and flying robots.

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,” 5G Network Softwarization, May 21, 2015, http://ieee-sdn.blogspot.com/2015/05/cognitization-is-upon-us.html. 6 “fully roboticized . . . military operations”: Robert Coalson, “Top Russian General Lays Bare Putin’s Plan for Ukraine,” Huffington Post, September 2, 2014, http://www.huffingtonpost.com/robert-coalson/valery-gerasimov-putin-ukraine_b_5748480.html. 6 Department of Defense officials state: Deputy Assistant Secretary of Defense for Research Melissa Flagg, as quoted in Stew Magnuson, “Autonomous, Lethal Robot Concepts Must Be ‘On the Table,’ DoD Official Says,” March 3, 2016, http://www.nationaldefensemagazine.org/blog/Lists/Posts/Post.aspx?

Mindf*ck: Cambridge Analytica and the Plot to Break America by Christopher Wylie

4chan, affirmative action, Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, air gap, availability heuristic, Berlin Wall, Bernie Sanders, Big Tech, big-box store, Boris Johnson, Brexit referendum, British Empire, call centre, Cambridge Analytica, Chelsea Manning, chief data officer, cognitive bias, cognitive dissonance, colonial rule, computer vision, conceptual framework, cryptocurrency, Daniel Kahneman / Amos Tversky, dark pattern, dark triade / dark tetrad, data science, deep learning, desegregation, disinformation, Dominic Cummings, Donald Trump, Downton Abbey, Edward Snowden, Elon Musk, emotional labour, Etonian, fake news, first-past-the-post, gamification, gentleman farmer, Google Earth, growth hacking, housing crisis, income inequality, indoor plumbing, information asymmetry, Internet of things, Julian Assange, Lyft, Marc Andreessen, Mark Zuckerberg, Menlo Park, move fast and break things, Network effects, new economy, obamacare, Peter Thiel, Potemkin village, recommendation engine, Renaissance Technologies, Robert Mercer, Ronald Reagan, Rosa Parks, Sand Hill Road, Scientific racism, Shoshana Zuboff, side project, Silicon Valley, Skype, Stephen Fry, Steve Bannon, surveillance capitalism, tech bro, uber lyft, unpaid internship, Valery Gerasimov, web application, WikiLeaks, zero-sum game

Later, it emerged that Facebook, in a panic about its PR crisis, had hired the secret communications firm Definers Public Affairs, which subsequently leaked out fake narratives filled with anti-Semitic tropes about its critics being part of a George Soros–funded conspiracy. Rumors were seeded on the Internet and, as I discovered personally, its targets took it as a cue to take matters into their own hands. * * * — IN FEBRUARY 2013, a Russian military general named Valery Gerasimov wrote an article challenging the prevailing notions of warfare. Gerasimov, who was Russia’s chief of the general staff (roughly equivalent to chairman of the U.S. Joint Chiefs of Staff), penned his thoughts in the Military-Industrial Kurier under the title “The Value of Science Is in the Foresight”—a set of ideas that some would later dub the Gerasimov Doctrine.

Nervous States: Democracy and the Decline of Reason by William Davies

active measures, Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, Amazon Web Services, Anthropocene, bank run, banking crisis, basic income, Black Lives Matter, Brexit referendum, business cycle, Cambridge Analytica, Capital in the Twenty-First Century by Thomas Piketty, citizen journalism, Climategate, Climatic Research Unit, Colonization of Mars, continuation of politics by other means, creative destruction, credit crunch, data science, decarbonisation, deep learning, DeepMind, deindustrialization, digital divide, discovery of penicillin, Dominic Cummings, Donald Trump, drone strike, Elon Musk, failed state, fake news, Filter Bubble, first-past-the-post, Frank Gehry, gig economy, government statistician, housing crisis, income inequality, Isaac Newton, Jeff Bezos, Jeremy Corbyn, Johannes Kepler, Joseph Schumpeter, knowledge economy, loss aversion, low skilled workers, Mahatma Gandhi, Mark Zuckerberg, mass immigration, meta-analysis, Mont Pelerin Society, mutually assured destruction, Northern Rock, obamacare, Occupy movement, opioid epidemic / opioid crisis, Paris climate accords, pattern recognition, Peace of Westphalia, Peter Thiel, Philip Mirowski, planetary scale, post-industrial society, post-truth, quantitative easing, RAND corporation, Ray Kurzweil, Richard Florida, road to serfdom, Robert Mercer, Ronald Reagan, sentiment analysis, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley billionaire, Silicon Valley startup, smart cities, Social Justice Warrior, statistical model, Steve Bannon, Steve Jobs, tacit knowledge, the scientific method, Turing machine, Uber for X, universal basic income, University of East Anglia, Valery Gerasimov, W. E. B. Du Bois, We are the 99%, WikiLeaks, women in the workforce, zero-sum game

Part of the appeal of war, at least as an idea, is that—unlike the civil society designed by the likes of Hobbes—it represents a form of politics where feelings really matter. PART TWO The Rise of Feeling 5 KNOWLEDGE FOR WAR Secrecy, sentiment, and real-time intelligence In an influential article published in 2013, the Russian general Valery Gerasimov argued that “in the twenty-first century we have seen a tendency toward blurring the lines between the states of war and peace. Wars are no longer declared.” The example of the 2011 Arab Spring suggested to Gerasimov that “nonmilitary” means of war could be far more threatening to state powers in the future than traditional military ones.

Click Here to Kill Everybody: Security and Survival in a Hyper-Connected World by Bruce Schneier

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Broad (4 Mar 2017), “Trump inherits a secret cyberwar against North Korean missiles,” New York Times, https://www.nytimes.com/2017/03/04/world/asia/north-korea-missile-program-sabotage.html. 71In 2012, a senior Russian general: Mark Galeotti (6 Jul 2014), “The ‘Gerasimov Doctrine’ and Russian non-linear war,” In Moscow’s Shadows, https://inmoscowsshadows.wordpress.com/2014/07/06/the-gerasimov-doctrine-and-russian-non-linear-war. Henry Foy (15 Sep 2017), “Valery Gerasimov, the general with a doctrine for Russia,” Financial Times, https://www.ft.com/content/7e14a438-989b-11e7-a652-cde3f882dd7b. 71There are cyberattacks that will be: David E. Sanger and Elisabeth Bumiller (31 May 2011), “Pentagon to consider cyberattacks acts of war,” New York Times, http://www.nytimes.com/2011/06/01/us/politics/01cyber.html. 71a state that political scientist Lucas Kello calls “unpeace”: Lucas Kello (2017), The Virtual Weapon and International Order, Yale University Press, https://yalebooks.yale.edu/book/9780300220230/virtual-weapon-and-international-order. 71The US responded to the North Korean attack: Carol Morello and Greg Miller (2 Jan 2015), “U.S. imposes sanctions on N.

The Levelling: What’s Next After Globalization by Michael O’sullivan

"World Economic Forum" Davos, 3D printing, Airbnb, Alan Greenspan, algorithmic trading, Alvin Toffler, bank run, banking crisis, barriers to entry, Bernie Sanders, Big Tech, bitcoin, Black Swan, blockchain, bond market vigilante , Boris Johnson, Branko Milanovic, Bretton Woods, Brexit referendum, British Empire, business cycle, business process, capital controls, carbon tax, Celtic Tiger, central bank independence, classic study, cloud computing, continuation of politics by other means, corporate governance, credit crunch, CRISPR, cryptocurrency, data science, deglobalization, deindustrialization, disinformation, disruptive innovation, distributed ledger, Donald Trump, driverless car, eurozone crisis, fake news, financial engineering, financial innovation, first-past-the-post, fixed income, gentrification, Geoffrey West, Santa Fe Institute, Gini coefficient, Glass-Steagall Act, global value chain, housing crisis, impact investing, income inequality, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), It's morning again in America, James Carville said: "I would like to be reincarnated as the bond market. You can intimidate everybody.", junk bonds, knowledge economy, liberal world order, Long Term Capital Management, longitudinal study, low interest rates, market bubble, minimum wage unemployment, new economy, Northern Rock, offshore financial centre, open economy, opioid epidemic / opioid crisis, Paris climate accords, pattern recognition, Peace of Westphalia, performance metric, Phillips curve, private military company, quantitative easing, race to the bottom, reserve currency, Robert Gordon, Robert Shiller, Robert Solow, Ronald Reagan, Scramble for Africa, secular stagnation, Silicon Valley, Sinatra Doctrine, South China Sea, South Sea Bubble, special drawing rights, Steve Bannon, Suez canal 1869, supply-chain management, The inhabitant of London could order by telephone, sipping his morning tea in bed, the various products of the whole earth, The Rise and Fall of American Growth, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, Thomas Kuhn: the structure of scientific revolutions, total factor productivity, trade liberalization, tulip mania, Valery Gerasimov, Washington Consensus

Abi-Habib, “How China Got Sri Lanka to Cough Up a Port,” New York Times, June 25, 2018, https://www.nytimes.com/2018/06/25/world/asia/china-sri-lanka-port.html. 20. Van Creveld, More on War; Grayling, War. 21. See General Gerasimov’s essay: G. Valery, “The Value of Science in Foresight,” Military Industrial Courier, February 26, 2013, https://www.vpk-news.ru/articles/14632; also H. Foy, “Valery Gerasimov, the General with a Doctrine for Russia,” Financial Times, September 15, 2017, https://www.ft.com/content/7e14a438-989b-11e7-a652-cde3f882dd7b. 22. The US Army Futures Command in Austin, Texas, is one of the areas of thought leadership in new aspects of warfare such as urban-based war. 23.

The Wires of War: Technology and the Global Struggle for Power by Jacob Helberg

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They’d simply gotten there first.”131 Gerasimov Meets Civil-Military Fusion In early 2013, with the embers of the Arab Spring still smoldering, an article appeared in a Russian military publication called the Military-Industrial Courier. Under the bland headline “The Value of Science in Prediction,” Russian general Valery Gerasimov argued that nonmilitary means could be used to destabilize seemingly stable societies.132 Indeed, he asserted that the United States had been doing exactly that in Eastern Europe through pro-democracy organizations and the Internet. “In the twenty-first century we have seen a tendency toward blurring the lines between the states of war and peace,” Gerasimov wrote.

Near and Distant Neighbors: A New History of Soviet Intelligence by Jonathan Haslam

active measures, Albert Einstein, Benoit Mandelbrot, Berlin Wall, Bletchley Park, Bolshevik threat, Bretton Woods, British Empire, cuban missile crisis, disinformation, falling living standards, false flag, John von Neumann, lateral thinking, military-industrial complex, Robert Hanssen: Double agent, Ronald Reagan, Strategic Defense Initiative, Valery Gerasimov, Vladimir Vetrov: Farewell Dossier, éminence grise

All of a sudden the GRU has found a new role in what might be described as “implausibly deniable” aktivka, operations not unlike those conducted against Poland by the Fourth in the 1920s: sufficient to keep the wound bleeding but insufficient, thus far, to warrant massive retaliation.8 These forms of covert operations were heralded by the new chief of the General Staff, Valery Gerasimov, in January 2013. The business-speak within the army today is “outsourcing,” which has been coined as a new Russian word. Now it has acquired a new meaning altogether. Moscow “outsources” its war fighting. Considered “an intellectual,” in the words of the editor of Natsional’naya oborona, Gerasimov assured those assembled at the Academy of Military Sciences that force continued to play an important role in resolving disputes between countries and that “hot points” existed close to Russian frontiers.

How Everything Became War and the Military Became Everything: Tales From the Pentagon by Rosa Brooks

airport security, Albert Einstein, Berlin Wall, big-box store, clean water, cognitive dissonance, continuation of politics by other means, different worldview, disruptive innovation, driverless car, drone strike, Edward Snowden, facts on the ground, failed state, illegal immigration, information security, Internet Archive, John Markoff, Mark Zuckerberg, moral panic, no-fly zone, Oklahoma City bombing, operational security, pattern recognition, Peace of Westphalia, personalized medicine, RAND corporation, Silicon Valley, South China Sea, technological determinism, Timothy McVeigh, Turing test, unemployed young men, Valery Gerasimov, Wall-E, War on Poverty, WikiLeaks, Yochai Benkler

ISIS has been quick to exploit U.S. overreliance on high-tech precision weapons as well, and our related refusal to consider “boots on the ground.” Near-peer states such as China and Russia have also taken notice. The Russians have already begun to reshape their strategic assumptions around these changes. In a 2013 article in a Russian military journal, for instance, Valery Gerasimov, Russia’s deputy defense minister and chief of the General Staff of the Armed Forces, wrote of the need for his country’s military to adapt to this new world: “In the 21st century we have seen a tendency toward blurring the lines between the states of war and peace. Wars are no longer declared and, having begun, proceed according to an unfamiliar template.”

The Future of War by Lawrence Freedman

Albert Einstein, autonomous vehicles, Berlin Wall, Black Swan, Boeing 747, British Empire, colonial rule, conceptual framework, crowdsourcing, cuban missile crisis, currency manipulation / currency intervention, disinformation, Donald Trump, Dr. Strangelove, driverless car, drone strike, en.wikipedia.org, energy security, Ernest Rutherford, failed state, Fall of the Berlin Wall, Francis Fukuyama: the end of history, global village, Google Glasses, Herman Kahn, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), John Markoff, long peace, megacity, Mikhail Gorbachev, military-industrial complex, moral hazard, mutually assured destruction, New Journalism, Norbert Wiener, nuclear taboo, open economy, pattern recognition, Peace of Westphalia, RAND corporation, Ronald Reagan, South China Sea, speech recognition, Steven Pinker, Strategic Defense Initiative, Stuxnet, Suez canal 1869, Suez crisis 1956, systematic bias, the scientific method, uranium enrichment, urban sprawl, Valery Gerasimov, Wargames Reagan, WarGames: Global Thermonuclear War, WikiLeaks, zero day

In 2006 its tactics showed up those of Israel, which judged the demands of the war poorly, relying too much on air power without a strong ground presence. But the war was also costly for the militia, with a lot of fighters killed, and the Israeli campaign battered its urban sanctuaries.7 Interest in the approach was revived as it was apparently followed by Russia in its campaign against Ukraine that began in 2014. In early 2013 Valery Gerasimov, chief of Russia’s general staff, had described how this might work. He noted how in Middle East conflicts there had been a progressive erosion of the distinctions between war and peace and between uniformed personnel and covert operatives. Wars were ‘not declared but simply begin,’ so that ‘a completely well-off and stable country’ could be transformed into ‘an arena of the most intense armed conflict in a matter of months or even days.’

Likewar: The Weaponization of Social Media by Peter Warren Singer, Emerson T. Brooking

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After the color revolutions roiled Eastern Europe and the Arab Spring swept the Middle East, a similar wave of enthusiasm in late 2011 inspired tens of thousands of young Russians to take to the streets, mounting the most serious protests of Putin’s reign. Perceiving the combined forces of liberalization and internet-enabled activism as an engineered attack by the West, the Russian government resolved to fight back. The aim of Russia’s new strategy, and its military essence, was best articulated by Valery Gerasimov, the country’s top-ranking general at the time. He channeled Clausewitz, declaring in a speech reprinted in the Russian military’s newspaper that “the role of nonmilitary means of achieving political and strategic goals has grown. In many cases, they have exceeded the power of force of weapons in their effectiveness.”