The Pot Begins to Boil
The United States was slow to react to these developments. In 2015, the US Central Command finally published a white paper to describe this new reality. It detailed the theory of the “grey-zone” – that undefined, murky space between open conflict and peace – as a new theater of military operations.
China, particularly in the East China Sea, has extensively utilized grey-zone tactics against Taiwan and the Philippines, building forward island bases and using commercial fishing fleets to harass other navies that get too close. This has been called the “Chinese salami-slicing strategy”, which makes a series of small aggressive actions that if done all at once would provoke a strong reaction.
These have happened along the Indian border as well as in the South China Sea, and even includes their Belt and Road Initiative investments across the Third World that builds infrastructure to bend poor countries to cooperate. The wholesale hacking and technological theft of intellectual property from the West is another example of this low-key but determined long-term offensive campaign.
Likewise, Russia used grey-zone tactics in the Black Sea against Ukraine. Hybrid warfare was employed with great success in the seizing of Crimea in 2014 by hordes of unmarked soldiers called “little green men”. Since the whole policy is based on plausible denial, it is difficult to tell exactly how and where it worked. But it is thought that Russian hybrid warfare was the cause behind the Nordstream gas-line and recent Baltic internet cable sabotage, an airplane-bombing plot, assassination attempts, and even jamming GPS signals.
Everything changed, of course, once Russia openly invaded Ukraine two years ago. Then their aggression was plain to see, and the West was finally aroused. By this time, the US had its own theory to explain what had happened, courtesy of the Chief of Staff of the Russian Army.
An article, “The Value of Science Is in the Foresight”, published at the end of February 2013 – a year before Russia took Crimea and the Donbass region – repeated a speech recently given by General Valery Gerasimov. It outlined the tactics the Russians would use by describing what he thought the Americans were up to. This was called “the Gerasimov Doctrine” by an American reporter in his honor.
In his article, the general called for up to four times the effort used for non-military measures than for military, emphasizing the control of information space and coordination. Civilian infrastructure deep in enemy territory was to be targeted along with that of the military, as is happening right now in Ukraine. It even proposed disguising military units as peacekeepers and protesters – a tactic used brilliantly just a year later. And like everything else, it was all blamed on the Yankees.
“The Pentagon has begun to develop a fundamentally new strategy of warfare, which has already been dubbed the Trojan Horse. Its essence lies in the active use of the protest potential of the ‘fifth column’ for the destabilization of a situation while simultaneously attacking the most important facilities with high-precision weapons”, Gerasimov told reporters. In other words, see what you made us do.
Other actions called for were economic sanctions, political pressure, the formation of an opposition movement in the opposing country, and even changing that country’s leadership. In other words, the Gerasimov Doctrine is more about hacking a nation into submission than militarily defeating them. Instead of the old maxim that “war is a continuation of politics, but by other means”, politics is now considered an extension of war by other means, just one of many tools for conquest.
Naturally, this provoked a lot of anxious discussion in Western intelligence and military circles. But a very curious thing happened. For the Gerasimov Doctrine was gradually but systematically denied by strategic thinkers, even by the journalist who had first described and named it. It was now said that the general’s statements merely reflected what he thought the US had been up to, not outlining real Russian plans, that it was neither a real military doctrine, nor actually Gerasimov’s own idea, or even that new. Nothing to see here: move along.
There are several possible reasons for this denial other than that whole thing is as theoretical as the Dulles’ Plan. One is that the general spoke truth, that this does represent American strategic thinking, which the US is most eager to deny in this covert war scenario. The other is no better – that the Gerasimov Doctrine describes just what the Russians and the Chinese are up to.
So then, there is another possibility. Maybe hybrid warfare is being actively pursued by both sides. Quite likely the Russians consider their activities as fair payback for the West interfering in their backyard. They were bitterly certain that the “colour revolutions” that overthrew Russian-leaning governments in Ukraine and other former Soviet republics for Western-style democracies were all orchestrated by the CIA, after all. Who knows? But the Russians’ true intention, in any case, seems to be to make the American empire collapse the same way that the Soviet empire did.
Acknowledged or not, the Gerasimov Doctrine does appear to be a good description of the sort of nasty hi-jinks we and our old Cold War foes like doing to each other when no one’s looking. And therein lies danger. If the public on one side or the other were to discover this situation in its full extent, might that not trigger an inevitable escalation into actual open warfare?
Perhaps that’s the reason for all the denial: because we’re already too deeply engaged in this shadow war. But is continuing to pretend that all is well not an open invitation to disaster? Or could this be a way to somehow safely let off steam?
One is certainly needed. Even without nukes, any total war would destroy civilization. Today’s international order is much more complicated than it was in 1945. There are numerous untested vulnerabilities and complexities that were undreamed of 80 years ago. Modern life depends on the internet, for instance, and in the pursuit of hybrid warfare, both sides have deeply infiltrated and compromised each other’s systems that run everything.
Real cyberwarfare is already happening with constant probes, malware, and hacks. The Russians have launched numerous attacks on Ukraine’s power grid over the years, both cyber and kinetic, along with massive information warfare right out of the Gerasimov Doctrine playbook. US authorities have also warned a number of times about Chinese hacking into our infrastructure, too.
Biological attacks – or even accidents – could kill billions. Attacks on satellites could render space inaccessible indefinitely via the Kessler syndrome. Weather warfare, which has been long denied, despite the Air Force claiming that it would “own the weather” by 2025 (that’s now, folks), could devastate whole countries and cause turmoil and mass famine. Is a vast unseen atmospheric battle being waged above our heads right now across the globe under the guise of climate change? A lot of people whose homes have been flooded or burned out might really like to know.
Any way one looks at it, the whole world is in a state of unacknowledged conflict like never before. And we haven’t even really discussed the confrontations in Korea and Taiwan, nor the actual wars going on in Ukraine and the Mideast. Nor, for that matter, the radical developments in technology underway with drones and artificial intelligence that are changing the battlefield daily.
But conflicts around the planet are dangerously close to going out of control. As someone once said, it’s like two men struggling in a dark basement full of spilled gasoline over a box of matches. The least mistake could set off unimaginable destruction.
Yet this is where it gets even more disturbing. For at last we come to the wild card that is Donald Trump.