GM: You are a brilliant young researcher who entered with rocket speed into the first-world echelon of geopolitical analysts. Your insights penetrate into the heart of the problems the world faces today. These problems can best be studied from the perspective of the nature of modern warfare: hybrid wars and network-centric wars. Present us, please, the nature of these wars you're talking about in your study:
HYBRID WARS: the indirect adaptive approach to regime change.
First off, thank you for the very kind words, that's real nice of you to say and I profoundly appreciate it. I also want to thank the audience for their interest in reading my interview, and I promise that they'll be left with a completely new picture of the world by the time they're done. This exclusive may be lengthy, but I hope to make it worth everyone's precious time in giving them an experience that they won't soon forget.
To address your question, my book focuses on the most cutting-edge form of warfare, which I define as being the transformation of failed Color Revolutions into Unconventional Wars. Using the examples of Syria and Ukraine, I assert that the US' new cost-saving strategy to regime change is to use embedded NGOs to orchestrate state destabilization, and if this doesn't succeed in overthrowing the government or blackmailing it to the point of submission, then the next step is to turn the placard-holding protester into a gun-toting insurgent. What's really astounding, I've learned, is that it's actually not all that hard to do, since there are certain strategic and organizational commonalities between Color Revolutions and Unconventional Wars, both in terms of what motivates their participants and the role of the external forces guiding the campaign, for but only two such examples.
This is post-modern warfare, the evolution of what everyone had unfortunately grown accustomed to ever since the end of the Cold War. This type of conflict is waged indirectly and via proxy, and in some cases, many people don't even realize they're in the middle of a warzone until it's too late. Taking advantage of new information platforms like social media (Facebook, Twitter, etc.), the organizers are capable of luring thousands of unaware civilians into their "protest marches" for use as human shields against the authorities, all with the eventual intent of having professional provocateurs instigate violence so that as many causalities are caused as possible.
The purpose behind this morbid manipulation of one's countrymen is to engineer the conditions for a state crackdown against the "protest" movement, which will then have the 'justifiable grounds' to call for regime change and escalate their demands against the government. Filmed by cell phone cameras and immediately uploaded to YouTube, select scenes can be purposely presented out of context or outright edited in order to garner as much pro-"revolutionary" sympathy across the world as possible. Once the event has made global headlines (usually in pre-planned cahoots between the organizers, their external patrons, and their affiliated friendly media entities like CNN), it can prompt foreign leaders to issue statements of condemnation or perhaps even sanctions against the affected country's authorities. The point is to tactically initiate the conflict escalation ladder that foreign intelligence services had already prepared for in order to enact maximum pressure against the target state.
If this strategy doesn't achieve its expected ends, then the US' latest improvisation in warfare is to transition the 'soft' coup attempt into a 'hard' one, where the TV-presentable "protesters" morph into rugged guerrillas obsessed with regime change. It's not to say that every Color Revolution will end in an Unconventional War or that every Unconventional War will begin as a Color Revolution from this point forward, but that for all their geographic and demographic differences, it's this common thread of approach that most closely links the US' Wars on Syria and Ukraine.
It turned out that the Syrian people have stoutly resisted the Hybrid War being waged against them for nearly five years already, whereas the Ukrainians capitulated after about three months when the urban "EuroMaidan" terrorists became too much for the state to handle. Keep in mind, however, that up until the day of the coup, guerrillas had seized a few provinces in Western Ukraine and had already raided police and military weapon reserves, arming themselves for what looked like an imminent march on Kiev. This news isn't secret - it was proudly reported by Newsweek Magazine just before the coup happened, but afterwards it was suppressed and not a single Western media commentator ever touched upon it again. Considering this, one can see that the Syrian scenario was clearly being planned for Ukraine, and had the coup not succeeded, then the War on Ukraine might have looked a lot more like the War on Syria.
The "hard" part - the battlefield introduction of this dangerous variation of warfare - has already been passed, and now it'll continue to be tested in different environments and circumstances until it's perfected to the point of becoming the unquestionable standard for the US. It's not often that a new strategic threshold is passed in the global military realm. The introduction of tactical nuclear weapons, precision-guided munitions, and robotics have all been paradigm changers over the past decades that have changed the calculations that go into conducting and defending against various aggressions, and Hybrid War (the combination of a Color Revolution and Unconventional War for regime change ends) ranks right beside them in revolutionizing how wars are fought.
GM: What is the place of war in our civilization? Is war a permanent condition like Sun Tzu Wu and Michel Foucault thought, where politics is seen as a continuation of war by other means?
There will always be elements of conflict in society, and even between family members, but the question is in controlling the extent that it's taken to. The extreme escalation of a dispute leads to violence, whether it's a punch in the face amidst a personal feud, or a military strike or invasion in an international one. But, in these instances, the participants are clear and there's no ambiguity about who's involved, whether or not a state of conflict exists between the parties, and correspondingly, how to proportionately respond to it. What's so destabilizing about Hybrid War is that all of the previous is so confused and murky under its dizzying conditions.
The attackers, their backers, the right kind of response (and against whom?), all of these things are completely outside the experience of the targeted government when put in the context of Hybrid War, and therefore they get thrown completely off guard and force into a state of strategic paralysis. Their feedback loop is completely disrupted and they thus become exceptionally vulnerable to collapse, hence why a Color Revolution typically succeeds in each case that the US invests enough time and money. Other less serious attempts are made to 'test the waters' of state defenses and either refine the overall theory itself or craft the best forthcoming method of applying it against the designated target sometime in the future.
What makes Hybrid Wars so unique in the spectrum of human warfare is that it pays particular emphasis in using human shields during the Color Revolution phase and terrorism during the Unconventional Warfare one (oftentimes with both tactics intermixed during their application). Although there's a sizeable foreign component that goes into these conflicts, their general rule is that they're sparked off by domestic elements operating under the orders of their external patron. Never before in human civilization have traitors, backstabbers, and internal subversives that 'open the gates' for the enemy played such a prominent role in the warfighting strategy of an aggressive power, and the reason for this is because such behavior was universally reviled and looked down upon even by those that have historically engaged in it from time to time, to say nothing of the disgust that everyone (even the contracting power) personally feels towards the traitorous individuals that assisted the operation, whether or not it succeeded.
What this means is that the fundamentals of Hybrid War are against standard human nature and that they're an extreme manifestation of conflict. Being so far removed from the standard practices of how human beings have historically and regularly dealt with one another, Hybrid War is able to successfully surprise all those that it has thus far been practiced against, although with the passing of time and the "normalization" of such methods, it'll begin to lose a bit of its luster and become slightly more predictable in a sense. Still, the essence of using one's own people against them as militant proxies on behalf of another power is unsettling and will always remain so, because somewhere in the mix of things the targeted authority will be faced with the uncomfortable decision of having to strike back at its own citizens out of self-defense, which is as unnatural for a country to do against "unarmed protesters" as it is for a sibling to strike their own "unprovoked".
In both cases, however, things are not as they seem, it's just the weight of 'human conscience' that holds back the defending actor. Nobody wants to feel like "Cain" who mercilessly killed their brother - everyone needs to feel as though there's some kind of justification for their response. Visually, it might not look like the "protesters" are a threat, and in many cases of legitimate protest, there's nothing for anyone to fear, neither the state nor the protesters. But when a "protest" becomes cover for a foreign intelligence-organized regime change attempt, and there's hundreds or maybe even thousands of unwitting and unaware human shields tricked into attending, then the situation is beyond critical and the risks of violence are extraordinarily high.
In this case, the state will be very reluctant to defend itself and the rest of the non-protesting citizens that it represents (always the vast majority of the population) because it doesn't want to inflict collateral damage against the human shields, but if provoked to do so because of petrol bombs or other ordinances being used against it by professional provocateurs (urban terrorists/guerrillas, but identified in the US as "protest organizers"), there might not be any choice. It's just that by the time it takes decisive action, it might be too late to stem the critical anti-government mass that has formed, or the action itself might unwittingly lead to the creation of the very same scenario that the state is trying to avoid.
These are the ethical, moral, and importantly, strategic dilemmas that Hybrid War, especially the initial Color Revolution phase, are expected to pose to the targeted state, and because it goes completely against the experience of human nature, it's more likely to lead to the decision-making paralysis that could dramatically increase the coup's chance of success
Read the rest of this excellent interview
here.
Reader Comments
. . . that WW II was as an STS 'rehearsal' and given what we've seen since they appear to have once again been smack on the money . . .