Good to see that Congress remains concerned with unconventional warfare.  I asked this question two years ago:  Congress Has Embraced Unconventional Warfare: Will the US Military and The Rest of the US Government?http://smallwarsjournal.com/jrnl/art/congress-has-embraced-unconventional-warfare-will-the-us-military-and-the-rest-of-the-us-go

I am still waiting for an answer.

You can read Johns Hopkins APL's study on Russia's Little Green Men referenced in the article at this link:  http://www.jhuapl.edu/ourwork/nsa/papers/ARIS_LittleGreenMen.pdf

Countering 'little green men': Pentagon special ops studies Russia ‘gray zone’ conflict

• By Jen Judson, www.defensenews.com
• View Original
• May 15th, 2017

The Pentagon is studying gray zone conflict – otherwise known as hybrid warfare – beginning with a focus on Russia and later moving on to study Iran and China, the acting assistant defense secretary for special operations and low-intensity conflict, told members of Congress.

On the heels of a Johns Hopkins University study on the nature of Russian unconventional warfare, U.S. Special Operations – through the Combating Terrorism Technical Support Office within ASD SO/LIC – is looking at “developing predictive analytic technologies that will help us identify when countries are utilizing unconventional warfare techniques at levels essentially below our normal observation thresholds,” Theresa Whelan said during a May 2 House Armed Services Emerging Threats and Capabilities Subcommittee hearing.

The study will help identify early evidence of unconventional warfare, she added, noting that once her office completes the research on Russian unconventional warfare, it will move on to developing a strategy for Iran and China.

Russian aggression has been characterized by the insertion of “little green men,” special forces that try to discreetly rile up ethnic Russians against the West in countries along its border. Russia’s surprise annexation of Crimea in 2014 has sparked fear in surrounding countries that something similar could take place within their own borders.

And Russia’s behavior in Ukraine and along the Baltic States continue to cause heartburn and worry among the U.S. and its European and NATO allies.

Recently, the top U.S. military commander in Europe said the U.S. has not done enough to reinforce its own and NATO’s nascent efforts to fight Russia’s prolific propaganda against European allies – considered to be classic “gray zone” activity.

By definition, special operations forces in the region would likely be among the first to notice such activity.

The fiscal year 2016 National Defense Authorization Act required the defense secretary and the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff along with other U.S. government departments and agencies to develop a strategy to counter unconventional warfare threats posed by adversarial state and non-state actors. Unconventional warfare “means 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, or guerrilla force in a denied area,” according to the legislation.

The strategy was due to Congress no later than 180 days following enactment.

Rep. Elise Stefanik, R-New York, asked during the hearing, for an update, noting delivery of the unconventional warfare strategy to Congress was roughly two years late.

The Pentagon has “had to shift resources to focus on this and develop capabilities and knowledge bases that had, to a certain extent, atrophied over the years,” Whelan said. “But also, the nature of UW has fundamentally changed because of 21st century technologies and techniques. We really in many ways have been starting from scratch.”

In order to complete the strategy, Whelan added, the Pentagon is working with interagency partners – acknowledgement that UW poses multiple threats to the U.S. government “because of the ways that our adversaries are using it.”

Studies already conducted by the Pentagon, as well as Georgetown University on UW has shown adversaries, “particularly the more sophisticated ones,” are focusing on “seams between our organizational entities and trying to exploit those seams and decision-making cycles in order to gain advantage on us in the space that essentially is below conventional war,” Whelan said.

She added the Pentagon does expect to have an interim “answer with our thoughts” delivered to Congress before the end of June.

The study focused on Russian UW, will feed into the greater strategy. Looking through a Russian lens also makes sense from a special operations perspective because countering the Russian threat is its number two priority. There are roughly 1,400 special operations forces deployed to protect against Russian aggression.

Gen. Raymond Thomas, U.S. Special Operations Command commander, echoed Whelan during the same hearing, stating, “We’re working closely with the department for the overall strategy, but I think as importantly and more practically, we’re focused on the resources and authorities that would underpin that strategy. So we actually are having some pretty substantive discussions specifically as it applies towards countering Russian aggression.”

I really think this article by Charles Bartles from the Foreign Military Studies Office in the January Military review is very much worth reviewing every time we talk about Russian Hybrid Warfare and Little Green Men.  And Frank Hoffman's recent Heritage article is another one that should be reviewed especially because I think he has it right with the concept of the spectrum of conflict of Gray Zone/Ambiguous, Irregular Warfare/Terrorism. Hybrid, Limited Conventional, and Theater Conventional war with unconventional warfare cutting across the entire spectrum. 

I would also say that I wish we were as good as the Russians think we are.  They think we are masterful at orchestrating all our instruments of power to achieve our objectives short of war (for the most part) and that we are able to orchestrate events such as the Color Revolutions and the Arab Spring and change regimes (Iraq and Afghanistan) and divide up nations (Yugoslavia) to suit our interests.  

http://fmso.leavenworth.army.mil/documents/Regional%20security%20europe/MilitaryReview_20160228_art009.pdf

Excerpt from CHarles Bartles:

Gerasimov’s position as chief of the General Staff makes him Russia’s senior operation-strategic planner and architect for future Russian force structure and capability development. In order to execute these duties, the individual in that position must have the foresight to understand the current and future operating environments along with the circumstances that have created those environments and will alter them. Gerasimov’s article is not proposing a new Russian way of warfare or a hybrid war, as has been stated in the West. Moreover, in Gerasimov’s view of the operational environment, the United States is the primary threat to Russia.

​

http://index.heritage.org/military/2016/essays/contemporary-spectrum-of-conflict/

Excerpt from Frank Hoffman:

The U.S. national security community should avoid narrow categorizations. The black-and-white distinction between war and peace, or traditional war and irregular war, makes for nice, simple boxes, but the real world is not so easily categorized. In fact, some adversaries seek to exploit U.S. paradigms and the gaping institutional seams that they create.

Rather, we need to embrace the fact that future opponents have their own ideas about how to fight, and they tend to mix and match those ideas with deliberate combinations of modes of conflict. Hard-wired and quaint notions of declared wars between states with symmetrically equipped armies and navies facing each other on defined battlegrounds are no longer helpful. The U.S. must expand its definitions and concepts beyond its history, cultural biases, and organizational preferences. Ultimately, its security is predicated upon its national security community’s being aware of the enduring continuities of war and possessing an adaptive ability to counter the many forms that warfare can take.

The United States faces adversaries capable of using strategies and techniques across the entire conflict spectrum. It must not give ground in gray zone conflicts if its interests are challenged. Europe and the Middle East today are a Petri dish of hybrid conflict,60 and the Defense Department’s current leadership team understands this evolving hybrid challenge.61The U.S. needs to prepare for that, and reinvigorating its unconventional conflict capability will help.62 We should not lose sight of the reality that the “gold standard” for high-end conventional war is based on excellence in joint combined arms warfare.

Large-scale conflict between states is not a relic of history. The potential for interstate war still exists and is arguably increasing. It is the most demanding form of war with the most costly of consequences, and the U.S. is less prepared for it than it should be—a concern raised in the bipartisan Independent QDR Report, which found that the U.S. is seriously shortchanging its national security interests.63 Appreciating the broad range of challenges and threats we face is the first step toward recognizing a growing danger.

​

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defenceindepth.co

LITTLE GREEN MEN AND RED ARMIES: WHY RUSSIAN ‘HYBRID WAR’ IS NOT NEW

• by Defenceresearch 
•  March 14, 2016 
•  7 min read 
•  original

DR GERAINT HUGHES

Ever since the annexation of Crimea in February-March 2014, and the conflict in Eastern Ukraine, military analysts have debated the nature of ‘hybrid war’ – or ‘non-linear’/’ambiguous warfare’ – and whether it represents the military strategy of choice for Vladimir Putin’s Russia. ThePolish, Estonian, Latvian and Lithuanian militaries in particular are using Ukrainian-style scenarios involving internal subversion and incursions by ‘little green men’ for defensive exercises, and pundits fear that ‘hybrid warfare’ may be exploited by Russia to weaken the alliance cohesion of NATO, threatening its outliers such as the Baltic States, and playing on the apparent unwillingness of European publics to honour Article Five in the event of Russian aggression against an Eastern member of the Alliance.

The concept of ‘hybrid warfare’ originally emerged nine years ago withFrank Hoffman’s paper on this topic, and was heavily influenced by Israel’s inconclusive war with Hezbollah in Lebanon in the summer of 2006. But it is now treated as being mainly about Russia, its undeclared war in Ukraine, and its apparent intentions towards other former Soviet states. Its characteristics can be described as follows:

• Information operations – or ‘propaganda’, to use the old-fashioned term. Russia and its state media concoct a narrative that disguises Moscow’s involvement in the subversion of a neighbouring state, blaming a crisis on internal factors so as to deflect any international condemnation. The takeover of Crimea by Russian naval infantry and spetsnaz (‘special designation’ troops) in unmarked uniforms was depicted by Russia as a spontaneous revolt by local citizen militias, while the revolution that overthrew Viktor Yanukovych in February 2014 in Kiev was portrayed as a ‘fascist’ putsch.

• Political intrigue – Russian operations in Ukraine have been accompanied by a constant diplomatic and political effort to encourage discord between NATO and EU member states, to play on national differences over contentious policies (notably the economic sanctions imposed on Russia from the spring of 2014 onwards), and also to buy or suborn support by populist political parties on the far-left and far-right who will act as apologists for Russia’s actions, muddying the waters and confusing the public debate. Moscow will also try to exploit public concern in Western Europe about the risks of a potential confrontation with Russia.

• The use of special forces – the spetsnaz of the GRU (Russian military intelligence) and the elite units of the Russian armed forces are used either in plain clothes to organise separatist militias (as per the ‘Donetsk’ and ‘Luhansk People’s Republics) or in unmarked uniforms to seize government buildings, military bases and other key locations from indigenous security forces, and to prop up a ‘pro-Russian’ administration that will automatically appeal for help from Moscow. The use of ‘little green men’ rather than an overt invasion by regular troops will confuse the international community, leading to prolonged debates about whether an act of state-on-state aggression has actually occurred, paralysing any Western military response until the Russians and their proxies have consolidated their position on the ground.

• Sabre-rattling – at the background of these operations Russia will mobilise its military forces, massing them on the borders for ‘exercises’ just as it did with Ukraine in the summer of 2014. Threats of escalation will be used to frighten the adversary and its allies, to undermine any will to stand up to Russian incursions, and also in an effort to intimidate weaker alliance partners. Flights by Russian aircraft into foreign air-space have also been used as a tactic to bully neighbours as well as NATO states.

All of the above has happened over Ukraine, and Western governments, militaries and defence analysts would do well to examine them and define the appropriate package of responses that NATO and the EU should follow. But none of us should be fooled into thinking that any of these tactics are new. They all have parallels in the Cold War.

Firstly, information operations. Russia Today and other organs of Putin’s state media are a lot slicker and more professionally produced than the turgid output of Radio Moscow and TASS back in the Cold War. The ‘troll farms’ of geeks who will post pro-Russian propaganda on Facebook, blogs and other social media are well–resourced, and the Russian state is seeking a wide array of political partners in Europe to push its narrative – whether with extreme-right parties such as the Front Nationale in France or Jobbikin Hungary, or far-left movements such as Syriza in Greece.

Yet throughout the Cold War the USSR was using sympathetic Communist parties as well as ‘fellow travellers’ to push its propaganda. The KGB and Warsaw Pact intelligence agencies like the East German HVA sought ‘agents of influence’ in politics, the media, academia and in peace movements to persuade Western publics that East-West tensions were all the fault of their governments, rather than the ‘peace-loving’ USSR. More controversially, it is clear that some terrorist groups such as the German Red Army Faction and the Italian Red Brigades got their training from behind the Iron Curtain. Putin was not the first Russian leader to attempt to undermine Western morale by any means available, or to try to manipulate public opinion against their own governments.

Secondly, with political manoeuvring and skulduggery. Again, throughout the Cold War the USSR did its utmost to play on intra-Western differences. In its diplomatic contacts with Norway and Denmark, it tried to encourage both NATO members to follow Sweden and Finland and adopt neutrality, making pointed remarks about how geographically isolated both countries were on the Atlantic Alliance’s Northern flank. Moscow sought to exploit Greco-Turkish animosities, particularly over Cyprus, and the KGB engaged in ‘disinformation’ operations to undermine allied unity, whether by fabricating rumours that the CIA had a hand in assassination attempts against French President Charles de Gaulle in the early 1960s, by publishing a fake US Army manual that purportedly advocated setting up ‘false-flag’ terrorist groups to discredit the European left, or by devising smear stories that blamed the outbreak of HIV/AIDS on American biological warfare experiments.

Thirdly, special forces and shaping operations. When the British government expelled 105 Soviet ‘diplomats’ from the USSR’s London Embassy and Trade Mission in October 1971, the direct pretext was a defector’s revelations about the KGB’s war-time plans for sabotage attacks across the UK. These plans were embryonic, but they indicated an intent by the Soviets to cause maximum disruption behind enemy lines in the event of an East-West crisis leading to World War Three. The 1980s saw what could be called the ‘spetsnaz scare’, including sensational press reports about the extent of Soviet and Warsaw Pact SF penetration in the West – my own favourite story involves the phantom female spetsnaz infiltrating the women’s peace camp at Greenham Common.

Post-1945, spetsnaz did see action in Czechoslovakia in August 1968 – as the vanguard of Soviet and Warsaw Pact forces suppressing the Prague Spring – and in Afghanistan in December 1979, where the KGB’s Alfa Group assassinated President Hafizollah Amin. Both these operations can be compared to Ukraine in 2014 because firstly Soviet/Russian forces either had a presence on the ground before intervention took place, or were geographically proximate (Russia already had the Black Sea Fleet in place in Crimea, complete with a brigade of Naval Infantry troops that conducted the takeover of the Peninsula in late February-early March 2014). Secondly, like Czechoslovakia in 1968 and Afghanistan in 1979 Ukraine was ostensibly a Russian ally, and saw no threat from its neighbour; its armed forces were facing West, not East. Thirdly, in the same way that the USSR had sympathisers within the Czechoslovak military and security police (StB) in 1968, and the Afghan armed forces and KhAD in 1979, Russia’s securocrats had developed considerable influence over the Ukrainian security forces during Yanukovych’s Presidency – particularly with the SBU (intelligence service) and the Berkut (paramilitary police) both of which provided proxies both during the February 2014 revolution and its aftermath.

Finally, with the conventional threat. One interesting difference here is that currently NATO’s military capabilities are superior to those of Russia’s – at least as far as raw figures of troop numbers and materiel is concerned – than was the case during the Cold War; although the Russian armed forces are of course theoretically able to achieve conditions of local superiority by (say) massing units near the Baltic States and also in the Kaliningrad Enclave. The USSR was also prone to ham-fisted displays of naval and air power to intimidate neighbours – recent exercises near Swedish air-space and in territorial waters bring back memories of the ‘Whiskey on the Rocks’ affair of October 1981, when a Soviet diesel submarine was beached near the naval base at Karlskrona.

Critics of NATO expansion claim that the Alliance’s expansion Eastwards has been untenable, and that it cannot defend the Baltic States – or perhaps even Poland or Romania – from Russian attack. Much the same concerns were expressed forty to fifty years ago about the security of Norway, or indeed the vulnerability of West Berlin to the Soviets and East German allies. The Berlin Crisis of 1958-1961 led NATO to prepare its contingency plans (BERCON) for the seizure of the French, British and American sectors Norway’s vulnerability was the reason why the Royal Marines got its Arctic warfare role in the late 1960s-early 1970s, with its commandos being earmarked for a deployment to the Northern flank in the event of a Soviet offensive.

Image: Border guards of the former German Democratic Republic on patrol, January 1979, via Wikimedia Commons.

Some analysts have suggested the possibility that Russia may test NATO’s will for collective defence not with an outright seizure of one of its newer members, but with a limited territorial land-grab that compromises territorial integrity without (at least initially) threatening state survival; the seizure of the Estonian city of Narva, with its ethnic Russian majority, is onepotential scenario. Again, this is not a new conceptual challenge. From the 1960s NATO planners wracked their brains about how to deal with a contingency dubbed the ‘Hamburg Grab’, in which Warsaw Pact forces conducted a limited offensive to take over an enclave of West German territory, only to subsequently adopt a defensive posture and to dare the USA and its allies to respond. The fear at that time was that NATO members would not wish to escalate to nuclear war in a scenario short of an all-out Soviet bloc invasion, and that Article Five would become a dead letter. Change the names, and you can see similar concerns in Brussels and in allied capitals today.

This is not to say that the answers to all NATO’s current problems with Russia – and that the Alliance’s response to future Ukraines – can be found with a quick search through the archives in Brussels and SHAPE. But it is important to remember that the tactics described in ‘hybrid war’ are not novel, and that previous iterations of ones which the Atlantic Alliance had faced before. After all, why should we be surprised that a government headed by a former KGB officer might very well be using combinations of diplomacy, subversion and military pressure that the old USSR exploited in repeated East-West crises?

Image: An armoured column from the Polish People’s Army during the Martial Law era, winter 1981-1982, via Wikimedia Commons.

My latest article on Small Wars Journal.

Congress Has Embraced Unconventional Warfare: Will the US Military and The Rest of the US Government?

by David S. Maxwell

Journal Article | December 29, 2015 - 1:56pm

http://smallwarsjournal.com/jrnl/art/congress-has-embraced-unconventional-warfare-will-the-us-military-and-the-rest-of-the-us-go

Congress Has Embraced Unconventional Warfare: Will the US Military and The Rest of the US Government?

David S. Maxwell

With the passage of the National Defense Authorization Act of 2016 the United States Congress has embraced what Russia, Iran, China, Al Qaeda and even ISIS have long known and that is unconventional warfare (UW) is a form of warfare that is optimized for achieving national objectives in the space between peace and war.  Congress, in Section 1097, has directed the Secretary of Defense to develop a strategy to counter unconventional warfare being conducted by adversaries of the US.  Congress recognizes the US has a strategy gap between peace and war and the directive to the SECDEF is the forcing function necessary to develop a strategy and to bring new and creative thinking to the national security challenges we face.

What is Unconventional Warfare?

In Section 1097 and in joint US military doctrine it is defined 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, or guerrilla force in a denied area.”

However, our adversaries employ their own unique forms of unconventional warfare by effectively integrating conventional and special operations forces, all elements of their national power, and in particular psychological warfare, while exploiting conditions, to include resistance, in countries and regions around the world to counter the west and often the US directly in order to achieve their political and security objectives.  They take a more holistic approach to unconventional warfare and are willing to employ it as a matter of course.  In     contrast the US has long viewed unconventional warfare as something only Special Forces conduct and then only to be used in very rare situations when there are no other alternatives.  In short, in the past the US has shown it does not have the stomach for unconventional warfare.  Fortunately, Congress has recognized this shortfall in US security strategy.

Directive from Congress

DOD has 180 days to provide to Congress a strategy to counter unconventional warfare.  The clock is ticking.  It will be interesting to read the response to Section 1097.  One possible bureaucratic course of action would consist of reviewing what the Department is already doing and showing the metrics of terrorists removed from the battlefield and listing all the capabilities the Department has that are and can be used to counter-unconventional warfare.  The Department will even tout the new joint unconventional warfare doctrine from the United States Special Operations Command (USSOCOM) the Joint Chiefs of Staff approved in September 2015.  The purpose of this course of action would be to meet the Congressional requirement with minimal disruption to the department and thus get Congress off its back.  Another course of action would be to view this as an opportunity for Congressional support of a new strategy that would be based on a thorough understanding of our adversaries’ strategies and how they are employing unconventional warfare.  The question is how with the department respond?

My concern is that the department and the rest of the US government will continue to have no desire to have anything to do with unconventional warfare.  It is complicated, messy, time-consuming, and hard to measure effectiveness and success especially when compared to counterterrorism and surgical strike operations where immediate results are demonstrated in the number of terrorists removed from the battlefield.

Why Focus on Counter-Unconventional Warfare Strategy?

First, our enemies are conducting their unique forms of unconventional warfare; Russia, Iran, China, Al Qaeda, ISIS (I think AQ and ISIS are much broader than "simply" terrorist organizations.)  We need to recognize the strategies they are using and attack those strategies to effectively operate in the "Gray Zone” between peace and war.

Second, focusing on our enemies conducting their unique forms of UW should lead to the recognition that we have to operate in the Special Warfare realm and not just the Surgical Strike realm.

Third, focusing on terrorism has caused us to think too tactically while a focus on counter UW can drive us to think more strategically and holistically about the problems we face by understanding the enemy’s strategy which poses complex political and military problems.

The Future of Warfare in the Gap Between Peace and War: Past is Prologue

As I opined in 2012 before a subcommittee of the House Armed Services Committee looking at the future of irregular warfare, we tend to prefer conventional conflict that can be defined as  "an armed struggle or clash between organized political parties within a nation or between nations in order to achieve political or military objectives.”  However, what we more routinely face is conflict that is “non-conventional” in nature.  It is something ambiguous and difficult to understand.  It extends the continuum of conflict.  Conflict in the conventional sense begins when the armed struggle begins; however, non-conventional conflict encompasses a broad range of types of conflict, starting with thethreat or possibility of conflict and extending past conflict termination, because the conditions that gave rise to hostilities in the first place may still remain, though not visible or easily recognized.  It also includes armed clashes by unorganized groups that are not seeking to achieve any political or military objectives but may be exploited by external actors.  Non-conventional conflict encompasses the lawlessness of a society in which the governmental system has collapsed, but no organized group has risen to take its place.  Violence and terrorist-like activity can occur out of frustration with no identifiable purpose.  This type of conflict is non-conventional, because it is difficult to determine the objectives and methods of the actors, perhaps difficult to even determine the actors, and thus it is difficult to apply conventional elements of power.  This is the sensitive and complex environment that our adversaries seek to exploit through their unique applications of unconventional warfare.

Since 9-11 we have embarked on the search for new names of forms of conflict and doctrinal terms to address those conflicts and the ever evolving nature of conflict.  We rediscovered Counterinsurgency; we have tried Asymmetric, Hybrid, and Fourth Generation Warfare and now the Gray Zone.  We have invented new doctrinal concepts such as Security Force Assistance; Train, Advise, and Assist; Building Partner Capacity, Train and Equip Programs, Human Domain, and ultimately decided on irregular warfare as the way to describe conflict in the post 9-11 world.  If we examine the history of conflict at theCorrelates of War Project we would realize the irony that what we are calling irregular in fact has been more regular than what we describe as conventional war.  Less that 20% of all conflicts since 1815 have been state-on-state conventional conflicts.  Or simply peruse Sir Lawrence Freedman’s Strategy: A History and Max Boot’s Invisible Armies to see that irregular warfare is the most prevalent form of warfare and is in fact pretty regular.

But at the heart of irregular warfare lies revolution, resistance, and insurgency.  These phenomena are taking place around the world but they are not new.  If you want to be a practitioner and strategist and operate in and develop strategy for the Gray Zone in the space between peace and war and conductpolitical warfare, unconventional warfare, and counter-unconventional warfare, as well as operate effectively in the human domain then you must read, study, and internalize the fundamentals of revolution, resistance, and insurgency as embodied in the Assessing Revolutionary and Insurgent Strategies (ARIS) project first produced by the Special Operations Research Office (SORO ) in the 1950's and 1960's. It now continues under the direction of the U S Army Special Operations Command and Johns Hopkins Applied Physics Laboratory's National Security Division.  Most important it is unconventional warfare that can support or exploit revolution, resistance, and insurgency.

Russian, Iranian, Chinese, and US Approaches to Unconventional Warfare

Unconventional warfare has not been and is not now well accepted within the US military and the US government.  The most recent attempt to raise unconventional warfare as a strategic option for our national security strategy illustrates the issue.  Some 28 years after the establishment of the USSOCOM in 1987, the command produced for the first time a joint unconventional warfare doctrinal manual.  USSOCOM had to lobby for over a year to get joint staff approval just to write the manual and when it was completed and approved in September 2015 the Joint Staff decided to make the manual For Official Use Only (FOUO).  Although this is not a classification it in effect makes the manual unavailable to the public as well as to academia.   I can only speculate the on the rationale for this but some action officers have said that it is a result of the controversy surround the unconventional warfare exercise Jade Helm that took place in 2015.  The real impact of this decision is summed up in the words of one my mentors who said that the surest way to make a doctrinal manual irrelevant and useless is to make it FOUO.

While the Joint Staff allowed unconventional warfare doctrine to be marginalized our adversaries have been perfecting and employing theirs.  The following charts summarize the unique unconventional warfare approaches of the Russians, Iranians, and the Chinese.  The last chart summarizes the US approach to supporting a resistance or insurgency.  As you read these charts notice that the Russian, Iranian, and Chinese approaches provide a strategic framework for understanding how they will employ special operations and conventional forces and all the instruments of national power to accomplish their objectives while the US approach is very tactical and focused on “how to do” UW by Special Forces only.

Russian New Generation Warfare

(Continued at the link below)

http://smallwarsjournal.com/jrnl/art/congress-has-embraced-unconventional-warfare-will-the-us-military-and-the-rest-of-the-us-go

Conclusion.  And as always we must know (and understand) our enemies and know what will deter them.  But knowing our enemies has to be more than a pithy phrase from Sun Tzu that we toss about.

In general, it is always better to deter aggression and prevent conflict than to reverse aggression and engage in conflict. But deterrence is difficult because it is a psychological effect, built on a foundation of beliefs and expectations. To make it work, the United States must understand what potential enemies think they can handle and what they fear most. To prevent war and deter aggression in this time of technological proliferation and budgetary constraints, American military leaders and defense policymakers must get in the heads of adversaries and exploit their fears.

Can unconventional warfare have a deterrent effect?  (Yes, of course it could if we have the demonstrated capability and the demonstrated will to conduct such a campaign.  The problem is the lack of demonstrated political will to do so).

At the same time, potential enemies must believe that the U.S. can strike at things they value. There are many ways to do this beyond the traditional use of bombers, drones and missiles. One would be having the ability to surge support for local allies, including national armed forces like the Ukrainian military as well as militias. The last thing that potential enemies—whether states like China, Iran, North Korea and Russia or organizations like the so-called Islamic State—want is to be forced to conduct their own counterinsurgency or counterguerrilla campaigns. The thought of having to do so might give them pause as they plan aggression.

We have to be willing to operate in the gray zone between peace and war where revolution, resistance, and insurgency take place and by doing so we can demonstrate not only our capabilities but our will to operate in this area that we have long ceded to our enemies who have sought asymmetric advantages over us and our friends, partners and allies to neutralize our technological dominance.  In short we need to be able to conduct political warfare. (

http://maxoki161.blogspot.com/2015/03/sof-support-to-political-warfare-white.html)

Political Warfare is a strategy suited to achieve U.S. national objectives through reduced visibility in the international geo-political environment, without committing large military forces. Likewise, Political Warfare can function as a critical, integrating element of U.S. national power against non-state adversaries such as the current Islamic State in Iraq and the Levant (ISIL). Most often, the Department of Defense role in Political Warfare will be one of supporting other U.S. Government agencies that are more likely to lead strategy and planning development. 

Political Warfare emerges from the premise that rather than a binary opposition between “war” and “peace,” the conduct of international relations is characterized by continuously evolving combinations of collaboration, conciliation, confrontation, and conflict. As such, during times of interstate “peace,” the U.S. government must still confront adversaries aggressively and conclusively through all means of national power. When those adversaries practice a form of Hybrid Warfare employing political, military, economic, and criminal tools below the threshold of conventional warfare, the U.S. must overmatch adversary efforts—though without large-scale, extended military operations that may be fiscally unsustainable and diplomatically costly. Hence, the U.S. must embrace a form of sustainable “warfare” rather than “war,” through a strategy that closely integrates targeted political, economic, informational, and military initiatives in close collaboration with international partners. Serving the goals of international stability and interstate peace, this strategy amounts to “Political Warfare.”

As will be described here, Political Warfare encompasses a spectrum of activities associated with diplomatic and economic engagement, Security Sector Assistance (SSA), novel forms of Unconventional Warfare (UW), and Information and Influence Activities (IIA). Their related activities, programs, and campaigns are woven together into a whole-of-government framework for comprehensive effect. In this regard, Support to Political Warfare is a novel concept in comparison to the last generation of national security thinking and military operational concepts. Yet, Political Warfare is not without recent precursors in U.S. policy and strategy, with the Cold War being a prime example of approaches foreshadowing the current conception.

To Deter Adversaries, U.S. Military Must First Understand Their Fears

http://www.worldpoliticsreview.com/articles/15553/to-deter-adversaries-u-s-military-must-first-understand-their-fears

Soldiers of the 82nd Airborne Division gather their equipment before boarding a CH-47F Chinook, Nawa Valley, Kandahar Province, Afghanistan, May 25, 2014 (U.S. Army photo by Staff Sgt. Whitney Houston).

By Steven Metz, April 17, 2015, Column

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For American defense professionals, the 1990s now seem like a distant dream. The United States was fresh off a stunning military victory over Iraqi dictator Saddam Hussein’s forces in Kuwait. The Soviet Union, long Washington’s bête noire, had crumbled. The American economy was robust, churning out important technological innovations one after another. In these halcyon times, U.S. military leaders and defense officials predicted that they would master what they called the “revolution in military affairs,” thereby attaining battlefield superiority over every possible enemy. Since the U.S. would be able to impose its will on opponents, there was little need to consider how enemies thought or what they intended to do.

A decade later, however, the slogging, bloody counterinsurgency campaigns in Iraq and Afghanistan showed that technology could not solve every security problem. Ideas and concepts, not to mention will and perseverance, mattered greatly. Then, just as the U.S. extricated itself from the counterinsurgency morass, the American economy tanked, taking the defense budget with it. The dreams of the 1990s had given way to nightmares.

Now military leaders and defense policymakers believe that America’s military superiority is shrinking and might someday evaporate entirely. In speech after speech, interview after interview, defense officials list the things that “keep them up at night.” At times, the cause of concern is China’s growing military power, at others it is what are called “hybrid threats,” or enemies that combine increasingly advanced conventional weapons, political action, irregular warfare, terrorism and criminal behavior to achieve political objectives.

Unfortunately, recognizing these potential threats does not automatically produce solutions. To address evolving threats within the strict budgetary constraints of sequestration, the Pentagon has developed what it calls the “third offset strategy” to pursue new technologies, organizations and operational concepts that can offset potential adversaries’ advances in technological and asymmetric capabilities. This is important but may not be enough: American strategists also must get inside the heads of existing or potential enemies, asking not only what they might do to the U.S., but also what the U.S. can do to keep them up at night, exploiting their fears to constrain them.

(Continued at the link below)

http://www.worldpoliticsreview.com/articles/15553/to-deter-adversaries-u-s-military-must-first-understand-their-fears