One thing at least we know about Vladimir Putin’s invasion of Ukraine: it isn’t going according to plan. Ah, yes, you reply, but which plan? Was it plan A, which simply said that you assemble enough conscripts and heavy artillery, roll into Ukraine, shell a few apartment blocks, amble across to Kyiv and have a victory parade? What we call the George W Bush model (except that he had his Iraq victory parade on the flight deck of an American aircraft carrier).
If this was plan A, then we know what plan B is. It’s to do to Ukraine what was done to the statelet of Chechnya in 1999, namely bomb it to rubble regardless of civilian casualties. Apart from its intrinsic inhumanity, trying to implement this plan in Ukraine faces some practical difficulties: Ukraine is vast whereas Chechnya is small, and Ukraine has a serious army, a feisty capability for resistance and a plentiful supply of serious weaponry from its friends in the west. So if Putin wants a primer before embarking on the next stage of his imperial adventure, he should perhaps download Charlie Wilson’s War, an instructive film about what happened to the USSR in Afghanistan all those years ago.
For those who follow these things professionally, the biggest puzzle is why Putin embarked on a campaign that looks like the second world war in Technicolor, when his military actually had an ultra-sophisticated plan for warfare in a digital age. It’s called the Gerasimov doctrine and it was the creation in 2013 of Valery Gerasimov, a smart lad who is chief of the general staff and first deputy defence minister of the Russian Federation.
At the heart of this doctrine is the concept of “nonlinear warfare”, the goal of which is to “achieve the desired strategic and geopolitical results, using a wide toolbox of non-military methods and means: explicit and covert diplomacy, economic pressure, winning the sympathy of the local population, etc”. Molly McKew, an expert on information warfare, describes it as “a new theory of modern warfare – one that looks more like hacking an enemy’s society than attacking it head on”.
At one point, McKew quotes a passage from Gerasimov’s original paper. “The very ‘rules of war’ have changed,” he wrote. “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… All this is supplemented by military means of a concealed character.” The doctrine called for a 4:1 ratio of non-military to military actions.
Watching what’s going on in Ukraine, one wonders if Putin ever read the Gerasimov paper. At any rate, the ratio of information to kinetic warfare currently being practised there looks more like 1:20. What is clear, though, is that Volodymyr Zelenskiy and his colleagues did read Gerasimov and prepared accordingly. As a result, they were relatively well prepared for the cyber onslaught that preceded the invasion.
Security experts, some of whom may have been seconded from friendly states, went through critical systems looking for malware such as WhisperGate and HermeticWiper and removing them. It’s not known how effective these measures were overall, but one critical result was that the systems controlling Ukrainian railway operations were decontaminated, which meant that trains enabling millions of Ukrainians to escape continued to run.
In recent decades, belief in the west about Russian mastery of electronic warfare has reached near-mythical levels. This inferiority complex may actually have its roots in the fact that democracies rely (foolishly) on the capacity of private companies to pay serious attention to cybersecurity – and their governments know that. To a serious hacker, an advanced western economy presents a large and largely defenceless “attack surface”, as the jargon puts it.
But at the same time, one useful byproduct of the invasion might be deflation of the myth of Russian invincibility. It became clear very early on that the invaders’ command and control systems weren’t working. As one specialist website put it: “Only three weeks after hostilities began, the internet was already filled with photos of cheap Chinese civilian walkie-talkies that the Russian military was forced to use instead of professional equipment, intercepts of conversations of Russian officers who had to call each other on regular phones and testimonies of prisoners who tell how they could not call for reinforcements or find the right way due to lack of communication with the outside world.”
In the absence of operational, secure army communications, many Russians succumbed to the temptation to use ordinary phones. They would simply take out Ukrainian sim cards and call Russia, allowing the Ukrainian military not only to easily intercept the conversations, but also to determine the location of the caller. On 16 March, US military sources were quoted saying that many Russian generals talk on unsecured phones and radios and that in at least one case Ukrainians had geolocated a call and killed him in an attack at his location. Ironically, his name was Vitaly Gerasimov. We do not know if he was related to the author of the military doctrine that his president seems to have ignored.
What I’ve been reading
Notes from underground
Putin in His Labyrinth: Alexander Gabuev on the View from Moscow is a transcript of a marvellous interview with a former diplomatic correspondent and deputy foreign editor at the Russian newspaper Kommersant.
No platform
Noah Smith’s insightful essay It’s not Cancel Culture, it’s Cancel Technology examines what social media does to us.
Smoking gun
In a World on Fire, Stop Burning Things is a fine New Yorker essay by Bill McKibben.
