The Gerasimov Doctrine
The Gerasimov Doctrine
In February 2013, General Valery GerasimovRussias chief of the General Staff, comparable to the U.S. chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staffpublished a 2,000-word article, The Value of Science Is in the Foresight, in the weekly Russian trade paper Military-Industrial Kurier. Gerasimov took tactics developed by the Soviets, blended them with strategic military thinking about total war, and laid out a new theory of modern warfare
one that looks more like hacking an enemys society than attacking it head-on. He wrote: The very rules of war have changed. The role of nonmilitary 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 article is considered by many to be the most useful articulation of Russias modern strategy, a vision of total warfare that places politics and war within the same spectrum of activitiesphilosophically, but also logistically. The approach is guerrilla, and waged on all fronts with a range of actors and toolsfor example, hackers, media, businessmen, leaks and, yes, fake news, as well as conventional and asymmetric military means. Thanks to the internet and social media, the kinds of operations Soviet psy-ops teams once could only fantasize aboutupending the domestic affairs of nations with information aloneare now plausible. The Gerasimov Doctrine builds a framework for these new tools, and declares that non-military tactics are not auxiliary to the use of force but the preferred way to win. That they are, in fact, the actual war. Chaos is the strategy the Kremlin pursues: Gerasimov specifies that the objective is to achieve an environment of permanent unrest and conflict within an enemy state.
Sounds sort of familiar, no?