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Thread: Russian Info, Cyber and Disinformation (Jan-June 2017).

  1. #461
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    Quote Originally Posted by TheCurmudgeon View Post
    Rough draft - second part of PCoG discussion.

    "Secondary Types. All Political Entities exist within a socio-cultural system. They are a part of that system, but not the only part. Other elements of that system interact with the Political Entity and can either support it or oppose it. The oft cited elements of national power – Diplomatic, Information, Military, and Economic (DIME) -- are just such elements and represent tools that one nation can use to influence another. But, like tracers, they go both ways.

    There are a myriad of supporting, or secondary types. The easiest way to think of these secondary types is through the metaphor of a man standing on a stool. The man is the primary PCoG. If I can influence him directly, I win. If I can’t, then I must look for another way. The secondary types are the legs of the stool. If I can cut deeply enough into one or more of those legs, I might be able to make the man unsteady, thus influencing the man just as if I had done it directly. Although there are probably dozens of secondary types, this paper only addresses a few.

    Economic System/Support. Humans are economic animals. The complex social systems we build depend on economic activity. The people who make up every polity depend on the economic system to provide them with the opportunity to obtain the goods and services they need to survive and thrive. Even in the most independent of systems, the people still look to the political entity to provide the framework for a dependable economic system.

    Security Forces. Security forces provide the basis of power for all political entities. In the case of a State, these are often the military and/or other security and intelligence agencies. In States, and lessor polities, these can also include private contractors or mercenaries, or militias made up of irregular forces.

    Vassals or Key Supporters. These are individuals who provide the political leadership critical financial, military, or political support. In an Ideological System, these will include the actual leadership.

    Ethnicity. Outside of family, ethnicity is probably the strongest physiological bond humans experience. It is often a critical part of how one defines themselves. It most likely defines what language a person speaks, what type of food the person grew-up eating, what region of the world the person lives, and potentially what religion they believe in as well as a plethora of cultural icons, common myths and fables, and historical stories. It provides an instant connection with others of the same ethnicity.

    Religion. Religions provide not just a set of guiding moral principals, but also a sense of purpose. Religious leaders often are well respected in the community and are looked upon to provide guidance in difficult times.

    Political Ideology. There are many political ideologies. Sometimes these are pure political theories, like Democracy or Anarchy. Sometimes they are a combination of political and economic theory, like Communism, Monarchy, and Socialism. On occasion, the political ideology and the Political System align, as in Democracy, but this is usually not the case. In most cases, the political ideology acts as a framework that bolsters and justifies the Political System. As such, while attacks against a political ideology will be useful, they are unlikely to be dispositive.

    Individual Human Rights. Historically speaking, this is a new concept that is primarily a 17th Century Western invention. This is the idea that each person is a coequal with all other people when it comes to certain aspects of human life. These aspects are usually referred to as rights or freedoms, and include freedom of religion, freedom of speech, and freedom to choose one’s own path in life.

    National myths and Icons. Although often overlooked, a people are also bound by their common myths and Icons. In America, the Icon of Uncle Sam looms large in patriotic symbolism, as do stories of the founding fathers. These icons and stories can be used to support a political leader, or to attack them."
    Are you not moving really into an "eco-system" which Kilcullen often used...was in vague for awhile then fell out of favor but inside the IT security world it is making a comeback lately as the easiest explanation for the intersection between criminal and state sponsored cyber and information warfare...?

    Your stool mechanism is interesting as I often use it to describe exactly the current power structures inside Russia....that Putin juggles in moving his political war forward...

    Which was a four legged stool.....1) Russian oligarchs ...2) the Russian state security services...3) Russian military and lastly 4) Russian transnational gangs.....overlaying all of this was the ideological foundation provided by the drive of the Russian Orthodox Church.

    Right now Putin has actually done an excellent job of balancing all of their needs and demands to remain in their individual power spheres...and to maintain their support for him.

    What is interesting is to go back and review what Kilcullen first wrote in 2004 and then sit back and slowly inhale and actually notice how close he was to the current reality of IS and AQ...13 years later which we have largely overlooked...

    http://smallwarsjournal.com/documents/kilcullen.pdf

    Might actually well worth it to go back reread and then adapt to what you are doing....this is actually what now advance IT security types are doing say with botnets automated and those individually controlled....but we are using an interesting AI algorithm developed along the lines of IBMs Watson that then allows us to "see" that ecosystem in a 3D model

    Here is a recent stab at it by a security analyst.....while the chart is a formal structured line and block one..you have to think of a spider web concept where as in a spider web every time there is a touching point there is a potential ecosystem.....interacting with another ecosystems and if one thing happens to the right of the web that are often ripples effecting the left side of the web and it those ripples that have to be watched which we have never done well....

    The problem many had during the Iraq war was actually taking what Kilcullen was envisioning and putting it into something that actually reflected the living world around us in Iraq...AFG or Syria....and I am sad to say many do not have that ability and that is largely why the concept of an "ecosystem died a slow death"...but due to the complexity now seen in cyber and information warfare it makes perfect sense....and in our business we are fully able to "see" the intersecting points....

    Many tend to forget that cyber and information warfare are human driven environments carried out either via machines and or by the human himself..and it is the human that derives the attack methodologies not a machine...and it is the human that discovers the tech failures on the engineering side that allow for such attacks.....thus a human ecosystem is easy to understand and build....and now with the advent of AI software programs far easier to envision than say 2006...

    The chart below takes into account all the known elements of a criminal ecosystem for the internet side.....once you understand all the components then it is easy to config them into an ecosystem based on their "value" inside the system meaning who is important.....middlle important and less important and more critically what is the single point of failure and or points of failure...or where do I have to push myself into the system in order to disrupt the system....stop the system or simply gain time to figure out something else....because the human on the other side is doing the exact same thing as I am and trying to find my single point of failure....

    The problem I have had over the years is that many studies/research articles are to "technical" in their structure and then it turns one off ....keep it simple...describe in a simplistic way that a ten year can understand and show examples tied to ground reality.....gets one further down the acceptance road than a study with tens of footnotes that no one ever really reads and or looks up...

    Example.....if you have ever learned morse code you will learn that each and every MC operator has a "specific key rhythm" that makes him identifiable.... his "fingerprint" that allows monitors to then identify him when he is transmitting MC....hackers are no different each individual hacker and or group has a specific attack thought pattern and will always use it if it was successful and that is what gets them into trouble as we have been very good lately at "seeing" those "signatures"....

    Just as we know the Russian state sponsored Fancy Bear was behind the DNC attack and now the same exact methodology is used in the French Marcon attack....hacker success breeds often complacency....just as we can tell the difference between a human driven attack vs. how a machine is carrying out the attack...

    If you had read the posting on the Russian hacking site of the Russian state sponsored attack in 2014 on DoS where a western intel service actually got DoS/NSA into the actual computers of the hackers and turned on a video camera in the room for the first time it was key stroke for key stroke...actual war in the cyber trenches...never seen again....

    The problem for cyber and information warfare is when to declare it an "actual war" thus triggering say Article 5 of NATO...Actually no one really has the honesty to stand up and define it as then the hackers would test the definition and see if there is a reaction by a nation state...

    12 years ago when Kilcullen first used the "ecosystem" we had no data points that we could fall back on and it was hard to generate it so the model fall out of favor...now we have the data points and it is easy to do...

    Just a thought...
    Attached Images Attached Images
    Last edited by OUTLAW 09; 04-25-2017 at 07:19 AM.

  2. #462
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    This goes to the question of when is cyber and information warfare true "war"..

    When would NATO Article 5 be triggered is it was declared to be "war"...

    That is exactly where we are now....I have seen the results and analysis and when the three top GRU Russian state sponsored hacking teams attack you...you are in fact under "attack and in a true sense it is a "kinetic war" as Russia is trying to force a political decision on France...or "bending France to the will of Russia" which is why "physical wars were fought in the past....

    Russian state sponsored hacking attacks and influence meddling in the US election went unchallenged thus we see Russia repeating the exact same attack style...

    Fancy Bear, Pawn Storm and other Russian hackers reportedly turning to France vote .
    https://www.buzzfeed.com/sheerafrenkel

    The same attack style from the Russian state sponsored hacking teams is now being seen and has been seen a few months ago now in Germany ahead of that major election....

    “I think some of this activity is even happening today, some of these spear phishing emails are going out today,” said Ed Cabrera, chief cybersecurity officer at Trend Micro. In one screenshot Trend Micro provided to BuzzFeed News, the hackers appeared to be targeting the Konrad Adenueu Stiftung, a German think tank which is affiliated with the Christian Democratic Union (CDU) Party of German Chancellor Angela Merkel. The hackers set up multiple internet addresses that mirrored those of the think tank to trick people into entering their passwords and other information
    I will take this idea of triggering Article 5 in another direction......

    Yesterday...the main Russian evening TV announcer basically in Russian stated that the French election could be won for Le Pen IF there was another terrorist attack...which we even saw Trump inject into the race with his tweet as well....and if we really looked closely at Trump his support for Le Pen goes actually deeper....than a tweet......

    In January, Marine Le Pen held a fundraiser for her presidential campaign... at Trump Tower.
    https://euobserver.com/elections/137613#

    SO if in fact there is another terror attack and the French can trace it back to Russia....WOULD then NATO Article 5 be triggered?

    An interesting question is it not?
    Last edited by OUTLAW 09; 04-25-2017 at 08:23 AM.

  3. #463
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    Quote Originally Posted by OUTLAW 09 View Post
    Bill..I said this morning that the Russians really do believe we the US are waging a non linear against them........

    Nice to see that their TASS media outlet agrees with me.....
    http://tass.com/politics/942643

    Kremlin advisor reveals 'cure for US aggression'
    Russian Politics & Diplomacy
    April 21, 19:22 UTC+3

    Putin's advisor also believes that Donald Trump is just "doing what the ruling elite expects him to do"




    Fun fact: Glazev is a paid member of Malofeev's NGO. Malofeev bankrolled & tried to deliver coup in Montenegro. Extremely strong evidence held by Montenegro with them requesting an Interpol arrest warrant for Malofeev....

    NOTE...Reuters recently reported that the USIC had two key documents from this Malofeev NGO that were the actual plans for the hacking and influence operations conducted by Russia against the US election adamently denied by Russian FM....and that they were signed off on by Putin....

    Katehon 2nd member Glazev is a figure in #FrolovLeaks, commands active hybrid war branch frm Orthodox Church side against ukraine

    Head of #Russian Institute of CIS Zatulin, in Jan 2013, writes a memo using terms "Sacred Crimea & Novorossiya"
    https://informnapalm.org/de/frolovle...kam-der-krieg/
    Only in German and or Russian

    That memo, one year and one month prior to Crimean annexation, ends up on desk of Glazev, Putin advisor on developments in CIS.

    Ukrainian Cyber Alliance (UCA) hacktivists shared with InformNapalm a massive data dump from the mailbox of Kirill Frolov, Vice-Director of the Institute for CIS Countries, spokesman of the Union of Orthodox Citizens and ROC expert....

    Russian response was initially that it was all "fake" but in the end admitted he had been indeed hacked BUT by the CIA.....

    https://informnapalm.org/en/frolovle...ine-episode-1/

    https://informnapalm.org/en/frolovle...cs-episode-ii/

    https://informnapalm.org/en/frolovle...ing-episode-3/

    https://informnapalm.org/en/frolovle...ia-episode-iv/

    https://informnapalm.org/31475-frolo...riot-epizod-v/
    Only in Russian and or Ukrainian

    https://informnapalm.org/de/frolovle...kam-der-krieg/
    Only in German

    NOTE...the UCA has also hacked into the email account of the Putin's personal adivsor to the Russian mercenaries in eastern Ukraine Surkov WHICH the US is now trying to open a back channel to by Trump's appointing of "WH special advisor" which does not need Congressional approval as a way to finally establish a back channel link between Putin and Trump.....

    Again Russia claimed this hack was done after they first stated Surkov had no email account...by again the CIA.....they defintely were not about to admit UCA pulled it off....

    Russian political warfare hard at work.....

    BTW...it is extremley important to understand the Russian foreign spy service (SVR) chief who replaced Malefeev......and how he fits now into Russian political warfare.....as a mjaor player as he is very close to Putin....
    http://russia-insider.com/en/putin-a...ine-again/5433
    Further information on the UCA's hacks of Surkov Putin's personal man in eastern Ukraine.......

    Surkov leaks show Russia funds and manages conflict in Ukraine http://www.atlanticcouncil.org/blogs...e-leaks-show#…

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    CRITICAL to understand this new Russian hack methodology......


    Everyone needs to get their hands on the Micro Trend study of the Russian hacking attacks on the French president candidate Marcon.....

    Russian hacking group Fancy Bear is using a new type of cyberattack to target Macron that's never been seen before
    http://www.businessinsider.com/what-...-group-2017-4#

    It has now been seen in other hacks in the last two weeks not focused only on the French.....

    "They're taking advantage of vulnerabilities in cloud-based email services like Gmail to trick people into downloading fake applications, and compromising their inboxes without even having to steal a password."
    Believe me cloud services are not as secure as the providers claim they are.....

  5. #465
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    How @MFA_Russia spreads #fakenews. 3 @Twitter a/c's have 12,000+ fake followers. Some promo prostitution & rape porn
    https://youtu.be/Xzg6lWa65es

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    Montenegro Coup Suspect Linked to Russian-backed “Ultranationalist” Organisation via @bellingcat
    https://www.bellingcat.com/news/uk-a...organisation/#

    BUT WAIT..this goes exactly to what I have been saying about Russian trolls and US proTrump trollers.....they work together....

    Breaking: Suspect in Putin backed coup attempt in Montenegro associated with pro Trump activists.
    Last edited by OUTLAW 09; 04-27-2017 at 03:51 PM.

  7. #467
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    Identified proRussian troll.....

    Kremlin Trolls CI‏#@KremlinTrolls

    =>@noclador heavily edited 2010 Polish AF plane crash page: removing refs to explosives that could implicate Russia
    :
    https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php...id=525287253#…

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    Here's a good example of how Russian media (Kremlin) spread fake news (lied) about events in #Ukraine #Donbass
    https://youtu.be/TIyaTukjcvs

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    Time and time again, #NATO keeps on pointing out the #facts when #misinformation is being spread. The list is long
    https://goo.gl/H2X5Ad

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    Russia Seeks to Influence European Politics Through Youth Wings of Far-Right and Far-Left Parties via @bellingcat
    https://www.bellingcat.com/news/uk-a...left-parties/#

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    Russian FM spox speaking just now : "We ask them (the West) to give an example of Russian fake news."

    She says no one can think of any.

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    US cybersecurity firm says China tried to hack group linked to US missile defense system in South Korea
    http://www.cnn.com/2017/04/27/asia/c...a-thaad-hack/#

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    Russia foreign intelligence chief Naryshkin: “The battle for the minds will become more intense & cover new areas"
    https://www.rt.com/politics/386364-r...ar-naryshkin/#

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    Dept. of @ENERGY ‘Liberty Eclipse’ shows just how bad a power grid cyberattack could be
    http://fifthdomain.com/2017/04/21/do...s-power-grid/#

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    Default In His Own Words: Vladimir Putin's Foreign Policy Analyzed

    From WOTR: https://warontherocks.com/2017/04/in...licy-analyzed/

    I tend to agree more with Kofman, and I regard Putin as an opportunist and tactician without a grand strategy or vision. I disagree with the authors that cooperation to fight Daesh is possible, given Russia's actions in Syria and now Afghanistan.

    According to Greg Miller of The Washington Post, Donald Trump and his advisers differ on how to approach Vladimir Putin. While Trump tweets that “[e]verything will work out fine between the U.S.A. and Russia,” and looks forward to “lasting peace,” his advisors air scathing assessments of Russian policies.

    Indeed, Putin has confounded and confused U.S. presidents and their advisors, intelligence analysts, and academics since his unlikely rise to power. He has been portrayed variously as a master chess player, a reckless egoist, a business-like statesman, and a street thug.

    Here at War on the Rocks, Joshua Rovner and Michael Kofman have disagreed on the wisdom and clarity of Putin’s grand design, and indeed whether any such thing can be said to exist. “Putin is a bad strategist,” Rovner writes. “He does not understand the relationship between military violence and political objectives,” and his “ham-fisted” seizure of Crimea, amongst other blunders, has “almost ruined” the chances of Russia’s return to great power status.

    Kofman disagrees, arguing that Putin is playing a weak hand — as the leader of a “regional power in structural decline” — with some skill. It’s too soon to judge the ultimate success of his challenge to the rules-based international system, but Putin has made progress on this score, and seems secure at home. The Russian leader understands strategy perfectly well, in Kofman’s view. The real problem is that America doesn’t understand Putin.

    To try to cut through the confusion, we analyzed every word President Putin has ever said on the major issues of foreign policy — a big data approach to the vexing problem of understanding one man.

    We use a technique known as operational code analysis. The origins of this approach lie in U.S. government efforts to understand the behavior of the Bolsheviks after World War II. Nathan Leites, a Soviet expert and sociologist, posited that the regime was acting based upon a set of rules and political maxims rooted in their ideology and revolutionary experiences: a Bolshevik operational code. Alexander George saw the potential for the approach to be useful beyond the single case of the Bolsheviks. More recently, the technique has been refined into a rigorous framework for the content analysis of public speech by computer algorithm.

    In this modern form, operational code analysis involves isolating the imagery of power and control deployed by leaders as they talk about the political world. Statements a leader makes about other actors and their own approach are categorized as hostile (punishments, threats, or words of opposition) or cooperative (appeals, promises, or rewards.) By aggregating a large number of these statements, the approach produces a read-out of how the leader expresses their beliefs about international relations. Public speech is taken to reveal, at least to some extent, the world as it exists in the mind of the speaker.

    To fuel the analysis, we collected Putin’s speeches and interviews about foreign policy from the Kremlin’s archive. With our analysis based upon over one million words spoken by Putin, we think this is the most extensive study of the Russian president undertaken so far.

    What we found was surprising: On most issues of foreign policy, Putin scores as a fairly mainstream world leader. To reach this conclusion, we compared Putin’s rhetoric to other states-people of his era: leaders of the great powers on the one hand — such as Xi Jinping, Barack Obama, and Angela Merkel — and leaders of rogue states on the other — such as Saddam Hussein, Bashar al-Assad, and Mahmood Ahmadinejad. We established that great power leaders talk about international politics differently than rogue state leaders, and found that Putin spoke (and by implication, thought) more like the standard great power leader than the rogue leader.

    Except for one thing: his obsession with control. Putin talks about his own and Russia’s control over events to an extent rarely seen, scoring consistently above the normal levels of other political leaders. All politicians want to stay in charge, and all states-people like to think of their country as shaping international affairs, but Putin represents an extreme case.

    Combing the biographical literature for explanations, we were drawn to the hypothesis advanced by Mary Elise Sarotte, Ben Judah, and Fiona Hill, which suggests that Putin’s firsthand witnessing of the collapse of Soviet power in East Germany left a lasting mark on his worldview. As a KGB officer stationed in Dresden, he felt personally threatened by crowds protesting the East German regime, and appalled that Soviet power was not employed to protect the KGB building: “I got the feeling then that the country [the Soviet Union] no longer existed. That it had disappeared. It was clear that the Union was ailing. And it had a terminal disease without a cure — a paralysis of power.” We are convinced that avoiding a similar paralysis of Russian power is the central motivation of Putin’s international strategy.

    While our techniques generate no direct measure of strategic competence — and so we cannot definitively settle the Rovner-Kofman debate — we can say that Putin’s strategy appears protean and multifaceted. We found little evidence that Putin is a great chess player with a consistently pursued grand design. Instead, he is more of a shameless opportunist. Our data supports the views of Gleb Pavlosky, Putin’s longtime associate, that “Putin is good at tactics. He has a vision. But there is no strategy in between.”

    Those who see him as a master grand strategist argue that he has always been driven by opposition to NATO — a classic realist reading of how a Russian leader should think about the encroachment of a competitor military alliance into his sphere of influence. We did indeed find that his recent public speech about NATO, and the Western powers more generally, was hostile.

    But this is a recent development, dating to the crisis that led to the ouster of former Ukrainian president and Putin ally Victor Yanukovych. During the early to mid-2000s when his economy was riding high on the oil market boom, he expressed a moderately cooperative attitude toward NATO, the United States, and the European Union.

    In short, our analysis is more supportive of the views of Russia specialists such as Michael McFaul, Kimberly Marten, and Lilia Shevtsova — that Putin is an opportunist who deploys anti-Western rhetoric as it suits his tactical purposes — than those of John Mearsheimer, who sees Putin as a master strategist driven by a consistently anti-NATO worldview.

    So what? We think, first, that systematic analysis of public speech is a useful technique, providing copious open-source intelligence that can give a read-out on the puzzling behaviors of inscrutable leaders. But our approach has inherent limitations. If Kofman is correct, then Western confusion about Putin is already the result of taking his statements too literally — an error we will merely have confounded with our content analysis. Putin’s comments, Kofman asserts, are “not official declarations of policy, but instead [play] a supporting theatrical role to whatever strategy is being implemented.”

    While we do not agree that public speech contains only or primarily misleading information, it is important to remember that our dataset almost certainly includes some disingenuous speech and excludes transcripts of private deliberations and records of secret operations. That is merely to acknowledge the obvious: that no one approach to understanding a world leader’s thinking is sufficient on its own. The work of integrating multiple sources of intelligence and applying policy judgements must still be done.

    Nonetheless, there are policy implications to this analysis of Putin. First, he has behaved for the majority of his time in office as the rational leader of a great power. Throwing up one’s hands and declaring him outside of the mainstream is to underestimate his normalcy, or, put another way, to overestimate the virtue and cooperative instincts of the standard leader.

    Second, our data show that Putin’s approach varies by issue. It should be possible to work with him on some policies, like fighting ISIL (his rhetoric on terrorism is astonishingly violent and brutal), while segmenting others. Secretary of State Rex Tillerson’s comments at his Senate confirmation hearing — that the United States should cooperate with Putin based on common interests and be steadfast in defense otherwise — seem to us to be essentially correct.

    Finally, given the centrality of control to Putin’s formative political experiences, and its prevalence in his public rhetoric, it is important to recognize that the disintegration of order and threats to his own power are red-lines for Putin. On the one hand, this suggests being cautious about making any move that looks like it targets the basis of his authority. On the other, should coercive diplomacy be necessary, Putin’s fear of losing control represents the sharpest stick with which to poke him.

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    As is with many Russian analysis articles and yes they looked at thousands of words...that is in fact the core problem.....

    In the Cold War days we had individuals who spent a life time in understanding the Soviet/Communist "ways"...commonly called "Kremlinologists" who were also solid Russian historians and Russian linguists who understood the fine nuances of the Russian language....

    They are no longer there for us to fall back on...thus everyone is swimming as basically Russia fell to the way side in studies after the fall of the Wall and the break up of the Soviet Union.

    Example...take a look at the numbers of Russian and even German linguists trained for the US military during that period..heck even German was no longer taught...

    I would point to the simple fact that the "Russian words" are in fact a form of disinformation and camouflage designed to create a smokescreen from which to operate.....

    If one took literally all Russian "words" and then compared them against Russian "actions" since 2003 you actually see a disconnect between the "words and actions"....

    There have been exactly four major Russian articles ...two on FP doctrine and two on military doctrine that actually had been the underpinning of what Russia has been doing since 2003...why they are overlooked is interesting....

    The next item that the authors totally missed is the ability of both the SU and now Russia to follow a longer term effort once a leadership position has been decided..something totally foreign to the way the US does business with a Presidential election every four years thus FP changes and or the continuation of existing policy until the next President comes in..then sudden and usually complete changes of directions.

    Here is the advantage of an authoritarian system...

    Next problem they did not address is the internal power structures of the old SU vs the new Russia....in some ways if one looks closely there has been little difference...but there is as the power players are much stronger now and are much more vocal in their defense of their individual power structures...take the Russian Orthodox Church..viewed under the Soviets as undermined by the KGB and distrusted by Russians and a haven for military draft dodgers is now a major FP player both internally and externally...and carries a major voice in all political over the border Russian decisions as well as setting the ideological stance inside Russia...

    Same goes for the Russian transnational gangs that were largely controlled and used by the KGB, but now have their own internal and external power foundations and are an accepted part of Russian decision making....and used to extend Russian overseas reach especially in the areas of black money...black ops and hacking....

    So to sum it up....the authors focus was to narrow and totally missed what is ongoing .....follow the "actions" not the "words"....

    You will notice that during the SU their actions were far more controlled and measured actually far more conservative in nature...now Russian actions are not...they are used as a political war driver...

    In some aspects I miss that simple fact that the writers totally overlooked the Putin single driver right now..a political war against what Putin views to be neoliberalism in all it's forms as represented by the US.....that he has voiced a number of times since Crimea..why that was missed in their "words review" is also interesting.....

    All one level below actual military conflict thus stymieing the US ability to counter it because we are simply not good at countering cyber and information warfare even though we the US drove the internet and social media.....and actually he are really bad at countering political warfare when it is directed against US....in the days of the Cold War that would not have happened....

    As a set of examples to look at are the "words" used by Russian in their defense of we did not shot down MH17 and the rebels used sarin....check "their actual actions" against their "words".....

    This paragraph actually sums up the failure of this article.....

    Second, our data show that Putin’s approach varies by issue. It should be possible to work with him on some policies, like fighting ISIL (his rhetoric on terrorism is astonishingly violent and brutal), while segmenting others. Secretary of State Rex Tillerson’s comments at his Senate confirmation hearing — that the United States should cooperate with Putin based on common interests and be steadfast in defense otherwise — seem to us to be essentially correct.
    Let's take the Putin "words" on fighting terrorism against his current "actions" inside Syria where if we again look at his "words" in the UNGA he stated we are going into Syria to fight terrorism...ie IS/AQ.

    BUT WAIT...what were then Russian "actions"....completely the opposite.....

    Or can the authors actually state that Assad with massive Putin military support has been totally focused on the destruction inside Syria of both IS and AQ.....ABSOLUTELY not....would be the answer if they were honest with themselves.

    Thus Russian "actions" completely contradicted the entire article built around the analysis of Russian "words".....

    Then......
    As a KGB officer stationed in Dresden, he felt personally threatened by crowds protesting the East German regime, and appalled that Soviet power was not employed to protect the KGB building: “I got the feeling then that the country [the Soviet Union] no longer existed. That it had disappeared. It was clear that the Union was ailing. And it had a terminal disease without a cure — a paralysis of power.” We are convinced that avoiding a similar paralysis of Russian power is the central motivation of Putin’s international strategy.
    I would argue that if we look at every move Putin has made since them...it has one central goal....restore Russian power and influence to that of an equal superpower and eliminate the US unipolar power position....

    The Russian political warfare has three distinct and clear geo political goals.....which have if we look closely Russian "actions" in support to those geo political goals has not wavered a single millimeter since 2003....

    1. damage and discredit NATO
    2. damage and discredit EU
    3. totally disconnect US from Europe and ME

    Apparently the authors overlooked the repeated statements by both Russian FM Lavrov and Putin since 2004 that envisioned a geo political economic/political zone running from the coastline of Portugal to the Russian Far East...ALL under the sphere of Russian influence....it is there and it must have been overlooked by the authors....BTW also repeated after their military annexation of Crimea....

    So again "did his actions" since then actually match his "words" during the same period?
    Last edited by OUTLAW 09; 04-28-2017 at 06:15 AM.

  18. #478
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    Azor...again referencing your posted article...does this look like a lot of "Russian words" or outright "Russian actions" which were not covered in your posted article......

    Russian-controlled telecom hijacks financial services’ Internet traffic. Visa, MasterCard, Verisign all affected
    https://arstechnica.com/?p=1085633

    KEY..Russian controlled telecom...not some rouge group..person or company...BUT hardcore Russian government controlled.......

    So again..."actions" trump "words"...

    BTW...in my former days with Cisco Systems as a main trouble shooting engineer BGP just "does not suddenly hiccup and go someplace else without a major PER HUMAN hand generated change".....

    On Wednesday, large chunks of network traffic belonging to MasterCard, Visa, and more than two dozen other financial services companies were briefly routed through a Russian government-controlled telecom under unexplained circumstances that renew lingering questions about the trust and reliability of some of the most sensitive Internet communications.
    Anomalies in the border gateway protocol—which routes large-scale amounts of traffic among Internet backbones, ISPs, and other large networks—are common and usually the result of human error. While it's possible Wednesday's five- to seven-minute hijack of 36 large network blocks may also have been inadvertent, the high concentration of technology and financial services companies affected made the incident "curious" to engineers at network monitoring service BGPmon. What's more, the way some of the affected networks were redirected indicated their underlying prefixes had been manually inserted into BGP tables, most likely by someone at Rostelecom, the Russian government-controlled telecom that improperly announced ownership of the blocks.
    We were watching this from the European side and it definitely was a Russian generated state sponsored "hiccup"...

    Interestingly ...was this a "not so subtle signal to the West that Russia can disrupt all major western financial internet backbone traffic when it wants to in advance of more possible sanctions against them"?

    In my world....yes it was.....
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    Last edited by OUTLAW 09; 04-28-2017 at 06:59 AM.

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    This is exactly why the US cannot and is not capable of responding to Russian political warfare and countering Russian cyber and information warfare....

    "The world is moving too fast for the institutions we created in the 20th century." - General Jones

    That is why social media and IT security companies are in fact leading the pushback...not the US government or it's agencies...and that includes DoD/DoS...

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    Quote Originally Posted by OUTLAW 09
    As is with many Russian analysis articles and yes they looked at thousands of words...that is in fact the core problem...I would point to the simple fact that the "Russian words" are in fact a form of disinformation and camouflage designed to create a smokescreen from which to operate...If one took literally all Russian "words" and then compared them against Russian "actions" since 2003 you actually see a disconnect between the "words and actions"...
    I don’t disagree.

    However, all leaders tend to say one thing and then do another. For instance, despite Obama’s speech in Cairo in 2009, he actually disengaged from the Muslim world and pursued a rather ruthless strategy of containment and attrition in failed Muslim states with no real efforts made at reconstruction or development.

    Quote Originally Posted by OUTLAW 09
    The next item that the authors totally missed is the ability of both the SU and now Russia to follow a longer term effort once a leadership position has been decided…something totally foreign to the way the US does business with a Presidential election every four years thus FP changes and or the continuation of existing policy until the next President comes in…then sudden and usually complete changes of directions. Here is the advantage of an authoritarian system...
    Yet conversely, such authoritarian states see patterns in the chaos of democratic foreign policy. To Moscow and Beijing, Operation Odyssey Dawn in 2011 is merely a continuation of Operation Allied Force in 1999: NATO being used as an offensive military alliance in pursuit of American imperialism. They do not believe in or understand the dynamics of democracy, much as they doubtless believe that spontaneous peaceful protests never occur without a hidden foreign hand.

    Quote Originally Posted by OUTLAW 09
    Next problem they did not address is the internal power structures of the old SU vs the new Russia....in some ways if one looks closely there has been little difference...but there is as the power players are much stronger now and are much more vocal in their defense of their individual power structures...take the Russian Orthodox Church…viewed under the Soviets as undermined by the KGB and distrusted by Russians and a haven for military draft dodgers is now a major FP player both internally and externally...and carries a major voice in all political over the border Russian decisions as well as setting the ideological stance inside Russia...Same goes for the Russian transnational gangs that were largely controlled and used by the KGB, but now have their own internal and external power foundations and are an accepted part of Russian decision making...and used to extend Russian overseas reach especially in the areas of black money...black ops and hacking...
    Agreed. Russian power is now based upon a dynamic, fluid and inherently unstable blend of various state and non-state actors and special interests. It is difficult to say whether this fusion has strengthened or weakened the state. What happens when the consensus breaks down?

    Quote Originally Posted by OUTLAW 09
    You will notice that during the SU their actions were far more controlled and measured actually far more conservative in nature...now Russian actions are not...they are used as a political war driver...In some aspects I miss that simple fact that the writers totally overlooked the Putin single driver right now…a political war against what Putin views to be neoliberalism in all its forms as represented by the US...that he has voiced a number of times since Crimea…why that was missed in their "words review" is also interesting...
    This is where it becomes clear that Putin is no grand strategist. He should have known from the outset that cooperation with the West was impossible, because free, democratic, prosperous and secure societies were a threat-in-being to the unfree and undemocratic society that Putin wanted to build on the assumption that such a society was necessary for prosperity and security. Putin’s early flirtations with the West were opportunistic and tactical. He finally realized that conflict was inevitable and expressed his concerns at Munich in 2007, using his words. He later conveyed his concerns with action in Georgia in 2008.

    I do believe that Putin was wrong-footed by the Western reaction to the Russo-Georgian War, particularly the media portrayal of Russia as an invader and war criminal, whereas Georgia was fighting to uphold Western values. By the time that the dust had settled and T’bilisi’s less-than-innocent role as instigator became clear, months had passed and the West no longer cared whether Georgian tanks had fired into basements or the Georgians had used cluster munitions. I believe that this public relations disaster in 2008 was the impetus for the well-oiled propaganda machine that Putin subsequently built.

    Quote Originally Posted by OUTLAW 09
    Or can the authors actually state that Assad with massive Putin military support has been totally focused on the destruction inside Syria of both IS and AQ...
    Indeed. I noted this major flaw in my introduction to the article.

    Quote Originally Posted by OUTLAW 09
    Apparently the authors overlooked the repeated statements by both Russian FM Lavrov and Putin since 2004 that envisioned a geo political economic/political zone running from the coastline of Portugal to the Russian Far East...ALL under the sphere of Russian influence...it is there and it must have been overlooked by the authors...BTW also repeated after their military annexation of Crimea...
    I doubt that the talk of forming a Eurasian union including Europe, Russia, Central Asia and China will ever lead to anything. The cultural, linguistic, geographic and political barriers are simply too high. Russian isolationists compete with "Europeanists" and "Eurasianists", whilst the EU and SCO steadily advance. How can the “Third Rome” possibly compete with Brussels and Beijing? In addition to these two fronts, there is also a southern Muslim front...

    Currently, Russia sees the western threat as more immediate than the eastern one. Arguably, Moscow would believe itself in conflict with the EU and NATO regardless of whether it sought to re-establish its former empire or whether it sought to be surrounded by neutral buffer states. Yet vacuums get filled and international relations is never static, so if the EU and NATO were dismantled tomorrow, Russia would inexorably fill the void. Therefore, one can conclude that Russia’s actions are at once defensive and offensive.

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