Meta-Warfare

[OUTLAW 09]

Following a review and with the agreement of the original RFI author I have moved twelve posts - which do not sit here well - to the thread devoted to Russian Disinformation plus.

So if the exchange seems to stop and start check that thread:http://council.smallwarsjournal.com/...=25056&page=23

Then this is an interesting comment simply because if I read the RFI and the resulting comments on "political warfare"...then the current Russian cyber and info warfare BEING used to both support and drive "political warfare" is suddenly what "not political warfare" AS it has "emerged out of a political system which has it's on belief system that is driving that "political war"....

Makes no sense does it not to totally ignore a major component?

If in fact we together with Mirco Trend have actually been able to track this Russian state sponsored hacking group and it is a group and it is state sponsored then in fact this element is definitely "political warfare"....

Read the full report and then tell me seriously this is not a central element of "political warfare" by any definition that one wants to give "political warfare"...even by SWC standards.

https://documents.trendmicro.com/ass...pawn-storm.pdf

Taken from the very first paragraph of the RFI if I am correct.....

I'd like to start a discussion on the sophistication of warfare; I don't mean the development of new technologies (essentially the spear and the rifle are the same weapon insofar they occupy the same space and serve the same purpose), but instead the expanding comprehensiveness of what's considered "warfare" - and, as a subset of that, the emergence of legal norms of what defines acceptable and unacceptable forms of warfare. If war is essentially a political act, then the sophistication of warfare follows the sophistication of political systems. War, in essence, reflects the political system from which it emerges.

THEN when we are actually confronted as a political system ie "the West" by a true form of "political warfare" that we can see....feel..touch and observe in real time......we do again exactly what...ignore it?

I could go back and link to a "political warfare article from "War on the Rocks" written in 2014 and the USA SOF White Paper on the same topic titled "Support to Political Warfare" which surprisingly while listed in Google is not available...which now Google cannot find the quoted page.

Political warfare is the logical application of Clausewitz's doctrine in time of peace. In broadest definition, political warfare is the employment of all the means at a nation's command, short of war, to achieve its national objectives. Such operations are both overt and covert. They range from such overt actions as political alliances, economic measures (as ERP—the Marshall Plan), and "white" propaganda to such covert operations as clandestine support of "friendly" foreign elements, "black" psychological warfare and even encouragement of underground resistance in hostile states.

If we are actually honest then "political warfare" has been with us since the first time humans formed any form of a "government"....what has changed are the abilities to employ it.

So when we have a living breathing actual form of it being shoved into our faces every day by Russia then suddenly those elements of "political warfare" are suddenly not part and parcel of political warfare?

BTW the way ...in this discussion I would like to see an accepted common definition that varies from the standard form...if it in fact varies from the above posted definition....which I do not think it has.