The edges of the war: Ukraine, the midterms, and abortion
May 4, 2022 through the lens of a selected news summary
Valery Gerasimov is the Russian General Staff Chief. Together with Sergei Shoygu, he’s responsible for shaping the Russian military into what they are today.
Let’s open with a quote from his March 2017 article “Contemporary Warfare and Current Issues for the Defense of the Country” (via Military Review, Nov-Dec 2017):
War has always been a constant companion of humanity. It was born before the appearance of the state and is one of the factors of the development of the state.
It is natural that the problem of defining the nature and essence of warfare has always been at the center of attention of domestic and foreign scholars. Clausewitz singled out the political nature of war, treating it as a continuation of politics by other means. He understood “other means” to be violent ones. He compared war to “extended single combat,” defining it as “an act of violence having the goal of forcing the enemy to carry out our will.”
Snesarev and Svechin—eminent Russian and Soviet military theorists at the beginning of the twentieth century—made a significant contribution to the development of “the science of war.” The principal trends of waging war, which are a result of not only political, but also economic and social relations, are an example of their research.
By the beginning of the 1990s, a firm understanding of war as a means of achieving political goals exclusively on the basis of employing means of armed struggle developed.
War as a phenomenon occupies the minds of both domestic and foreign military specialists. At present, the United States has a classification of military conflicts, including traditional and nontraditional warfare. At the beginning of the twenty-first century, American theorists proposed the inclusion of “hybrid warfare” in this classification. This refers to actions that occur in a period that cannot possibly be associated purely with war or with peace.
In domestic science and practice, a more weighty approach to the classification of contemporary military conflicts has been determined. It takes into account a greater number of attributes of wars and armed conflicts.
According to the Military Doctrine of the Russian Federation, wars, together with armed conflicts, comprise the general content of military conflicts. They are “a form of resolving interstate or intrastate conflicts with the employment of armed force.” At the same time, there is no definition of “war” in official international or domestic documents.
The term “war” is used in domestic military science. It is defined in the Military Encyclopedia. Today, the military and scientific community is dynamically discussing issues regarding a clarification of the concept of war.
Some scholars and specialists adhere to the classical treatment of the nature and content of war. Here, the objectivity of the evolutionary development of warfare as a phenomenon and the necessity of introducing changes into its theory are not rejected. Others recommend a fundamental reexamination of views on the nature and content of the concept of war, taking into consideration that armed struggle is not an obligatory attribute. At present, one can encounter in print and in public discussion such phrases as “information warfare,” “economic warfare,” “hybrid war,” and a multitude of other variants of the use of the word “war.” All this must be analyzed and discussed. It is evident that a healthy scholarly discussion can only be something good for domestic military science.
The General Staff is focusing the necessary attention on resolving this issue. In 2016, a discussion on the nature of the concept of war under contemporary conditions was organized at the General Staff Military Academy…
…The United States and NATO countries are actively introducing “hybrid operations” in the international arena. For the most part this was conditioned by the fact that this operational variant does not fall under the definition of aggression. The mass media are calling these methods “hybrid warfare.” However, using the phrase “hybrid warfare” as an established term is, at present, premature. An analysis of the conflicts of the beginning of the twenty-first century points to a number of trends with respect to their transformation…
…On the whole, the role of military science remains, as ever, fundamentally important, and its results should be drawn on in practice. In this regard, I would like to linger on the priority tasks of the Academy of Military Sciences and of military science on the whole.
First and foremost is the study of new forms of interstate confrontation and the development of effective methods for countering them.
It is necessary to focus special attention on determining preventive measures to counter the unleashing of “hybrid warfare” against Russia and its allies.
It is necessary to effectively study the features of contemporary military conflicts and, on the basis of this, develop effective forms and methods of troop and force operations under various conditions.
The problems of organizing and implementing force regroupings on remote theaters of military operations require separate research.
Nor have the general tasks of military science lost their urgency. They also require further work, development of new ideas, and acquisition of new knowledge. (emphasis added)
I want a few things to jump out here:
Gerasimov acknowledges a ‘hybrid’ political and economic component to war
Hybrid warfare is part of a broader practice of inter- and intrastate conflict resolution in Gerasimov’s reckoning
On Gerasimov’s account, NATO and the U.S. are the ones who are engaged in hybrid warfare against Russia
As useful as Gerasimov’s conceptual vocabulary is, it’s also an official announcement from the army of a country notorious for lying. Arsalan Bilal in NATO Review on November 30, 2021 has a much simpler definition of this:
To put it simply, hybrid warfare entails an interplay or fusion of conventional as well as unconventional instruments of power and tools of subversion. These instruments or tools are blended in a synchronised manner to exploit the vulnerabilities of an antagonist and achieve synergistic effects.
The objective of conflating kinetic tools and non-kinetic tactics is to inflict damage on a belligerent state in an optimal manner. Furthermore, there are two distinct characteristics of hybrid warfare. First, the line between war and peace time is rendered obscure. This means that it is hard to identify or discern the war threshold. War becomes elusive as it becomes difficult to operationalise it.
Hybrid warfare below the threshold of war or direct overt violence pays dividends despite being easier, cheaper, and less risky than kinetic operations. It is much more feasible to, let’s say, sponsor and fan disinformation in collaboration with non-state actors than it is to roll tanks into another country’s territory or scramble fighter jets into its airspace. The costs and risks are markedly less, but the damage is real. A key question here is: can there be a war without any direct combat or physical confrontation taking place? With hybrid warfare permeating inter-state conflicts, it is possible to answer this in the affirmative. This remains closely linked to the philosophy of war as well. The supreme art of war is to subdue the enemy without fighting, as the ancient military strategist, Sun Tzu, suggested.
The second defining characteristic of hybrid warfare relates to ambiguity and attribution. Hybrid attacks are generally marked by a lot of vagueness. Such obscurity is wittingly created and enlarged by the hybrid actors in order to complicate attribution as well as response. In other words, the country that is targeted is either not able to detect a hybrid attack or not able to attribute it to a state that might be perpetrating or sponsoring it. By exploiting the thresholds of detection and attribution, the hybrid actor makes it difficult for the targeted state to develop policy and strategic responses.
Both Bilal and Gerasimov come from different places about what hybrid war means, and where things are going as a result, but are on the same page about what exactly hybrid war is - it’s multi-spectrum activity of working “political, economic and social relations” levers to attain policy outcomes.
This leads to a fundamental blank spot in hybrid war theory, as I see it, and that is what exactly civilians are supposed to do, and where we stand in all this. It involves us, by design, but the only people figuring out what it even means are military people, writing for other military people.
This is problematized substantially by disinformation, as Bilal touches on, because disinformation has the effect of undermining the rational bases for democratic choice; it ‘hacks democracy’ by offering false senses of identity and inculcating irreconcilable political differences based on unreality. Not only am I not being told what to do as a citizen, which, considering this is literally job #1 of the government, suggests some serious conceptual lacks at the Federal policy-design level, I’m being actively lied-to and manipulated as part of the overall attack.
Generally speaking, this is an answerable question, somewhat annoyingly so, but still; the answer was simply resist, and that was a fairly sufficient answer for 2016-2020. Simple, critique-based answers like that stop working once you get a chance to actually change things and get information to people that matter, however.
At a certain point, you need to positively assert how things should be seen, instead of merely stating that they shouldn’t be seen through a variety of fascist or capitalist lenses (usually both).
I think a fairly defensible, parsimonious assertion as to how things should be seen is, this is all one big hybrid war, not just against Russia, but everybody against everybody. And we’re all in it.
I think of Willy Joseph Cancel, the American Marine killed in Ukraine, as part of that, as much as the Wagner mercs reported flooding into the country in late March; or “market frenzy” for PMCs accompanying a surge in demand for mercenary services, specifically extraction out of Ukraine, in early March, as much as disinformation about on the Russian side of things.
Regime-internal Russian disinformation is part of that, even (especially) when it puts people in a fairly insane place, like this eyebrow-raiser of a headline out of state-sponsored outlet RIA Novosti today:
On our side, we’re seeing, I think, a series of proliferating intrastate conflicts and interstate conflicts that are resulting in “economic, political and social” operations and efforts from across American society that are promising, but unfortunately rather disjointed.
Start with the state of abortion rights in America today. Multiple outlets are covering a company called SafeGraph, who sold “information related to visits to clinics that provide abortions including Planned Parenthood facilities, showing where groups of people visiting the locations came from, how long they stayed there, and where they then went afterwards, according to sets of the data purchased by Motherboard” (Cox, Joseph, “Data Broker Is Selling Location Data of People Who Visit Abortion Clinics”, Vice News, May 3, 2022), including BusinessInsider, CNBC, and The Week.
Nandini Jammi is all over it:
This all cashes out most relevantly in the midterm elections coming up, as Biden pointed out in his statement relative to the Alito draft.
I haven’t taken a look at midterm assessments since February, before the Ukraine war kicked off. I looked, in January, and decided that Nevada was a focal point worth paying attention to, given the state of internecine discord within both the Democratic and Republican state parties, provable connections on social media to Proud Boys, and (what I suspect is) the presence of fairly damning oppo on the presumptive Republican Senate nominee, Laxalt.
I finally looked again today. It’s not pretty.
You could make some allowances for the effects of the Alito draft on the midterms, but going strictly by polling data, FiveThirtyEight’s analysts don’t think it makes much difference. Holding constant the expected loss of the House of Representatives, that puts the Senate into pretty much the same place as it was in late January, per Cook Political Report as of today.
The more relevant race to look at today, by consensus opinion, is not Nevada, but actually Ohio. There, Politico is reporting today on Peter Thiel and a network of superPACs appear to have played key roles in getting J.D. Vance a frankly surprising Trump endorsement that helped him attain a win in his primary.
We could counter-pose a race like Michigan HD-74, where a fairly insane Republican candidate “who gained national noteriety for remarks about rape and conspiracy theories related to QAnon and Jews” (Gibbons, Laura, “Robert Regan, tagged ‘perhaps worst candidate ever,’ loses House bid to Dem”, Bridge Michigan (news site), May 4, 2022):
Regan had been favored to win the reliably Republican district after scoring an upset win in a special primary election. But he was scorned by Democrats and Republicans alike for a series of offensive comments, most notably a remark during a livestream hosted by a conservative group that he told his daughters, “if rape is inevitable, you should just lie back and enjoy it.”
Many Republicans had disavowed Regan ahead of the election, with some putting their hopes — and dollars — into write-in candidate Mike Milanowski. The county reported 1,117 write-in votes, although it’s unclear at this point how many of those went to Milanowski.
Regan responded to the loss on social media Wednesday, noting he’s regrouping and putting together a campaign for the August primary to represent the region next term.
“One thing is now clear. The RINO Republican establishment would rather have a Democrat than an America First Republican like me in office,” he wrote.
The election was held to fill the remainder of former state Rep. Mark Huizinga’s term, who vacated the seat after his election to the state Senate last fall.
Regan — who according to his campaign website is an entrepreneur and has worked in banking, manufacturing and recruiting — unsuccessfully run for office in 2014, 2018 and 2020, when he made national news because one of his daughters urged voters to oppose him.
In addition to the rape comments, Regan faced backlash for his other online activity. At one point, he called the Ukraine war a “fake war just like the fake pandemic” and shared a meme claiming that feminism is “a Jewish program to degrade and subjugate white men.”
In other past social media posts, Regan shared conspiracy theories claiming that Jewish people were behind the Sept. 11, 2001 terror attacks and presidential assassinations and control the banks as well as the media.
In one post, Regan affixed his campaign logo and website address to a far-right video, “It’s Beginning to Look a Lot Like Genocide.” The song is a parody of the Christmas classic, questions the COVID pandemic and ends with photos of the nation’s top medical adviser, Dr. Anthony Fauci and others next to nooses and the line “One day, we’ll see these bastards swing.”
In another video posted in February 2021, Regan explained and endorsed QAnon, a wide-ranging conspiracy theory alleging world governments are controlled by a shadowy cabal of pedophiles who worked to undermine Trump and steal the 2020 election.
"What it's doing is it's exposing the depth and breadth of the corruption that's been going on in the government, not just financial corruption by the (child sex) trafficking that's been going on and the drugs and the murders," Regan said. "I just keep getting encouraged each week that more and more and more of this is in fact true."
Regan previously told Bridge Michigan that “my words aren’t as smooth and polished as the politicians are because I’m not a politician. I’m working on it.”
In a statement touting other special election victories, the House Republican Campaign Committee acknowledged Glanville's victory in the district, which covers Walker, Grandville, Rockford and several adjacent townships, noting the caucus "chose not to participate in the race."
Other Republicans set their sights on the August primary, expressing confidence that the party could win back representation in the region next term with a different candidate on the ticket.
“We couldn’t support Regan & it’s clear voters couldn’t either,” Tori Sachs, executive director of the Michigan Freedom Fund, which champions conservative policies, wrote on Twitter. “The GOP can & will pick this seat back up in November if a credible candidate is nominated in August.”
Gus Portela, communications director for the Michigan Republican Party, wrote on Twitter that Regan was “possibly the worst candidate I’ve ever seen” and said there was no room in the party for someone advocating for violence against women. (emphasis added)
This is a state house race as against a major indicator state, however; the overall message is not one that should have people sitting back and being complacent about things on the Democratic side.
We shouldn’t forget, too, that Russia - the adversary state that we are in the midst of an international hybrid World War III with - supported one of the two major parties in our country, fairly obviously and blatantly, up to the point of apparently exerting leverage on our commander-in-chief on important issues like our foreign policy towards Venezuela, Turkey and Syria. If the behavior of the so-called “Putin caucus” is any indicator, you might be forgiven for making a wild unsubstantiated guess that they’re still doing it today.
Not only does that put into question any statement Republicans have ever made about Ukraine, it throws Republican positions - like pseudoscientific abortion restrictions - into harsh relief. The debate over abortion, and the Alito opinion (easily the subject of another whole thing that I don’t want to crowd into here), end up fitting in here.
It’s an addictive and ultimately unrewarding way of looking at things, to pin this all on Russia at the end of the day, even in significant part. I don’t think it’s accurate or helpful to do that. But it’s unmistakeably and irretrievably a part of all this, and with it, so too is the hybrid war.
Like it or not, believe it or not, we’re all in it now.