The global rise of authoritarianism is a pressing strategic problem for the United States and its like-minded allies. Chinese and Russian authoritarianism threaten the liberal order from without. Simultaneously, democratic backsliding in the U.S. and Europe undermines liberalism from within. The nature of these twin aspects of authoritarianism requires a joint response that is able to support and strengthen the liberal order against disintegration. This response must include a more expansive approach to countering the authoritarian warfare occurring below the traditional threshold of armed conflict. At the same time, any response must account for an environment beset by resource constraints, anti-access and area denial factors, and the complexity of preparing for large-scale combat operations, on the one hand, and distributed hybrid warfare, on the other hand. Ultimately, the U.S. and like-minded allies must consider ways to expand and empower traditional shaping activities with smaller, tailored force packages, while doing so efficiently.

 Origins of Authoritarian Information Warfare

 The eruption of authoritarianism is understandable as part of an ongoing military revolution in information warfare. Like previous military revolutions, this one is recasting not only warfare but society and politics as well.[1] A military response to the extent of the changes and challenges must account not only for actions occurring in the traditional military domain, but also for those occurring in the civil or non-military domain.

Soviet practitioners forecasted the outlines of an informational revolution in warfare as early as the mid-1980s. Building upon decades of interest in fomenting anti-liberal insurgency within liberal democratic states, Soviet politico-military foresight anticipated that a new kind of deep raiding action and distributed command-and-control would be possible by using information to cognitively manipulate, incite, and radicalize target populations.[2]

In 2013, the Russian Chief of the General Staff, Valery Gerasimov, continued the Soviet focus on information warfare, viewing it as a central way of “reducing the fighting potential of the enemy.”[3] From its early Soviet inception to its contemporary authoritarian employment, information warfare has remained a method of disintegrating liberal societies from within by identifying, generating, organizing, supporting, and inciting illiberal “protest potential” within them.[4] Gerasimov characterizes this new type of warfare as long-distance, contactless, and utilizing weapons of a “mass character” to help radicalize a country’s already existing “internal opposition” forces.[5] As Gerasimov says, such an internal opposition is tantamount to a “permanently operating front” which, in the case of illiberalism, expresses authoritarian sympathies. Beyond providing the basis for a transnational authoritarian order, Gerasimov generally sees this sympathetic front as an insurrectionary standing reserve able to sink a state into a “web of chaos, humanitarian catastrophe, and civil war.”[6]

More specifically, authoritarian forces have sought to apply information and nonmilitary warfare to critical vulnerabilities in liberal social systems. For both the Soviet and the post-Soviet Russian regimes, one major vulnerability of the West has been its genealogy of racial apartheid and white supremacy. But whereas the Soviets sought to embarrass the West and especially the U.S. for its race relations, the post-Soviet Russian regime switched course entirely. Throughout the 1990s, Russian ruling elites cultivated ethnic nationalist fundamentalism and xenophobia internally and internationally. Russia quickly emerged as the titular world capital of white power movements and began to view ethnic nationalism as an organizing principle of its information and nonmilitary warfare.[7]

Dugin’s information and nonmilitary strategy reads like current events and transnational axes of illiberalism have grown in number and strength.

Aleksandr Dugin, a Russian fascist ideologue and high-profile right-wing personality, helps to illustrate the modern Russian application of information warfare.[8] In 1997, Dugin published a highly influential book among post-Soviet Russian elites and the General Staff Academy. In the book, Dugin advocated “encouraging all kinds of separatism and ethnic, social and racial conflicts” and supporting “extremist, racist, and sectarian groups” to “destabiliz[e] internal political processes in the U.S.” and “suppor[t] isolationist tendencies in American politics.” For Dugin, successful incitement could severely weaken the United States. Dugin’s desired outcomes included a fractured NATO, the Russian partition and eventual seizure of Ukraine, and the creation of several transnational “axes” of sympathetic antiliberal fronts and states. Dugin anticipated that these axes would attack liberal societies from within while sharing irregular and informational warfare tactics and techniques to fracture democratic governments, especially the U.S., as “pay back” for the fall of the Soviet Union.[9]

John Dunlop, an emeritus senior fellow at the Hoover Institution and expert on Soviet and Russian politics, was an initial observer of Dugin’s rise. Writing in the early 2000s, Dunlop cautioned that, although Dugin’s prescriptions may have sounded “both crude and mad,” they were deeply connected to a resurgent European New Right and well postured to result in explosive destabilization.[10] Indeed, just 25 years later, Dugin’s information and nonmilitary strategy reads like current events and transnational axes of illiberalism have grown in number and strength. It is clear why Gerasimov says that “nonmilitary means of achieving political and strategic goals [have] grown and… exceeded the power of force of weapons in their effectiveness.”[11]

The Current and Future Security Environments

We are now better able to understand the origins (extremism, racism, sectarianism, isolationism) and expansive goals (degeneration of the liberal order) of this century’s global rise of authoritarianism. New information technologies and a media environment saturated with persistent and stylized disinformation have aided the normalization of anti-democratic movements while weakening liberalism from within. Just as Dugin predicted, they have also hastened the translation of conspiratorial fictions into powerful organizational fronts with transnational reach and a new type of informational command and control.

With this backdrop of authoritarian resurgence, several challenges noted in U.S. strategic documents come into sharper focus. Consider the National Defense Strategy of 2018. It calls for the U.S. to work with allies to compete against illiberal revisionist powers and share responsibilities for “resisting authoritarian trends, contesting radical ideologies, and serving as bulwarks against instability.”[12] The National Military Strategy 2018 charges the Joint Force to better formulate ways to militarily compete below the level of armed conflict.[13] And the U.S. Army in Multi-Domain Operations 2028 is preparing the Army to counter authoritarian unconventional warfare, information warfare, and a variety of political and military strategies such as the “exploitation of social, ethnic, or nationalistic tensions” and the generation of “instability within countries and alliances” intended to “create political separation.”[14]

Moreover, the Interim National Security Strategy Guidance 2021 notes that “[w]e face a world of rising nationalism, receding democracy, growing rivalry with China, Russia, and other authoritarian states, and a technological revolution that is reshaping every aspect of our lives.”[15] Carrying the message of authoritarian and technological revolution further, the Joint Operating Environment 2035 forecasts military competition in which illiberal identity networks “manipulate the mental processes, emotions, feelings, perceptions, behaviors, and decisions of their intended targets” as “information warfare reinforced by violence” is used to manipulate “broad public opinion” and degrade decision-making.[16] Finally, the U.S. Air Force’s Global Futures Report envisions several dark futures characterized by authoritarianism, legitimacy crises, illiberal political and military systems anchored on new ideological and biogenetic forms of “bio-supremacy,” and war.[17]

Areas of Strategic Competition Most in Need of Increased Attention: Nonmilitary and Informational Warfare

Each of the surveyed strategic and future forecasting documents acknowledge that authoritarian strategic competition is complex and operating across nonmilitary and informational fields. Authoritarian forces both internal and external to the West seek not only to compete against liberalism but to collapse it by shattering the allied and coalitional links that uphold the liberal order.[18] Therefore, authoritarianism’s growing capacity to accomplish fait accompli victories is premised at least as much or more on the weaponization of “catastrophic social, economic, and political consequences” as it is on military-technical developments.[19] Indeed, “the focus of applied methods of conflict,” as Gerasimov says, “has altered in the direction of the broad use of political, economic, informational, humanitarian, and other nonmilitary measures.”[20] When used in coordination with the “protest potential” of insurrectionary networks, “such new-type conflicts are comparable with the consequences of any real war. The very ‘rules of war’ have changed.”[21]

The West’s military response to the threat of authoritarianism continues to focus on large scale combat and expeditionary operations, or the development of traditional weaponry and technological solutions to problems connected to artillery fires, hypersonic missiles, artificial intelligence, and so on.

Unfortunately, the U.S. and its like-minded allies are struggling to develop military responses to nonmilitary and information warfare. The West’s military response to the threat of authoritarianism continues to focus on large scale combat and expeditionary operations, or the development of traditional weaponry and technological solutions to problems connected to artillery fires, hypersonic missiles, artificial intelligence, and so on. As important as these responses are, Western militaries need to pay more attention to and and demonstrate ingenuity in responding to the social, ideological, insurgent, and other forms of antipolitical warfare that authoritarianism is using to set conditions to win without or prior to combat. As the National Military Strategy 2018 suggests, there is an urgent need to reconsider the military dimension of so-called nonmilitary and informational warfare activities that fall short of armed conflict, or else the outcome of the conflict may be predetermined.

…the current threat of authoritarianism and the informational military revolution underway require a more robustly planned and resourced approach to shaping operations…

Defenders of the liberal order must respond to authoritarian nonmilitary and information warfare with responses that have the potential to build democratic resilience and plant the seeds of liberalization, including in illiberal regions and states. Western military strategy requires an offensive mindset in the promotion and protection of democratic conditions anywhere they exist or may come to exist. It is upon the strength of these conditions that Western civil and military power depends.

Indeed, the U.S. and NATO already use their militaries to “instill values, norms, or practices into other militaries through persuasion, teaching, and the building of habits.”[22] But the current threat of authoritarianism and the informational military revolution underway require a more robustly planned and resourced approach to shaping operations, something akin to what Andrew Mueller has called strategic counterinsurgency.[23] Western shaping activities, perhaps as key elements of combatant command theater security cooperation plans, must become more expansive. They must combine modes of both protection and attack to counter the antidemocratic assaults of authoritarian nonmilitary warfare, and they must include strong narrative competition together with a qualitatively new approach to traditional activities of theater setting, security cooperation, disaster relief, military-to-military exchanges, and sustainment preparation of the operational environment, among other things.[24]

What might an expansive approach to shaping look like, especially in a context of increasing resource constraints? We can only provide an initial outline here but, overall, shaping activities and theater setting must put as much focus on combating disinformation and instilling values in partner forces as is now focused on military exercises and logistical preparation. In addition, U.S. and NATO regionally aligned force packages should combine conventional forces with special forces and security force assistance units. This would provide a wider array of capacities across the range of military operations, more regional expertise and cultural competence, and a larger network of enduring relationships with which to cooperate inter-organizationally and apply against nonmilitary weapons of warfare.[25] Conventional deterrence, while remaining the bedrock of partnered capacity, would also be fortified with deliberately planned social, politico-economic, and informational activities designed to build resilience and protect against authoritarian subversion.

While conventional deterrence is critical, it is also resource intensive and has a large footprint. Cost effectiveness and survivability in the context of anti-access and area denial strategies will require the U.S. and like minded partners to adapt conventional responses. In many regionally aligned force (RAF) missions, it may be better to replace armored brigade combat team deployments, which cost up to $200 million annually, with Security Force Assistance Brigade (SFAB) deployments, at a cost of $60 million.[26] Similarly, armor battalions could be supplemented with SFAB battalions for RAF missions. While occupying a smaller footprint, a mix of conventional and security force assistance (SFA) units could also conduct a combined tactical and advisory approach to building interoperability, common operating frameworks, and partner capacity across the range of military and multi-domain operations.[27] RAF missions combining conventional and SFA capabilities could be better suited to address military and nonmilitary challenges while also achieving the calibrated force posture called for in the Army’s multi-domain operating concept.[28] Indeed, the key to deterrence and shaping activities in the current and future operating environment really depends on building shared, interorganizational capacity, especially in the non-military domains of war.[29]

…it is not clear that the presence of U.S. ABCTs in Europe or elsewhere has deterred authoritarian aggression, as evidenced by Russian expansionism since 2008 and Chinese militarization of the South China Sea.

Shaping activities and deterrence of this type are as reliant on soft power—persuasion, attraction, legitimacy—as on hard power and coercion. It cannot be doubted that shrinking the size of RAF missions from armor brigade combat teams (ABCT) to battalion-plus elements may weaken conventional deterrence. On the other hand, it is not clear that the presence of U.S. ABCTs in Europe or elsewhere has deterred authoritarian aggression, as evidenced by Russian expansionism since 2008 and Chinese militarization of the South China Sea. However, it is precisely the soft power of liberalism and its undergirding promise of participatory and civic governance—in a phrase, political liberty—that Russia, China, and other illiberal strongholds fear the most and which have the potential to inspire and empower the friends of liberal republicanism wherever they are. Said another way, it is not that the liberal West must attempt to subvert its authoritarian enemies as they try to subvert liberalism, but rather that the West must revive and extend the sphere of the spirit of liberal republicanism while empowering the defenders of democracy to ennoble whatever regimes they find themselves in, even and especially degenerate—e.g., authoritarian, oligarchic, sectarian, theocratic, ethnic nationalist—regimes. Despite the fact that authoritarian forces operate freely within the West’s strategic support zones, the West must have a plan to assist and even protect pro-democratic populations and movements anywhere.

The broad concept outlined above will require a coalitional and whole-of-government approach as well as strong civil-military relationships. This latter point cannot be stressed enough. Remember that the main goal of authoritarianism is to invert civil society itself and, where possible, to enable proxy and sympathetic forces to seize and consolidate state power. Nothing could be more debilitating to the deterrent power of the liberal order than a series of civil-military crises in the West facilitated by the rise of authoritarian groups able to seize, de-professionalize, and privatize military power.[30]

Conclusion

The militaries of the liberal order fail to secure the societies they serve when they cede the informational and nonmilitary space to authoritarian assaults, and at great peril. Informational weapons and methods of authoritarianism are part of a military revolution with the power to degenerate the liberal order and thereby weaken Western resolve and military readiness. As the U.S. and its partners prepare to deter or wage large scale combat operations against authoritarian imperialism from states such as China and Russia, they must also protect against illiberal vectors and nonmilitary weapons of authoritarianism that threaten to fracture military and civil capacity from within. Countering this threat requires an offensive, cost-effective, and interorganizational approach to military and nonmilitary domains to protect and promote liberal democratic conditions anywhere.

Clyde J. Daines, PhD, is an officer in the U.S. Army and a student at the Army Command and General Staff College in Fort Leavenworth, Kansas. The views expressed are the author’s alone and do not reflect those of the U.S. Army, the Department of Defense, or the U.S. Government.

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Header Image: The Global Freedom Status Map, 2020 (Freedom House).

Notes:

[1] Williamson Murray and MacGregor Knox, “Thinking About Revolutions in Warfare,” in The Dynamics of Military Revolution, 1300-2050 editors Williamson Murray and MacGregor Knox (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2001), 1-14.

[2] Jacob W. Kipp, The Methodology of Foresight and Forecasting in Soviet Military Affairs (Fort Leavenworth, Kansas: Army Combined Arms Center Soviet Army Studies Office, 1988), 1-26.

[3] Valery Gerasimov, “The Value of Science is in the Foresight: New Challenges Demand Rethinking the Forms and Methods of Carrying Out Combat Operations,” trans. Robert Coalson, Military Review 96, no. 1 (January-February 2016): 27.

[4] Hannah Arendt discerned an earlier version of this antipolitical insurgent organizing in the Origins of Totalitarianism (San Diego: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1973). In Chapter 11.2, Arendt discusses how conspiratorial fictions came to function as alternate realities that enabled authoritarian movement leaders to control sympathetic “front organizations.”

[5] Gerasimov, “Foresight,” 24-25.

[6] Gerasimov, “Foresight,” 24. Arendt is also useful here. Referring to World War II, she writes that “with its Quislings and collaborationists everywhere, [it] should have proved that racism can stir up civil conflicts in every country, and is one of the most ingenious devices ever invented for preparing civil war.” See Origins, 161 and also 373 ff.

[7] Alexander Umland, “Post-Soviet ‘Uncivil Society’ and the Rise of Aleksandr Dugin: A Case Study of the Extraparliamentary Radical Right in Contemporary Russia” (PhD diss., Trinity College Cambridge, 2007). Hannah Arendt’s history of the development of fascism from ethnic nationalism in the late 1800s through mid 1900s is a good complement to Umland’s dissertation. For more, see Arendt’s Chapter 8 of Origins of Totalitarianism.

[8] Umland, “Rise of Aleksandr Dugin,” III.5. See also George Michael, “Useful Idiots or Fellow Travelers? The Relationship between the American Far Right and Russia,” Terrorism and Political Violence 31, no. 1 (26 FEB 2019).

[9] Dunlop, “Geopolitics,” 8, 6. See also Elizabeth Grimm Arsenault and Joseph Stabile, “Confronting Russia’s Role in Transnational White Supremacist Extremism,” Just Security (06 FEB 2020), available at https://www.justsecurity.org/68420/confronting-russias-role-in-transnational-white-supremacist-extremism/.

[10] Dunlop, “Geopolitics,” 5.

[11] Gerasimov, “Foresight,” 24.

[12] U.S. Department of Defense, Summary of the National Defense Strategy of the United States of America 2018: Sharpening the American Military’s Competitive Edge (Washington, DC: Pentagon, 2018), 2, 9.

[13] Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, Description of the National Military Strategy 2018 (Washington, DC: Pentagon, 2018), 2.

[14] Headquarters, Training and Doctrine Command (TRADOC), The U.S. Army in Multi-Domain Operations 2028, TRADOC Pamphlet 525-3-1 (Washington, DC: TRADOC, 2018), vi, 7.

[15] The White House, Interim National Security Strategy Guidance (Washington, DC: White House 2021), 6.

[16] The Joint Staff, Joint Operating Environment JOE 2035: The Joint Force in a Contested and Disordered World (Washington, DC: U.S. Joint Staff, 2016), 23, 25.

[17] U.S. Air Force Warfighting Integration Capability, Global futures report: Alternative Futures of Geopolitical Competition in a Post-COVID-19 World (Washington, DC: Air Force Warfighting Integration Capability AFWIC, Strategic Foresight and Futures Branch, June 2020), 3, 9-10.

[18] See Brad Roberts, On Theories of Victory, Red and Blue, Livermore Papers on Global Security No. 7 (Livermore, CA: Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory Center for Global Research, June 2020), for an important account of the strategic problem that now faces the liberal order.

[19] Gerasimov, “Foresight,” 24.

[20] Gerasimov, “Foresight,” 24.

[21] Gerasimov, “Foresight,” 24.

[22] Kyle Wolfley, “Military Power Reimagined: The Rise and Future of Shaping,” Joint Force Quarterly 102, 3rd Quarter (Washington, DC: National Defense University Press, 2021): 23.

[23] For strategic counterinsurgency, see Andrew Mueller, “The ‘Strategic Counterinsurgency’ Model: Escaping a One-Dimensional Strategic Worldview,” Strategy Bridge (10 NOV 2021), available at https://thestrategybridge.org/the-bridge/2021/11/10/the-strategic-counterinsurgency-model-escaping-a-one-dimensional-strategic-worldview.

[24] For the Army’s approach to narrative competition as well as direct and indirect competition, see Headquarters, Department of the Army, “The Army in Military Competition: Chief of Staff Paper #2” (1 March 2021), available at https://api.army.mil/e2/c/downloads/2021/03/29/bf6c30e6/csa-paper-2-the-army-in-military-competition.pdf. This paper portrays indirect competition as more of a heading under which to group a range of military activities short of war rather than a new concept of competition. I would argue that the idea of indirect competition needs to become a standalone concept.

[25] For an example of this, see Liam P. Walsh, Enabling Others to Win in a Complex World: Maximizing Security Force Assistance Potential in the Regionally Aligned Brigade Combat Team (Carlisle Barracks, PA: U.S. Army War College Press, 2015).

[26] MAJ John Thomas Pelham IV, “Combat Multiplier: Examining the Security Force Assistance Brigade's Role in Future Army Strategic Deterrence,” Land Warfare Paper 141 (Association of the United States Army: September 2021), p. 8. Available at  https://www.ausa.org/publications/combat-multiplier-examining-security-force-assistance-brigades-role-future-army.

[27] For analysis into the challenges of force posture, multi-domain unit activity, and convergence with allies, see Jack Watling and Daniel Roper, “Occasional Paper: European Allies in US Multi-Domain Operations,” Royal United Services Institute for Defense and Security Studies (October 2019).

[28] United States Army Training and Doctrine Command, “The US Army in Multi-Domain Operations 2028,” TRADOC Pamphlet 525-3-1, 6 December 2018.

[29] For an in depth look at the importance of security force assistance to the future operating environment, see Michael Nilsen, “Once An Advisor: How Security Force Assistance is an Essential Gray Zone Activity for Deterrence in Strategic Competition” (Master of Military Art and Science thesis, United States Army Command and General Staff College, forthcoming).

[30] See Samuel Huntington, The Soldier and the State: The Theory and Politics of Civil-Military Relations (Cambridge: Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 1957) for more on the consequences of “subjective civilian control” of the military, p. 80 ff.