Digital Warfare
Digital Warfare
“World War Three will be a guerrilla information war with no division between military and civilian participation.”                                                     
Marshall McLuhan [Culture Is Our Business, 1970]
This page provides an overview of digital warfare, focusing on Russia, which appears to have the most advanced and sustained pernicious programme of disinformation in the world. For many years Russia has been perfecting the technique of 'reflexive control' and it has shown itself adept at exploiting the dark web, the vulnerabilities inherent in social media, and 'black cash' (untraceable, corrupt money) to attack Western interests, create public anxiety and confusion, and undermine democracy.[1] When its activities are exposed or challenged it either denies any knowledge of the charge or dismisses it as Russophiabia or more often than not, both.[2]
Page Contents
1   Reflexive Control
Reflexive control has long been taught at  Russian military schools; it is part of Russia's national security strategy — which has rightly or wrongly been dubbed 'The Gerasimov Doctrine'[3]. Today, reflexive control is key to Russia’s hybrid warfare plan, which has since the collapse of the Soviet Union (in 1991) morphed into a new Cold War.[4]
Reflexive control is a "sustained campaign that feeds an opponent selected information so that the opponent makes the decisions that one wants him/her to. Methods of reflexive control include spreading false information, leaking partial information at opportune moments, and projecting a different posture of oneself than what may actually be the case… The most fundamental way to do this is to locate the weak link in the system and exploit it through moral arguments, psychological tactics, or appeals to specific leaders’ character."[5]
Reflexive control involves:
●  Direct lies for the purpose of disinformation both of the domestic population and foreign societies;
●  Concealing critically important information;
●  Burying valuable information in a mass of information dross;
●  Simplification, confirmation and repetition (inculcation);
●  Terminological substitution: use of concepts and terms whose meaning is unclear or has undergone qualitative change, which makes it harder to form a true picture of events;
●  Introducing taboos on specific forms of information or categories of news;
●  Image recognition: known politicians or celebrities can take part in political actions to order, thus exerting influence on the world view of their followers;
●  Providing negative information, which is more readily accepted by the audience than positive.
There are a number of short videas on reflexive control on the Videos Page. This includes a disturbing talk by cybersecurity expert Laura Galante, who argues that Russia's strategy of reflexive control exploited the public's brains in the 2016 US election and that "the real target of anyone looking to influence geopolitics is dastardly simple: it's you."
2   Information Laundering
"The point of modern propaganda isn’t only to misinform or push an agenda. It is to exhaust your critical thinking, to annihilate truth."    Garry Kasparov
Russia’s ability to successfully conduct hybrid warfare is "predicated on the creation of a fog of ambiguity between the Kremlin’s actions and the Kremlin itself. By conducting operations through an ad hoc network of proxies — whose connection to the Kremlin is difficult to definitively establish — the Russian government is able to maintain plausible deniability and thus lower the diplomatic and military costs of its actions.[6] This presents an obvious challenge: How can the West respond to an adversary who denies even being present on the battlefield?” (see below).

The spread of disinformation has been likened to the laundering of illicit funds. Just as ill-gotten money needs to be moved from an illegitimate source into an established financial institution, disinformation is most powerful when a façade of legitimacy is created through ‘information laundering’.
Effective disinformation campaigns rely on social media accounts that can disseminate information in a manner that masks both its intent and its source. In the money laundering context, this process is often achieved through the use of shell companies — firms with no physical location and little-to-no assets — because they are cheap to establish, provide anonymity, and can be jettisoned if their true purpose is revealed. And one approach is ‘layering’. This involves either the use of middle-men (who seemingly have no relation to the originator of the information) or indirect citations (known as ‘cascading citations’) from unsubstantiated social media posts to seemingly legitimate news sources. The use of such intermediaries provided the information with a greater sense of legitimacy. “Once a misleading rumour enters the ‘mainstream,’ it is almost impossible to combat, even if it is subsequently debunked." [7]
3   Sputnik & RT
“One side is handicapped [wanting to stick to the facts], and the other side seems not to be, and that’s always a difficult playingfield to be on.”   Ben Nimmo [Atlantic Council]
Key instruments in Russia getting its message out are Sputnik (formerly The Voice of Russia) and RT (formerly Russia Today). 
Sputnik is a news service, established by a Russian government-controlled news agency. It is geared towards non-Russian audiences, and has been widely accused of bias and spreading disinformation. Sputnik currently operates news websites in over 30 languages and runs newswire services around the clock; it also produces photo essays, live streaming, infographics and public opinion surveys.
Shortly after it was launched (in 2014) Foreign Policy magazine described Sputnik as a "slick and internet-savvy outlet of Kremlin propaganda" which "remixes President Vladimir Putin's brand of revanchist nationalism for an international audience... beating a predictable drum of anti-Western rhetoric." (Wikipedia) Sputnik has also been accused of acting as "a spoiler to try and disrupt or blur information unfriendly to Russia, such as Russian troops' widely alleged involvement in the war in Ukraine."
RT launched its first international news channel in 2005, and today describes itself as “a global, round-the-clock news network of eight TV channels, broadcasting news, current affairs and documentaries, with digital platforms in six languages and RUPTLY, the video news agency.” It broadcasts in English, Spanish, French and Arabic, and makes a point of using native speakers; it also has web presences in Russian and German, and is available in more than 100 countries spanning five continents.

For an overview of RT and the role it plays in Russia’s ongoing ‘War on Truth’ see Stephen Hutchings's April 2018 blog. In it, Hutchings (Professor of Russian Studies at the University of Manchester) observes that RT’s “real success is on YouTube, Instagram and Twitter where it has grasped how to work with the grain of the decentred and elusive meanings that characterise much of the online world.” To address the challenge posed by RT, Hutchings argues that UK security policymakers need to: recognise that RT’s ‘War on Truth’ belongs to a dynamic, reflexive process and avoid knee-jerk ‘counter-measures’ (like encouraging broadcasting bans); deploy the UK’s own public diplomacy tools (like the BBC World Service) to engage with RT in more dialogic, less dismissive, ways; identify and properly understand RT’s audiences rather than assuming them all to be naive dolts; and "address those flaws in the architecture of the vast digital realm which enable RT to thrive alongside other neo-authoritarian tools of influence."
The European Parliament has accused Spunik and RT of ‘information warfare’, and placed these Russian media organisations alongside terrorist organisations such as the Islamic State.
Earlier this year the European Commission said Russia and China were running “targeted influence operations and disinformation campaigns in the EU, its neighbourhood, and globally”. While the charge against Russia has been levelled on many occasions, this is the first time the EU executive has publicly named China as a source of disinformation.[8]
4   The West's Response
How Western governments are responding to Russia's disinformation campaign (and those of other hostile foreign states), and what constitutes an 'Act of War', are discussed elsewhere on the website, here and here respectively.
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Notes
1     I don't claim to have any special knowledge of the topic: the material on this page is all open source. For an excellent description of Russia's disinformation campaign see this article by Ben Nimmo of the Atlantic Council's DFRLab; and here is another coherent (and chilling) account of how Russian information warfare is undermining democracy.
2    Here's Russia's view on American politics and how the US Goivernment has been reacting to the 'Russian threat'.  In response to a question from American journalist Megyn Kelly at the plenary meeting of the St Petersburg International Economic Forum (June 2, 2017) President Putin responded: “It is an attempt to lay the blame at someone else’s door. This is not our problem. The problem is in US politics... The other team lost. They  are reluctant to acknowledge the mistake. It is easier to say, “We are not to blame, the Russians are to blame, they interfered in our election.” It reminds me of anti-Semitism: the Jews are to blame for everything. We know what such sentiments can lead to. They lead to nothing good. The thing to do is simply to work and think of how to get things right”. [op cit]
3    The Doctrine is named for Russia’s Chief of the General Staff, General Valery Gerasimov, but some well-informed observers think it's a myth: "this is a supposed plan for combined psychological, political, subversive, and military operations to destabilize the West. Or perhaps just covert operations and disinformation, without the shooting. Or maybe the aim is to destroy the whole architecture of the global order. The very confusion about what exactly this “doctrine” entails betrays the basic point: it doesn’t exist."
4    "In the Russian context the term disinformation (dezinformatsiya) is often used to embrace a number of other concepts: ‘strategic deception’, ‘active measures’, information operations, psychological operations, concealment and deniability. The common factor is the use of various information tools – with some analysts referring to it as the ‘information weapon’ – to convey selective, incomplete and/or distorted messages and influence the thinking of an adversary. Disinformation is often woven into traditional diplomacy, ‘soft power’ in the form of trade and cultural links, or the promotion of ‘strategic narratives’ by official sources which act as a ‘force multiplier’ in shaping the views of target audiences. It may also be aimed at undermining the credibility or confidence of perceived adversaries by disrupting their own narratives, sowing confusion and mistrust, and – according to some studies - fostering ‘networks of influence’ (political, business, security, media) that seek to undermine state cohesion or even achieve state capture." [Extract from the CREST Report featured and dicussed further here.]
5   The extract if from an article in the Georgetown Security Studies Review. For a more in-depth discussion see Keir Giles's 'Handbook of Russian Information Warfare' [2016]. Here's a pertinent extract: “in more recent constructs, involvement of conventional military forces is reduced to a minimum... ‘Of great importance… is the use of the global internet network to exert a massive, dedicated impact on the consciousness of the citizens of states that are the targets of the aggression. Information resources have become one of the most effective types of weapon. Their extensive employment enables the situation in a country to be destabilized from within in a matter of days… In this manner, indirect and asymmetric actions and methods of conducting hybrid wars enable the opposing side to be deprived of its actual sovereignty without the state’s territory being seized.’ In fact, senior Russian officers have suggested that information effects — including using the internet to affect mass consciousness — can in some cases replace armed intervention altogether.” (p18, with references cited there)
6  This is “a strategy with deep roots: maskirovka — a Soviet-era military doctrine that translates as ‘mask’ or ‘masquerade’ — established operational deceit as a core tenet of both conventional and irregular warfare. While modern maskirovka is most commonly associated with the use of “little green men” to occupy Crimea, it is a tactic that is also deeply ingrained in the Kremlin’s ongoing disinformation campaign against the United States and Europe.” One way of detecting information laundering is where multiple accounts with common IP addresses are set up rapidly, sometimes outside of normal daytime hours for the account’s claimed physical location, and routinely retweet or share posts from other accounts with no additional activity. [Source]
7  Condensed extracts from a Policy Brief by Alliance for Securing Democract.

8   China has been accused by Brussels of running disinformation campaigns inside the European Union, as the bloc set out a plan to tackle a “huge wave” of false facts about the coronavirus pandemic. [Guardian report]
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