How Hot is Ukraine Gonna Get?

[The_Capt]

29 minutes ago, photon said:

I wonder whether our staff colleges teach the Odyssey, which is all about informational warfare?

Well I know of at least one that does not.  You get it at first year of military college but it is retained for about 15 seconds by most cadets.

We went with a “STEM will save us” model in the west.  The obscenity of the term “political science” is one example.

They often ask me what questions to ask new hires and I always go with “what do you read?”  The answer I am looking for is fiction: we wrap our lies in “truth” and we hide our truths in our lies.

Edited September 25, 2022 by The_Capt

[billbindc]

1 hour ago, The_Capt said:

Well you should not have been dismissed, and if I was part of that dismissal I owe you a Coke.  

The potential of information warfare is - and has been - definitive in this war.  We have been largely playing defence and Ukraine has been weaponizing truth brilliantly.  However, this is one area of warfare we in the West are coming from behind compared to Russia - or at least were.

For example, during 2014 in Crimea the Russian had hacked the telecommunications system and were able to send individual texts to protestors against the annexation - while they were protesting.

Mis and Dis information are one area that the Russians excelled at prior to this war, right up until they started throwing up all over themselves.  You can still see it in some circles but neither the information warfare acumen, nor cyber-Geddon seems to be doing much for the Russians.  We know they are out there and up to stuff but not at the levels we were expecting.  It kind of looks like they have divorced the methods of subversive warfare and conventional - which is another sign we overestimated their sophistication.

So why are we not doing the same:

- Policy.  We have very limited policy authority for these actions.  Mainly based on political risk aversion and lack of legal frameworks.  For example, is it legal to use disinformation to attack the RA logistical system when it may cause civilian suffering?  How much?  The LOAC does not account for some of the 2nd and 3rd order effects, so the lawyers have largely avoided then issue.  We can get a lot of people killed with information and subversive warfare and right now in the West we have yet to rationalize that with the rules based order - Russia, and China, do not have so much trouble.

- Tactics and doctrine.  The expertise to do this work exists but it is not concentrated within the military.  Hell, we are grappling with how to recruit cyber and information operators - these guys can make seven figures in private industry out of college and we offer them a rank of private and a lot of being yelled at.  Then there is the corporate knowledge base.  Try briefing a 50 year old general on what information warfare targeting and see why you get - a serious lack of knowledge and experience as it is something we let public affairs deal with.  Finally offensive information warfare is really an area we get icky with because it is basically lying to hurt, which is very unsportsmanlike and not something we have spent a lot of time studying.

- Human Terrain expertise.  We have specialists and experts but nowhere near the capacity and density we had back during the Cold War.  This means we could come off sounding like Tokyo Rose if we tried your massive info warfare plan - “Russian gangsters, your Putin is sub-optimal leader and your borscht is getting cold”.  Building that to a competitive point is going to take time.

So should we get in this game - definitely, about ten years ago.  Are we there yet, nope.  

It should be also pointed out that there is quite a bit of information warfare happening already targeted at senior levels of the Russian military and political/intelligence elites. It just looks different now because it can be sent direct to a cellphone or email account and tailored individually. So it's  happening, it's just not as obvious.

[billbindc]

4 hours ago, Bulletpoint said:

"Hey, this is not what we signed up for..."

This would fundamentally change the purpose of NATO. It would go from a general defensive alliance to being an anti-Russian alliance.

And why would countries sign up for full NATO membership if they knew they could end up getting automatically involved in wars to protect non-NATO countries?

Why would they sign up if they could stay "neutral" but just invite NATO to come protect them if they ever had the need?

It would be closer to the mark to say that NATO is going *back* to being an anti-Russia alliance. "Keep the Russians out, the Americans in and the Germans down" as Ismay had it.

 

[Haiduk]

Probably T-90A of 2nd GMRD, but tactical sign is unclear

 

[Combatintman]

1 hour ago, The_Capt said:

- Policy.  We have very limited policy authority for these actions.  Mainly based on political risk aversion and lack of legal frameworks.  For example, is it legal to use disinformation to attack the RA logistical system when it may cause civilian suffering?  How much?  The LOAC does not account for some of the 2nd and 3rd order effects, so the lawyers have largely avoided then issue.  We can get a lot of people killed with information and subversive warfare and right now in the West we have yet to rationalize that with the rules based order - Russia, and China, do not have so much trouble.

- Tactics and doctrine.  The expertise to do this work exists but it is not concentrated within the military.  Hell, we are grappling with how to recruit cyber and information operators - these guys can make seven figures in private industry out of college and we offer them a rank of private and a lot of being yelled at.  Then there is the corporate knowledge base.  Try briefing a 50 year old general on what information warfare targeting and see why you get - a serious lack of knowledge and experience as it is something we let public affairs deal with.  Finally offensive information warfare is really an area we get icky with because it is basically lying to hurt, which is very unsportsmanlike and not something we have spent a lot of time studying.

- Human Terrain expertise.  We have specialists and experts but nowhere near the capacity and density we had back during the Cold War.  This means we could come off sounding like Tokyo Rose if we tried your massive info warfare plan - “Russian gangsters, your Putin is sub-optimal leader and your borscht is getting cold”.  Building that to a competitive point is going to take time.

So should we get in this game - definitely, about ten years ago.  Are we there yet, nope.  

I concur ... My bolds from personal but not well-remunerated experience  at the coal face of PSYOPS and the management level of PSYOPs and Information Ops:

1.  All of our PSYOPs product had to go through the lawyer and to get it through we had to describe the First, Second and Third order effects and then needed command sign-off once the lawyer was happy.  Not only describing those effects was hard work but persuading certain lawyers was a bit of a to-and-fro experience.  That whole process was usually more difficult than designing and putting the product together in the first place.

2.  I was the yeller rather than the yellee by the time I got into the Information Ops game. 

3.  Not necessarily lying - our doctrine did allow it, whereas other nations including the US did not.  I can only think of maybe one occasion where we did in my nine months in Afghanistan in the role and that had to be signed off by a two star.  The main reason for not fibbing is that the truth usually catches up with you and then you lose all credibility as a source of information.  You can get it away with it in a fluid tactical situation but not in the insurgency game. but it usually ends up backfiring because inevitably the truth will surface eventually. 

[The_Capt]

10 minutes ago, Combatintman said:

Not necessarily lying - our doctrine did allow it, whereas other nations including the US did not.

Glad yours does, black psyops goes over like a fart in church in my neck of the woods.  As to the truth - why is it having such a hard time in the West then?  "The truth will out" seems anachronistic in this day and age and we have seen the other teams really be able to reinforce echo chambers with lies people often are just looking for permission to believe.

We have thought and discussed what a western version of reflexive control might look like but in some circles it is right next to nuclear weapons and offensive cyber in the palatability playbook.

Tricky business, and we were actually very good at back during the Cold War; however, like anything else it take investment.  I have zero doubt the US intelligence machine is pulling on every thread it can right now but the wrong people appear to keep falling out of buildings - or maybe they are the right people we just don't see it yet.

And for any of the "government is in my fillings" leaning, trust me, Madison Avenue and Silicon Valley are far deeper in your dental work.

Edited September 25, 2022 by The_Capt

[Combatintman]

8 minutes ago, The_Capt said:

Glad yours does, black psyops goes over like a fart in church in my neck of the woods.  As to the truth - why is it having such a hard time in the West then?  "The truth will out" seems anachronistic in this day and age and we have seen the other teams really be able to reinforce echo chambers with lies people often are just looking for permission to believe.

Sure - I get it but I am still a believer in fact-based narratives.  I suppose we were lucky because we had fairly unsophisticated target audiences who had access to limited mediums so it made our job easier to some extent.  Nonetheless we struggled because we were unable to achieve the persistence and access required for certain target audiences due to the limited physical footprint.

With this conflict, the resources would need to be huge to do info ops justice.  Looking at just the PSYOPs side of it, all of the available mediums are being used and the volume of traffic is huge.  This thread is a small subset of it - by the time you've written a post and hit submit, there are three posts on the thread that you haven't seen.  The potential target audiences - or segments thereof are also potentially massive.  In those conditions of course you could feed echo chambers with big fat fibs and probably get away with it.  I always find it fascinating how a lot of slightly less than factual propaganda/PSYOPs messaging gets recycled today and how certain narratives or labels stick in people's minds, whether factual or not.  The killing of the IRGC chap Soleimani being a classic example - I remember hearing it on al-Jazeera first and the word "assassination" was used.  That gained a lot of traction in many news outlets or sources, some of which who ought to know better:

Soleimani assassination | Today's latest from Al Jazeera

2 years after the U.S. killed Iran's Qasem Soleimani, tensions remain : NPR

Qasem Soleimani - Wikipedia

Afghanistan Reacts to Soleimani’s Death – The Diplomat

Words are certainly important combined with the right target audience analysis you could certainly cause trouble in some of those echo chambers, but it comes back to picking those target audiences from a massive pool. 

I've certainly been following the discussions about the manoeuvring in the Kremlin, what's going on with the nats and all that and having an idle thought or two about how you could influence some of that.  An academic exercise for me really because, despite the great insights from various posters here, I don't have sufficient understanding to really come up with something that would fly.

[LongLeftFlank]

 

 

 

[The_Capt]

21 minutes ago, Combatintman said:

Sure - I get it but I am still a believer in fact-based narratives.  I suppose we were lucky because we had fairly unsophisticated target audiences who had access to limited mediums so it made our job easier to some extent.  Nonetheless we struggled because we were unable to achieve the persistence and access required for certain target audiences due to the limited physical footprint.

With this conflict, the resources would need to be huge to do info ops justice.  Looking at just the PSYOPs side of it, all of the available mediums are being used and the volume of traffic is huge.  This thread is a small subset of it - by the time you've written a post and hit submit, there are three posts on the thread that you haven't seen.  The potential target audiences - or segments thereof are also potentially massive.

Well there is a solid point that the truth itself can create a lot of effects.

You hit the nail on the head on resource load to do this right.  It would be massive 24/7, multi-lingual and multi-cultural.  You would need satellite analytics teams with just about every facet of human effects represented.  Mapping out the human space in Belarus, Russia and diaspora world wide would take time - nodes, links and mavens. 

We drove ourselves nuts doing it the VEO space let alone a country of 144 million.  I personally don’t think it is really possible without machine learning/AI assist in this day and age.  But the other team has moved out on it, no denying that.  I personally think we need to really get into the game.  I am not sure we will get it together in time for this war, but how much is really going on is out out of sight, maybe we will find out once it is over.

[quakerparrot67]

19 hours ago, Haiduk said:

Elves? )

 

entings.

 

cheers,

rob

[danfrodo]

2 hours ago, The_Capt said:

Well I know of at least one that does not.  You get it at first year of military college but it is retained for about 15 seconds by most cadets.

We went with a “STEM will save us” model in the west.  The obscenity of the term “political science” is one example.

They often ask me what questions to ask new hires and I always go with “what do you read?”  The answer I am looking for is fiction: we wrap our lies in “truth” and we hide our truths in our lies.

As author of The Things They Carried said (very short paraphrase version here) "fiction tells the bigger truth".  Nonfiction often lies using the truth.

Meanwhile, seems like no movement in Kherson area.  And RU seems to be getting at least some supplies over the river. 

In Oskil/Lyman sectors, looks like maybe an important breakthrough possible for UKR.  Yet another cutting of critical RU supply lines will hopefully occur. 

As far as psyops, I will return to my idea from hundreds of pages ago.  At night, SOF inserts multiple cases of vodka near positions to later be attacked.  Tie brightly colored ballons so RU will see them in the morning.  There's zero chance RU will not drink the stuff all at once.  Won't have to use any artillery at all and will be easy to overrun.  This will be even more effective for the new conscripts. 

And can you imagine trying to train these clowns while they are having severe alcohol withdrawals?  Or maybe they'll just be sent straight to the front, shaking and delirious.

[Haiduk]

When Russians captured Russians (Russian fighters of "Legion of Freedom" captured Russian troopers)

 

[Battlefront.com]

6 hours ago, Bulletpoint said:

And why would countries sign up for full NATO membership if they knew they could end up getting automatically involved in wars to protect non-NATO countries?

Automatically?  No.  They would get under the umbrella only if NATO decided it was in NATO's best interests.  Nothing automatic about that.  Nations that want to have an automatic level of protection have to petition to become members of NATO.

Having NATO revise its charter to formalize proactive defensive measures seems like a good idea to me.  For that to happen, though, the members would have to agree to it.  In that case it very much is "what they signed up for".

Steve

[The_Capt]

18 minutes ago, danfrodo said:

As author of The Things They Carried said (very short paraphrase version here) "fiction tells the bigger truth".  Nonfiction often lies using the truth.

Meanwhile, seems like no movement in Kherson area.  And RU seems to be getting at least some supplies over the river. 

In Oskil/Lyman sectors, looks like maybe an important breakthrough possible for UKR.  Yet another cutting of critical RU supply lines will hopefully occur. 

As far as psyops, I will return to my idea from hundreds of pages ago.  At night, SOF inserts multiple cases of vodka near positions to later be attacked.  Tie brightly colored ballons so RU will see them in the morning.  There's zero chance RU will not drink the stuff all at once.  Won't have to use any artillery at all and will be easy to overrun.  This will be even more effective for the new conscripts. 

And can you imagine trying to train these clowns while they are having severe alcohol withdrawals?  Or maybe they'll just be sent straight to the front, shaking and delirious.

Not sure you would need anything so elaborate as SOF just drive a truck up and park it:

“Noting videos on social media purportedly showing Russian conscripts passed out from too much vodka, the tweet continued, “We also know that soon these ‘soldiers’ will be at the front, and with such a love for alcohol, it will be easier for them to die on our land.”

https://www.ctvnews.ca/world/ukraine-mocks-russia-s-partial-mobilization-on-twitter-1.6083536

[Haiduk]

Somewhere...

 

[FancyCat]

Wouldn't it be best for Ukraine to take the lead in any psyops with NATO providing assistance as needed? Not sure the U.S is up to it, and Ukraine having fought Russia since 2014 should be way more tuned to how to deal with Russian forces.

[Battlefront.com]

1 hour ago, Combatintman said:

I've certainly been following the discussions about the manoeuvring in the Kremlin, what's going on with the nats and all that and having an idle thought or two about how you could influence some of that.  An academic exercise for me really because, despite the great insights from various posters here, I don't have sufficient understanding to really come up with something that would fly.

Your personal experiences related above are greatly appreciated.  Always interesting to see what our customers get up to when they aren't blasting pixels into virtual dust.

The problem I see with PSYOPS on the complacent Russian middle is that they are, by their nature, conditioned to not react at all.  The middle of a Western country doesn't think that way.  They, unlike their Russian counterpart, believe that they have power and sway over what happens within their country.  They are lazy and self centered (to put it crudely), therefore they allow (key word!) the political/social extremes to do what they do.

The point of this is you could sit 50% of the Russian population down, show them reality, show them what it is going to lead to, and they'd just collectively shrug their shoulders.  "Yup, that looks pretty bad for sure.  However, what do you expect us to do about it?  Risk our lives?  We'd rather let things run their course and someone new tell us what to do and when to do it.  Now bugger off and leave us be".

What can be done, however, is screw around with the RU Nats.  That would be pretty easy and straight forward.  For example, when Girkin or Rybar criticizes the MoD, reinforce it with messaging that extends that to show how deep the rot goes.  Girkin and Rybar deliberately avoid doing this because it would eventually led their readers to think the war is lost.  From there you get them to start holding Putin responsible for the whole mess.  Since nobody on the PSYOPS team has to worry about FSB retaliation in the middle of the night, there's no worry about "going there".  It just has to be done subtly over a period of time, accompanied by parroting nationalist goals, otherwise Russian paranoia will sniff it out as being from the West.

Another one that could be done is getting the RU Nats bloggers to turn on each other.  Make the case, real or not, that Rybar is a sock puppet for Wagner.  Push the narrative that PMCs are taking resources and glory away from the Red Army.  Attempt to humiliate Girkin as a washed up blowhard who is weakening Russia's resolve to be great.  Etc.

Anyway, there is more that could be done on the information side of things by the West, however I don't think there's much hope of moving the middle to take action against the regime until it is ready all on its own to do so.

Steve

[Haiduk]

Zelenskiy in own interview to CBS said US handed over to Ukraine two NASAMS batteries

[dan/california]

1 hour ago, Combatintman said:

Sure - I get it but I am still a believer in fact-based narratives.  I suppose we were lucky because we had fairly unsophisticated target audiences who had access to limited mediums so it made our job easier to some extent.  Nonetheless we struggled because we were unable to achieve the persistence and access required for certain target audiences due to the limited physical footprint.

Regarding persistence and volume of communication, Russian TV is basically fox news on every channel, all day. every day. The sheer volume of crap being shoveled down peoples throats is beyond astounding. 

 

5 hours ago, Haiduk said:

Well, maybe I confused guidance and homing, but it's just discussion about terms. I just meant Strela-10 has opportunity to fight low thermal signature UAVs, using photocontrast/optical channel 

Does anyone have book recommendations on missile guidance, radar, and electronic warfare? This war has convinced me I don't know enough about it. Those commenters who wish to inform me I don't know enough about anything, well I am open to other book recommendations as well.

4 hours ago, The_Capt said:

Well you should not have been dismissed, and if I was part of that dismissal I owe you a Coke.  

The potential of information warfare is - and has been - definitive in this war.  We have been largely playing defence and Ukraine has been weaponizing truth brilliantly.  However, this is one area of warfare we in the West are coming from behind compared to Russia - or at least were.

For example, during 2014 in Crimea the Russian had hacked the telecommunications system and were able to send individual texts to protestors against the annexation - while they were protesting.

Mis and Dis information are one area that the Russians excelled at prior to this war, right up until they started throwing up all over themselves.  You can still see it in some circles but neither the information warfare acumen, nor cyber-Geddon seems to be doing much for the Russians.  We know they are out there and up to stuff but not at the levels we were expecting.  It kind of looks like they have divorced the methods of subversive warfare and conventional - which is another sign we overestimated their sophistication.

So why are we not doing the same:

- Policy.  We have very limited policy authority for these actions.  Mainly based on political risk aversion and lack of legal frameworks.  For example, is it legal to use disinformation to attack the RA logistical system when it may cause civilian suffering?  How much?  The LOAC does not account for some of the 2nd and 3rd order effects, so the lawyers have largely avoided then issue.  We can get a lot of people killed with information and subversive warfare and right now in the West we have yet to rationalize that with the rules based order - Russia, and China, do not have so much trouble.

- Tactics and doctrine.  The expertise to do this work exists but it is not concentrated within the military.  Hell, we are grappling with how to recruit cyber and information operators - these guys can make seven figures in private industry out of college and we offer them a rank of private and a lot of being yelled at.  Then there is the corporate knowledge base.  Try briefing a 50 year old general on what information warfare targeting and see why you get - a serious lack of knowledge and experience as it is something we let public affairs deal with.  Finally offensive information warfare is really an area we get icky with because it is basically lying to hurt, which is very unsportsmanlike and not something we have spent a lot of time studying.

- Human Terrain expertise.  We have specialists and experts but nowhere near the capacity and density we had back during the Cold War.  This means we could come off sounding like Tokyo Rose if we tried your massive info warfare plan - “Russian gangsters, your Putin is sub-optimal leader and your borscht is getting cold”.  Building that to a competitive point is going to take time.

So should we get in this game - definitely, about ten years ago.  Are we there yet, nope.  

Our biggest problem in the info war is the sheer volume the other side puts out. Even more so in Russian and languages not commonly spoken in NATO. Our GREAT advantage is summed up by a movie quote " If you stop telling lies about me, I will stop telling the truth about you". The Russians really are utter B$$$####ds. They really do treat the parts of Ukraine they occupy like a disorganized concentration camp. They would/have treat/treated anybody else they have/would like to conquer the same way.  That is why the places that have had the misfortune of having the Russians around provide %220 to Ukraine.

3 hours ago, The_Capt said:

Well I know of at least one that does not.  You get it at first year of military college but it is retained for about 15 seconds by most cadets.

We went with a “STEM will save us” model in the west.  The obscenity of the term “political science” is one example.

They often ask me what questions to ask new hires and I always go with “what do you read?”  The answer I am looking for is fiction: we wrap our lies in “truth” and we hide our truths in our lies.

See the book recommendations I posted last night. The most powerful thing about teaching things though interesting fiction is that it will be retained. I don't think this can overemphasized. It can be really hard to do to order, but when it works it the results are orders of magnitude greater than any other way. A person could make the same argument for games that teach the correct lessons, anybody know of one of those?

[Billy Ringo]

A huge thanks to all for the comments/input on psyops.  My narrow scope of expectations focused on jamming a couple of Russian TV stations to "educate" the Russians.   Had NO idea about the multi-faceted, multiple language, depth, complexity and elaborate messaging required to be effective.

This entire thread is flat-out amazing.  Props to all who contribute.

[dan/california]

Everything this guy puts out should be translated, animated, a pushed out on Russian Speaking telegram as hard as humanly possible. 

[Raptor341]

14 minutes ago, dan/california said:

 

Does anyone have book recommendations on missile guidance, radar, and electronic warfare? This war has convinced me I don't know enough about it. Those commenters who wish to inform me I don't know enough about anything, well I am open to other book recommendations as well.

I may be able to help you here, send me a PM.

[Haiduk]

Almost ten days of rains and here is...

Bogged M1142

YPR-765, sliding even on light mud

 

[Taranis]

3 hours ago, Haiduk said:

Probably T-90A of 2nd GMRD, but tactical sign is unclear

 

failed reverse

[Harmon Rabb]

20 hours ago, Haiduk said:

Elves? )

 

When the forest starts speaking Ukrainian.