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Grant Piper's avatar

Thanks for the in depth explanation of what you see going on - I have not read much written about ISR in UKR but thought it would be critical.. Some of my thoughts, as an ex-FAC(A), but way out of touch these days. I think that RU has prepared it's forces for NATO/WW3, so a total war. This is why this op is called an SMO. They still need to keep their main forces and abilities prepared for war, not showing them to everyone in UKR. If they decide it is a 'war', then the NATO++ SIGINT aircraft will immediately be targeted, as will the satellites, and probably many NATO installations. So much of what we have seen could well be 'deception' through limitations on equipment and usage, thus the lessons learned may be false once war starts proper - the relatively small role of airpower for example.

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Flabbergaster's avatar

Hi, lot's of interesting information and analysis.

One part did cause me to raise a few eyebrows though, when you talked about the 'Gerasimov Doctrine'. To the best of my knowledge, it doesn't exist. The notion was invented by the west (Mark Galeotti to be more precise, after which the MSM and intelligence services ran with it), to be able to point to Russia as the evil mastermind behind whatever bad happened in the world ("it's Russian hybrid warfare! It's Russian meddling/interfering! That's what they do, they have a whole doctrine for it!"), and by attaching Gerasimov's name to it, they tried to label the very thing they were doing themselves (colour revolutions, coups, rigging elections, assassinating people, spreading disinformation through manipulated media, etc) as something foreign, and Russian in particular.

They didn't invent this notion out of thin air, there was something akin to this which was much older, the Primakov Doctrine. That was focused on foreign policy and Russia's place in the world, and not a military policy or doctrine.

Gerasimov in turn, wrote an article in February 2013 called 'the value of science in prediction' (that's the translation at least), in the 'Voyenno-Promyshlennyy Kurier' (I hope I got that name right). It's not a long article, and in it he describes how the rules of war have changed, and how as a result the classical distinction between military operations and civilian ones have become so blurred that it's no longer valid to distinguish them at all. He does this based on what the West had been doing (Arab, spring, colour revolutions, etc), and describes, in general terms, what challenges that poses for the traditional military.

There's two graphic's in his article, one called 'Change in the character of warfare - Achievement of political goals' and the other is 'The Role of Nonmilitary Methods in the Resolution of Interstate Conflicts - The primary phases (stages) of conflict development'. It is analytical in nature, it is not proscribing anything like a practical doctrine.

The article was published in a, by western standards, rather obscure publication, and was pretty much missed by mainstream annalists in the west, until Mark Galeotti picked it up, who recognised the author, and who was instantly intrigued. He then wrote an article about it, came up with the name 'Gerasomiv Doctrine' and pretty much made up a lot of stuff that's not in the original article. Now his article did catch the attention of the rest of the western media pack, and like 'chinese whispers', his article got twisted and subverted in turn, leading to the purely western invention now paraded as the 'Gerasimov Doctrine'.

Galeotti wrote another article a couple of years ago, in which he apologised for having invented the term and inadvertently created a shitstorm based on a lie.

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