Russian backs tactics for intervening on foreign soil

MOSCOW — The chief of Russia’s armed forces on Saturday endorsed the kind of tactics used by his country to intervene abroad, repeating a philosophy of so-called hybrid war that has earned him notoriety in the West, especially among U.S. officials who have accused Russia of election meddling in 2016.

At a conference on the future of Russian military strategy, Gen. Valery Gerasimov, chief of the general staff, said Russia should bring a blend of political, economic and military power to bear against its adversaries, including the United States.

The speech outlined what some Western analysts consider the signature strategy of Russia under President Vladimir Putin — and what other experts call a simple recognition of modern war and politics.

Gerasimov said Russia’s armed forces must maintain both “classical” and “asymmetrical” potential, using jargon for the mix of combat, intelligence and propaganda tools that the Kremlin has deployed during conflicts in places such as Syria and Ukraine.

He cited the Syrian civil war as an example of successful Russian intervention abroad. The combination of a small expeditionary force with “information operations” had provided lessons that could be expanded to “defend and advance national interests beyond the borders of Russia,” he said.

The speech was noteworthy for echoing themes Gerasimov laid out in an article published in 2013 in The Military-Industrial Courier, a Russian army journal, that many now see as a foreshadowing of the country’s embrace of “hybrid war” in Ukraine, where Russia has backed separatist rebels and used soldiers in unmarked uniforms to seize Crimea.

Though definitions of the term vary, some analysts see a progression from the blend of subversion and propaganda used in Ukraine to the tactics later directed against Western nations, including the United States, where Russia’s military intelligence agency hacked into Democratic Party computers in the run-up to the 2016 election. Russia denies interfering in the election.

A U.S. interagency report on the Russian election meddling blamed the intelligence agency, which is known as the GRU and is at least formally subordinate to Gerasimov, for hacking the Democratic National Committee servers and releasing documents to damage the campaign of Hillary Clinton and support her opponent, Donald Trump.

In the 2013 article, Gerasimov wrote that there were no clear borders between war and peace in the modern world. Militaries fight in peacetime, he said, and political and economic means are deployed in war.

That article prompted some Western analysts to call the Russian approach the “Gerasimov Doctrine,” though other experts object to crediting the general or the Kremlin alone.

“The idea that the Russians have discovered some new art of war is wrong,” Mark Galeotti, a Russia expert at the Royal United Services Institute and author of Russian Political War, said of the general’s latest speech. “This is basically the Russians trying to grapple with the modern world.”

Hybrid war has long been a Western military term of art, analysts say, especially in the context of counterterrorism. The phrase has been adopted in discussion of Israel’s security and the United States’ occupation of Iraq, for instance, and in 2005 it appeared in the title of an article co-authored by James Mattis, then a U.S. lieutenant general and later Trump’s secretary of defense.

When discussing a blend of military, political and information operations, Russian strategists use the terms “complex approach” or “new generation war,” according to Ivan Konovalov, a military analyst and director of the Center for Studies of Strategic Trends.

In both the article and the speech, Gerasimov emphasized the importance of mixed tactics by blaming Russia’s adversaries for using them.

“The Pentagon set about developing a new principle and strategy of military action already called a ‘Trojan horse,’” he said Saturday. “The essence is active use of protest potential in a ‘fifth column’ in the interest of destabilizing the situation, simultaneously with airstrikes on the most important objects.”

Sputnik, a Russian state news service, suggested the general’s comments were in part an analysis of the crisis in Venezuela, where Russia has accused the United States of trying to oust President Nicolas Maduro.

The article and speech may also have a message for rivals at home. Pavel Felgenhauer, a military analyst and columnist in Moscow for the newspaper Novaya Gazeta, said military hard-liners often promote the idea of Russia being in limbo between war and peace because it helps them in internal government disputes, giving them greater sway over foreign policy.

Promoting the idea is also consistent, he said, with using the GRU to target Western countries. The message, he said, is “we don’t care what the West thinks, we are enemies.”