Color revolutions and hybrid wars of modern times
The emergence of innovative destructive technologies is crucially determined by the weakening of the global security system, the deformation and fragmentation of which lead to the increasing chaos of international relations. At the heart of such a development of the international situation are the actions of the United States, which, in their striving for world hegemony, purposefully form global instability to weaken strategic competitors, primarily China, Russia and the European Union.
As a result, international and internal conflicts are aggravated, chaotic formations that lead the war of “all against all” arise on the site of the once prosperous countries, network forms of international terrorism are gaining momentum, organized crime takes on a global scale, and flows of refugees are purposefully directed to Europe. The composition of the forces involved in conflicts is changing, new non-traditional threats are emerging.
Actions to undermine global and national security are based on the US economic, financial, and military domination, on the broad system of alliances, international economic and financial organizations under the auspices of Washington, and on the skillful use of soft power technologies. The combination of these components determines the effectiveness of the widely used destructive technologies of the West.
TRANSFORMATION OF WAR
Today, a kind of "transformation of war" is taking place, which is regarded as a culturally conditioned type of human activity, radically different from the industrial or economic spheres. Being a cultural phenomenon, war, in contrast to unorganized violence, obeys certain rules that limit the use of force. At the same time, the transformation of contemporary conflicts is influenced by the deepening of interethnic, ethno-confessional and sociocultural contradictions, which leads to fundamental shifts in the characteristics of armed conflicts.
One of these features is a high degree of uncertainty in the development of political situations, many of which are purposefully created and considered manageable. Modern practice shows that a deliberate impact on the national security system of states creates conditions under which a small push can provoke an avalanche - in an unpredictable place, with unpredictable consequences that change the entire system, no matter how stable it may seem. In this regard, according to Russian President Vladimir Putin, "today's world lives in a very limited planning horizon, especially in the field of politics and security." Examples of such criminal intervention by external forces - the United States and NATO are the dramatic development of the situation in Iraq, Libya, Syria, and Ukraine.
The impossibility of accurately predicting the results of the subversive actions carried out for the commission of a coup d'état was declared by French scientist Gabriel Nod to be one of the first in the 17th century. In his work “Political Reflections on High Politics and the Mastery of State Coups,” he noted: “Thunder falls from heaven before it can be heard; prayers are pronounced before the bell calls to them; someone is being struck, thinking that he strikes him himself; those who never expected it suffer, and those who thought they are in complete safety are dying; and all this is done under the cover of night and darkness, amid storms and confusion. " Prophetic predictions.
Today, by destroying statehood in the Middle East with color revolutions, the West has spawned an IG. Addressing from the UN rostrum to the initiators of subversive actions, Russian President Vladimir Putin asks: “Do you at least understand what you've done?” There is no answer.
The changing scenarios of contemporary conflicts do not open up all the options for the development of the situation and often leave the initiators of all kinds of changes alone with new, unpredictable dangers.
HYBRID WAR STRATEGY
A serious systemic basis for the analysis of contemporary conflicts is provided by the consideration of strategies that determine the intent and stages of the implementation of the color revolution and hybrid warfare.
The essence of the hybrid war is revealed when analyzing its basic strategy, which, in our opinion, is built on the enemy's exhaustion and exhaustion. The goal is to completely destroy the national subjectivity of the state - the object of aggression and the subsequent transfer of it (or what remains of the state) under external control.
A kind of antithesis of the strategy of starvation is the strategy of destruction, which to a significant extent reflects the characteristics of the color revolution.
Russian military theorist Alexander Svechin noted that "the concepts of crushing and starvation apply not only to strategy, but also to politics, and economics, to boxing, to any manifestation of the struggle and should be explained by the very dynamics of the latter."
Based on this idea, it can be argued that if the strategy of destruction is substantially applicable to the analysis of the phenomenon of the color revolution, then in a hybrid war a strategy designed for a long period is used as a kind of moderation strategy.
In the conventional war (from the English conventional - the usual, traditional, conventional, customary), the strategy of starvation is viewed as a method of military action, which is based on expectation of victory by consistently weakening the enemy, depleting his armed forces, depriving the enemy of the ability to recover casualties and satisfy the military needs, to maintain the combat capability of the army at the required level, to intercept his communications, to force the enemy to surrender.
The conventional war model reflects the characteristics of an armed conflict between two or more states. It is believed that the conflict is conducted in accordance with the norms of international law, including the protection of the rights of the parties to the conflict, prisoners of war, and civilians. Specifically, the issues of non-use weapons mass destruction. The provisions of conventional war are described in the Hague Conventions, the Geneva Conventions for the Protection of Victims of War 1949 of the Year and their Additional Protocols 1977 of the year, resolutions of the UN General Assembly and other documents.
The peculiarities of the hybrid war do not allow unconditionally applying to it not only the provisions of these documents, but also the internationally recognized definition of aggression, formulated in the resolution of the UN General Assembly in 1974:
“Article 1. Aggression is the use of armed force by a state against the sovereignty, territorial integrity or political independence of another state or in any other way incompatible with the Charter of the United Nations, as defined in this definition. ”
According to Pavel Tsygankov, in a hybrid war “it is impossible to fix the start and end date, front and rear, status of a fighter, defeated and a winner ... it is difficult to distinguish military (and terrorist) actions, threats, negotiations typical of the classical understanding of war. No less difficult to identify the enemy. "
The aggressor country takes full advantage of the imperfections of the existing international regulatory framework to weaken and destroy the enemy. The hybrid war strategy is aimed at debilitating the victim's country through the chaos of political and administrative management, the economy, the cultural and ideological sphere and the military security sphere. Military and irregular formations and special operations forces can be used at various stages of the hybrid war.
Following this strategy, the aggressor state secretly, without a formal declaration of war, attacks the government structures, the economy, the informational, cultural and ideological sphere, the forces of law and order, and the regular army of the target country.
At a certain stage, hostilities are deployed with the participation of local rebels, mercenaries, private military companies, supported by personnel, weapons and finance from abroad and some internal structures (oligarchs, organized crime, nationalist and pseudo-religious organizations).
An important component of the strategy is the targeted impact on the country's military security in order to draw the victim state into exorbitant military spending by provoking local conflicts in border areas and strategically important regions, conducting large-scale military exercises on provocative scenarios, deploying destabilizing weapons systems, use of the capabilities of the "fifth column" and agent networks. The time frame for the strategy of starvation is many years.
As part of the strategy of starvation, today we can talk about the widespread use of ethnic weapons in the system of hybrid wars in the Middle East by bleeding various ethnic groups among themselves. However, this phenomenon is not new. This type of weapon was used by the Great Britain in the wars of conquest in Afghanistan, in the Middle East and India a century ago, used by the Nazis against the USSR in the Ukraine, in the Baltic States, in the occupied countries of Western Europe. In modern conditions, in the presence of extensive network of subversive structures that make extensive use of the Internet, mobile communications, the destructive potential of ethnic weapons increases significantly.
Thus, in contrast to the conventional war in a hybrid war, the use of actual armed force is not the only prerequisite for achieving victory over the enemy. Military force in a hybrid war is used in conjunction with non-military methods of influence — information-psychological war operations, methods of undermining the enemy’s economy, attempts to isolate and blockade it with the aim of overworking and suppressing the will to resist, cyber-war, and tools of traditional diplomacy.
Moscow proposes to the world community to stop hybrid wars and to fight international terrorism together. Reuters Photos
The leading role in the hybrid war belongs to the operations of the information-psychological war and the means of influencing the economy of the enemy.
The main object of any war is the consciousness of the enemy. Recall Clausewitz: war is first and foremost a matter of moral endurance. Actually military operations play a supporting role. The strategy of hybrid warfare, relying on modern information and communication technologies, takes the informational confrontation to one of the leading directions of influence on the enemy.
The use of information-network impact technologies in a hybrid war provides the necessary coverage from local to global scale. The essence of the events held is to create conditions for the hidden management of the cultural and ideological sphere in order to transform the mental field of the population of the target country by reorienting, weakening and then destroying the traditional spiritual and cultural values of the people. In the Russian Federation, one of the most important traditional spiritual and cultural values is the Russian language, and ensuring the linguistic security of the Russian language is one of the key tasks both within the country and in the CSTO and the CIS.
Another important area of struggle in a hybrid war is economic. This is again not an invention of modern hybrid wars technologists. Here you can also talk about long enough stories a phenomenon.
THE GENESIS OF THE HYBRID WAR
So, long before the outbreak of the First World War, Kaiser Germany purposefully used a complex of subversive actions against Russia in order to reduce its economic and military power and loosen its power. The Germans pedantically studied and took advantage of the weak and vulnerable sides of Russia's strategic management and national development. The subversive practice of the “fifth column” in the system of economic and informational relations of Russia was formed in advance, an agent network was introduced into state and military control, sabotage and sabotage was carried out at enterprises and communications, disinformation was spread, subversive forces were financed through emigration channels, etc.
The 1945 – 1991 Cold War was actually a form of hybrid warfare waged by the United States and NATO against the USSR. During the war, large-scale subversive ideological and economic actions were carried out, the Soviet Union was deliberately embroiled in a grueling arms race, in the war in Afghanistan, etc. The threat of unarmed confrontation, which emphasizes various hybrid forms of subversive activity, was not preemptively assessed by the Soviet leadership, which stubbornly considered classical war and nuclear deterrence as the main area of strategic confrontation.
Within the framework of the strategy of hybrid forms of subversive activities, the Western economic sanctions system directed against the USSR represented by the Coordinating Committee on Export Control (COCOM) established by the NATO countries and Japan in 1949 for goods and technologies prohibited from being imported into the USSR and the ATS state. The goal is to ensure the controlled technological gap of the USSR.
At the same time, our country was diligently offered some obviously "dead-end" technologies and directions for the development of the branches of science and technology. Manipulations with the prices for energy carriers, etc. were carried out.
At the end of 80-X and the beginning of 90-s, with strong ideological and material support from abroad, bloody conflicts flared up in the republics of Central Asia, the Caucasus and Transdniestria, and the separatists in the Baltic republics became more active. During the protest actions, objects of the armed forces were subjected to attacks, power structures, communications were blocked. The leadership of the USSR, in the absence of adequate strategic forecasting and lack of political will, was unable to resist unarmed aggression against the country and prevent its destruction.
Today, events in Ukraine have been a major blow to the national security system and the national interests of the Russian Federation. The development of a confrontational spiral, negative for Russia and Ukraine, became possible as a result of the active use of modern technologies by the USA to reformat the consciousness of a significant part of the country's population. On the other hand, the imperfection of the Russian system of forecasting and assessing the situation in a strategically important state resulted in the absence of any meaningful opposition to the activity of the United States and NATO in Ukraine.
Given the lessons learned, hybrid warfare should be based on strategic forecasting and proactive planning.
At the same time, it is necessary to single out several stages of a hybrid war, built on the strategy of starving the enemy:
- the conduct of strategic intelligence by the aggressor state to uncover the weak and vulnerable points in ensuring the internal and external security of the target country;
- formation of a complex of hybrid threats taking into account local specifics for influencing an object of aggression;
- the provision of a consistent destructive impact on key areas of the management of collective activity of people: administrative-state (political) management; management of the cultural and ideological sphere; management of the socio-economic sphere. At the initial stage of the hybrid war, the main efforts are directed to reformatting the ruling elites and the whole population of the country with the help of information technologies, as well as to systematically weaken the economy of the target state. In the sphere of administrative-state (political) administration, the military security of the state is the most critical.
In the subsequent stages, undeclared military actions are deployed, during which the aggressor country attacks the state structures and the regular army of the enemy with the help of local rebels and separatists, mercenaries, and private military campaigns supported by weapons and finances from abroad. An important place is given to acquiring extremist actions of the “fifth column”, which is used to deliver ram attacks on power in the course of one or several color revolutions;
- and, finally, the introduction of ultimatum demands for the complete surrender of the victim state.
The timeframe of a hybrid war is calculated for a long time (sometimes for decades). The color revolution is carried out in a stricter time limit, it is planned and conducted in accordance with the logic of the technologies used and provides for forms of influence in accordance with the separately planned set of subversive activities. Therefore, strictly speaking, in the system plan, it is not an element of hybrid warfare.
However, one can hardly speak of the complete incompatibility of the color revolution and hybrid warfare as formats of influence on the enemy. In the United States and NATO countries, a comprehensive interdepartmental, intergovernmental and international strategy is applied, based on a system-holistic approach to planning and implementing a set of tasks to destroy the country - the object of aggression. This strategy determines on a coherent basis the basic laws of the available formats of influence on the enemy, objects and forms of such influence at all stages of confrontation: peace stages, unarmed conflict stages, armed confrontation and post-confrontational stabilization while maintaining the threat of a return to confrontation.
COLOR REVOLUTION STRATEGY
In this context, it can be argued that, against the background of a long-lasting and long-lasting hybrid warfare, the color revolution (or several color revolutions in one country, as it was, for example, in Ukraine in 2004 and 2014) serves as a kind of catalyst, accelerator events on the transformation of the victim state during an indirect confrontation at the stages of the world and unarmed conflict.
Note that the policy of concessions chosen by the leadership of Ukraine during the clashes on the Maidan, led ultimately to a coup d’état and an unconstitutional displacement of the president. The country for an indefinitely long period plunged into a bloody civil confrontation and was split.
Is this not a convincing example of the preference of a single decisive response of the government to violence as a “terrible end” in order to prevent “endless horror”? Such decisive actions by the leadership of the Republic of Belarus in December 2010 allowed us to avoid the development of events according to the scenario of the color revolution.
In a conventional war, the strategy of crushing is considered as “a method of military actions, which is based on achieving victory by completely defeating the enemy, destroying its armed forces and destroying the military-economic base.”
The strategy of the color revolution should be viewed as a private type of strategy of indirect actions, including a system of political, socio-economic, informational, ideological and psychological measures to influence the population of the country, the personnel of law enforcement agencies and the armed forces in order to undermine power.
Features of the implementation of this strategy, its relatively short time frame allows us to refer it to the category of strategies of crushing.
Accordingly, the counterstrategy of destruction should provide for resolute opposition to attempts to organize a color revolution and neutralize them at the initial stage. An example of such a crush of sowers of chaos were the events on Tiananmen Square in China in the summer of 1989.
To analyze the strategy of the color revolution and develop countermeasures, the model of the color revolution proposed by political scientist Andrei Manoilo serves. The model includes five main stages: the formation of an organized protest movement; the creation of an incident is an event capable of causing a powerful public outcry and leading people to the street; implementation of conflict mobilization; forming a political crowd; putting forward ultimatums to the authorities.
The model fits perfectly into the strategy of destruction, that is, a strategy based on the relatively high dynamics of the aggressor's actions. In accordance with the strategy of crushing at the first, preparatory stage of the color revolution, painstaking work is carried out to collect information and prepare for mass disobedience actions: finding sources of financing, formulating slogans, establishing control over the media, training militant leaders, selecting targets for possible capture, organizing a warning system to gather protesters, etc.
The subsequent four stages of the strategy are implemented within a relatively short period of time (several weeks) and envisage a powerful ram attack on the authorities with the aim of overthrowing it and placing the country under external control. Such strategies of color revolutions have shown their effectiveness when used against relatively underdeveloped countries with an unstable system of government, socio-economic, ethnic, religious contradictions. An important role in the preparation of mass protests of the population belongs to foreign foundations operating in the state, pseudo-religious organizations, and manipulated media. Diplomatic agencies and intelligence agencies of the aggressor country are actively working to crush the ruling regime.
COUNTERING STRATEGIES FOR DECOMPOSITION AND ISMOR
Models to counteract color revolutions should take into account the use by external forces of special categories of provocative people (representatives of the reborn national elite and the media, mercenaries, terrorists and extremists) as an element of the network organizational system of external interference in the internal affairs of the country. Close attention needs to be paid to the timely opening of funding channels for destabilizing social and political situations (primarily in the capital and large cities) related to the use of non-governmental organizations, the media, the Internet, and social networks.
A hybrid warfare strategy has to be designed for a long period and is based on the wide geographic coverage of the subversive network cells of the entire territory of the country, its ruling elites and the population, the economy and finances, and the objects of governance. One of the important objects of protection is the Russian language as the state language of international communication.
The threat of color revolutions and hybrid wars in the CIS and CSTO is very serious. Creating in the states of these integration associations base for the use of subversive technologies, our opponents are actively taking advantage of the tendency to strengthen state nationalism and the related policies of some countries to oust the Russian language from communication, education and culture. The unreasoned, reckless and defective for the national interests of the desire of part of the ruling elites of a number of states to a falsely understood multi-vector policy in foreign policy also requires close attention. This was manifested, for example, during the recent visit of US Secretary of State John Kerry to the Republic of Central Asia (CA). The visit showed that the Americans, relying on the nationalist sentiments of a part of local elites, are trying to implement a policy of containing Russia and limit its influence in the region by creating the “5 + 1” format in Central Asia and the USA. The possibility of such a format in case of successful promotion of the initiative of Washington is planned to be used not only against Russia and China, but also against individual states of the region if they try to get out of the intrusive tutelage of the United States and its allies (for example, Turkey).
A powerful catalyst of conflict is the tangle of interethnic contradictions between the countries of Central Asia and the Caucasus. The United States and NATO are persistently striving to draw the states of these key Russian security regions into the orbit of their interests, using all means, including supporting anti-government forces and pushing them to organize coups.
Given the dramatic development of events in Ukraine, it’s time to turn away from the soothing slogan “Where will they get from us!” In relation to our neighbors, allies and partners. Sad experience shows that, based on falsely understood national interests and relying on outside "help," some of them may find "where to go" and end up in the camp of Russia's opponents. To counteract creeping aggression, it is necessary to fully use the potential of “soft” and “hard” forces, strengthen the unity and cohesion of the CSTO and the CIS, develop the EAU, attract the best personnel for these purposes, and actively and consistently work with young people. The high impact of work with young people was demonstrated, for example, by the Yerevan State University on the initiative of the CSTO Analytical Association in cooperation with the CSTO Institute (Armenia) in November of this year. 2-I CSTO Youth School.
It should be assumed that the hybrid war against Russia and its allies did not stop even during the period of relative "warming" of relations with the West at the beginning of the 90s. At present, it has taken on a fierce form in the conditions of our country's independent foreign policy, consistent with national interests. Under these conditions, preventive mechanisms should be created in advance to neutralize the negative impact of external interventions by strengthening civil society, consolidating allies and partners, protecting national values and national interests as factors of internal mobilization to counter color revolutions and hybrid wars.
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