Ep 088 "Hybrid Warfare in the New Age: The Future Forward (Part Three)"

Bill Buppert (0:08)

The Army doesn't like more than one disaster in a day. It looks bad in the newspapers and upsets civilians at their breakfast.

I'm Bill Buebert, retired Army officer and a regular warfare practitioner and scholar. Welcome to Chasing Ghosts, an Irregular Warfare Podcast, the show that examines the mythos, loss history, bad thinking, martial malpractice, and government incompetence that informs so much of Irregular Warfare. Today I want to peek behind the curtain at the vast machinery and briar patch politics of insurgency and counterinsurgency and everything in between. Now let's go ghost hunting together.

Hello this is Bill and welcome to Episode 88, Hybrid Warfare in the New Age, The Future Forward, Part 3 Even though I think we'll be talking about Hybrid Warfare, now and to the immediate future. So a little bit of housekeeping for this episode, per usual. I will be speaking at the gathering of Arcada, November 13th through the 14th in Bozeman, Montana. I will put the website and the show notes. Would love to see some of my listeners there and we could have a chat and maybe have a wee drink or two between us. In other news, my youngest son has joined my middle son in joining the Orthodox Church. I'm pretty excited about that. I myself am a catechumen there. And an aspirant in the Church, I told my sons 15 years ago that if they wanted to seek a masculine Christianity that was concerned about preserving Western Christendom, that the only place they would find that would be in Orthodox Christianity. Not the Protestants, not the Catholics. I was also recently on a show with Scott Horton, his Provoked podcast that he does with the eminente Darryl Cooper. For the first time, after a long time where I've been wanting to get on a show with Darryl, we were able to do so and found that we had a whole lot in common and a whole lot to discuss. I will also put that in the show notes if you'd like to watch that episode of Provoked. That is episode 62 of Provoked.

So in the previous two episodes, we've discussed Hybrid Warfare, Nonlinear Warfare, Gray Zone Warfare.

It's evolved significantly over the years. I think it's both a factor of communications and technology, and of course, the amalgamation of both with communications technology itself, flattening the hierarchy of people being able to get in touch with people through either clandestine or open-source means. A brief review, Hybrid Warfare combines conventional and conventional methods, including military operations, cyber warfare, disinformation campaigns, what the Russians used to call de informatia mascarovka, and economic pressure. And there are a myriad of other things that one can align with that. Speaking of alignment, don't think that these are linear processes, more so non-linear processes, because during conventional warfare, or even irregular warfare, this can take place. Or the more apparently peaceful aspects of Hybrid Warfare can be either a preamble or a turning point during stability operations after main combat operations have ceased, driving the political and economic and sociocultural ecology into a different direction than the original invaders had planned. One thing to keep in mind here is that this will be applied to conventional warfare either hastily or deliberately. It will be applied by the antagonist or the protagonist. It will be applied in a number of different ways that I would say are unpredictable.

If you look at the Russo-Ukrainian War right now, I think there's a clear example of these tactics in action. The conflict which began with Russia's annexation of the Crimea in 2014 has been marked by a mix of traditional military operations, cyber attacks and information warfare. I would tell you this goes back to 2008 If not going back to 1992 with the Russo-Ukrainian Conflict, when it comes to this constant schizophrenia within the West in which they continue to embark on these provocation operations against Russia with the neutrality or entry to membership to NATO dangling along these what would be for the Russian's Western buffer zones and what would be for the European continent in the West, the Eastern buffer zones. You can even see this with China in Taiwan or China in Tibet or what's recently occurred here in this hemisphere with the United States and what they have done to our friends down South. I do find it curious US aid may be classified. This could be coincidence or this could be causative. I happen to think that it is correlative that with the defunding of the US. Agency for International Development, which one could charitably call a slush fund for the intelligence community in the United States and the West, to use said monies, maybe untraceable monies or deniable monies, to conduct color revolutions, information campaigns, and other such things to include using the walkification of the aid to go down and disrupt the cultural ecologies of these countries in a negative fashion. That disruption tends to the left and not to the right when it comes to the polities that emerge afterwards.