With “Four Types of Russian Propaganda“, I published my 3,000th blog.

Wow.

Back to work.

Under the Sun shows behind-the-scenes coercion by government minders trying to construct an image of a ‘normal’ family

By Carmen Gray

Wednesday 2 December 2015 12.29 EST

A new film on life in North Korea has caused a diplomatic row after the director used officially sanctioned shoots to demonstrate how the state manipulates its people.

Authorities are said to have tried to prevent screenings of Under the Sun, a film that follows a North Korean girl as she prepares to celebrate the Day of the Shining Star, the birthday of former supreme leader Kim Jong-il.

Directed by veteran film-maker Vitaly Mansky, the documentary crew gained unprecedented access to the country by making the North Korean regime an official production partner and allowing officials complete control over the script.

But despite being watched constantly by government minders during filming, Mansky found a way to expose the propaganda machine by leaving the camera running while each shot was set up.

The film reveals how government representatives seek to construct an image of an “ideal” family, capturing the hectoring of officials as they tell the Koreans what to say, how to sit and when to smile.

“I wanted to make a film about the real Korea, but there’s no real life in the way that we consider,” said Mansky, who spent a year in the country filming. “There is just the creation of an image of the myth of a real life. So we made a film about fake reality.”

Under the Sun depicts a day in the life of a supposedly ordinary family in Pyongyang, following young Zin-mi who is about to join the Korean Children’s Union pioneers. The script was written and locations pre-chosen by representatives of the North Korean government.

Row

But relations with the government became tense after the director presented his version of the material, prompting politicians in Moscow to publicly distance Russia from its involvement in the project.

Shortly after the film’s premiere at the Tallinn Black Nights film festival, an article by the former Russian minister of culture, Mikhail Shvydkoy, appeared in Rossiskaya Gazeta criticising the film-maker and his team for presenting the project as a “friendly collaboration” when they applied for state support.

Black Nights director Tiina Lokk downplayed rumours that the festival had been strongly urged by North Korean representatives to withdraw the film, but admitted: “Yes, there was some kind of pressure.”

Mansky said politicians had been scared off from associating with the film. “[Shvydkoy] complained that we lied to our North Korean partners and should feel ashamed about that, because the people who helped to make this film could be killed,” he said. “So the Russian Federation want to remove their support of the film.”

He said he had started out making a film in line with North Korean specifications, in which a girl would emerge as “one pixel of a larger picture” – but his experience during the year-long shoot changed his approach.

He said minders had had “total control” over the filming process. “These people didn’t say who they really are but we understood that all the decisions were made at the highest level,” he said.

“They opened a special office in the hotel where we were staying and every day after shooting we had to give our material to them. They gave it back without censored frames.

“There is no idea in North Korea about personal space, or the freedom to make a very simple decision about what you’re doing,” Mansky said..

In one scene, Zin-mi praises the health-giving qualities of kimchi in preventing ageing and cancer, and Mansky allows the audience to see how the crew are instructed to reshoot the scene over and over until the North Korean minders are happy they’ve achieved the right gusto.

In another sequence, a factory forewoman gives a speech congratulating workers on their productivity while regime representatives can be heard demanding several takes and asking for heightened zeal each time.

The film’s official narrative says that Zin-mi’s father is a garment factory worker, but an on-screen title added in post-production reveals that this role is fictional – the film crew learned later he is really a print journalist. “They have their own imagination of how it should be and for them it’s quite logical that they’re changing the occupation of the father,” said Mansky.

Propaganda

In Mansky’s view, the DPRK’s propaganda machine will always reveal evidence of its own lies. “Propaganda is also counter-propaganda,” he says. “My idea was to shoot a film like Leni Riefenstahl’s Triumph of the Will, which is both those at the same time.”

Born in Ukraine when it was part of the Soviet Union, Mansky has shot within a Communist regime before (Motherland or Death in Cuba), and says part of his drive is a will to understand how his parents lived. “I’ve always been interested in the concept of freedom and its lack.”

Describing communism as “against real life”, he claims: “In the Soviet Union people of course didn’t have freedom, but they were free inside their minds. In North Korea there is no such kind of freedom. That’s the tragedy of the society. They just don’t imagine that there’s another kind of life.”

Source: http://www.theguardian.com/world/2015/dec/02/north-korea-under-the-sun-vitaly-mansky-film

DEC. 2, 2015

Thomas L. Friedman

When President Vladimir Putin of Russia announced he was setting up an air base in the middle of Syria to take on the Islamic State and bolster President Bashar al-Assad, more than a few analysts and politicians praised his forceful, game-changing, strategic brilliance, suggesting that Putin was crazy like a fox. Some of us thought he was just crazy.

Well, two months later, let’s do the math: So far, Putin’s Syrian adventure has resulted in a Russian civilian airliner carrying 224 people being blown up, apparently by pro-ISIS militants in Sinai. Turkey shot down a Russian bomber after it strayed into Turkish territory. And then Syrian rebels killed one of the pilots as he parachuted to earth and one of the Russian marines sent to rescue him. Many of the anti-Assad rebels in that area are ethnic Turkmens, with strong cultural ties to Turkey; Turkey was not amused by Putin bombing Turkmen villages inside Syria, because it weakens Turkey’s ability to shape Syria’s future.

Meanwhile, in Crimea, Ukraine, which Putin annexed, pro-Turkish Tatars apparently cut the power lines, plunging Crimea into a near total blackout. And in October dozens of Saudi clerics called for a “holy war” against the governments of Syria, Iran and Russia.

In sum, Putin’s “crafty” Syrian chess move has left him with a lot more dead Russians; newly at odds with Turkey and Iran; weakened in Ukraine; acting as the defense lawyer for Assad — a mass murderer of Sunni Muslims, the same Sunni Muslims as Putin has in Russia; and with no real advances against ISIS.

Other than that, it’s been a great success.

Truth be told, I wish Putin had succeeded. It would have saved us all a lot of trouble, because ISIS is not the “J.V. team” President Obama once called it. It’s actually the Jihadist All-Star team. It combines the military efficiency of Iraqi ex-Baathist army officers with the religious zealotry and prison-forged depravity of its “Caliph Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi,” the Web-savvy of Arab millennials and a thrill-ride appeal to humiliated young Muslim males, who’ve never held power, a decent job or a girl’s hand.

And the ISIS threat is becoming strategic. The massive outflow of refugees from Syria and Iraq that ISIS has provoked is leading the European Union to start to close internal borders and limit the free flow of people and probably some goods as well — just the opposite of what the bloc was created to do. That will only slow the E.U.’s economic growth and fuel greater nationalism that could ultimately threaten its unity. The E.U. is America’s most important partner in managing the global system. If it is weakened, we are weakened.

But to sustainably destroy ISIS, you need to understand three things: 1) It is the product of two civil wars; one was between moderate and extremist Sunnis and the other was between Sunnis and Shiites. And they feed each other. 2) The only way to defeat ISIS is to minimize the struggle between Sunnis and Shiites and strengthen the fighting capacity of moderate Sunnis against extremist ones. And 3) the fight has to be led by Arabs and Muslims but strongly backed by America, the E.U. and, yes, Russia.

Whereas Putin’s goals are uncertain, and perhaps limited to protecting a truncated Assad regime, Obama really does want to defeat ISIS. Just as important, he wants to do it without being either Putin or George W. Bush, who just dove into the middle.

But it isn’t clear that a middle approach exists, let alone the fantasy options of many Obama critics, as in Donald Trump’s just “bomb the [blank] out of them.” (Gosh, no one thought of that!) Everyone wants to defeat ISIS with the “Immaculate Intervention”: more bombs from the air or somebody else’s troops, boots, risks or political transformation.

Sorry, but to sustainably defeat ISIS you need a mutually reinforcing coalition. You need Saudi Arabia and the leading Sunni religious powers to aggressively delegitimize ISIS’s Islamist narrative. You need Arab, Kurdish and Turkish ground troops — backed by U.S. and NATO air power and special forces, with Russia’s constructive support — to uproot ISIS door to door.

You need Iran to encourage the Shiite-led government in Baghdad to create a semiautonomous “Sunnistan” in the areas held by ISIS, giving moderate Iraqi Sunnis the same devolved powers as Kurds in Kurdistan so they have a political alternative to ISIS. And you need Iran to agree to a political transition in Syria that would eventually replace Assad.

In short, you need either a power-sharing political solution that all the key players accept and will enforce, or an armed force to just crush ISIS and then sit on the region indefinitely, so ISIS doesn’t come back. Obama can’t secure the former, and doesn’t want to do the latter. Nor do the American people — nor Obama’s critics, despite what some of them might suggest.

You can say that when it comes to ISIS and Syria, Obama has done an impossible job badly, and someone else might have done it better. But it is still an impossible job as long as all the key players in that region define their interests as rule or die and as long as most of the real democrats in that region are living abroad.

Source: http://www.nytimes.com/2015/12/02/opinion/02friedman.html?ref=opinion&_r=0

Editor’s note: many trolls have multiple fake profiles.

I turn in a few each day.

LinkedIn is a terrific platform to cultivate business connections. It is also rife with fraud and deceit. Fraudsters use as a social engineering tool which allows them to connect to professionals, trying to lure them into disclosing their real contact details (work email is the best) and then use this email address to send spam, or worse, deliver malware.

Always check the profile before accepting an invitation, and do so via the LinkedIn message mechanism and not viaemail (fake invitation emails can cause much more harm than fake profiles – see our previous post).

So we have established that it is imperative to be able to identify a fake profile when someone invites you to connect on LinkedIn. But how would you do that? Follow our proprietary (just made up) CID protocol! CID stands for – Connections, Image and Details. By following it, you will be able to spot most fakes in 60 seconds or less. For more elaborate fraud attempts, it will be much longer or maybe even impossible for the non- professional to identify. We will discuss these later.

Connections – while you can fabricate any “fact” on your profile, connections cannot be faked; they have to be “real” LinkedIn users who have agreed to connect with you. So unless the fraudster is willing to create 100 other fake profiles, and connect these with the fake persona he is trying to solidify (something that takes a lot of time and effort to do, and something I hope the LinkedIn algorithm will pick up), the only way for him to have 100 connections is to connect to 100 LinkedIn users. So if you see someone with a puny number of connections, you can start to be more suspicious. So, connections number check – 5 seconds. Moving on.

Image – by now most people creating a LinkedIn profile realize that it is in their best interest to include a real image of themselves, and usually a professionally looking one (either taken by a professional or in professional attire). So no image or an obscure one is kind of suspicious. Also, any too good-looking images should ring an alarm bell. Since it is almost certain that the fraudster will not use his/hers own image (by that they will make the profile real to a certain extent), they will most likely search for a nice photo to post online. How can you tell if the image they have used is taken from someplace else? There are dedicated websites for reverse image searching, but since we are under serious time constraints here, why not simply right-click the image and ask Google to check the source? Very quickly it will find a compatible image and you can match the profile image to an existing stock image. Another 25 seconds gone. Say these two tests were insufficient and you are still not sure? Check the Details.

Starting Google image search

Details – people know that the more detailed their profile is, the better. Profiles lacking education or occupation details are very unreliable, along with these are any severe discrepancies: How could this guy study at Yale and serve overseas at the same time? lack of skills, recommendations and endorsements are not in favor of any real profile. Taking another 30 seconds of your precious time, you should by now be able to spot a fake profile.
Sure, someone just starting on LinkedIn might have fit our CID protocol while actually just launching his LinkedIn profile, and therefore has few connections. If you know this guy, go ahead and connect. If you do not, it is best to wait until the profile seems more robust.
It is very important to note that accepting the invitation to connect by itself (given it was delivered via a LinkedIn message mechanism or clicked on the user profile) does not create any damage, but it establishes a link between you and a fraudster, which can later be utilized as an attack vector.

Oh, and if you have 30 more seconds, why not do everyone a favor and report the fraudster? LinkedIn allows you to report suspicious profiles for review.

Simply click the “Block or Report” option, fill the short form and there you go.

P.S.

the profile displayed in this article is an actual fake profile who tried to connect to one of our analysts. Busted!

Source: http://blog.sensecy.com/2014/08/24/how-to-spot-a-fake-linkedin-profile-in-60-seconds/

Kristen Inbody, kinbody@greatfallstribune.com5:52 p.m. MST December 1, 2015

Editor’s note: This story first ran in 2011.

A wreck involving a rental truck rolling down a ravine on an isolated gravel road outside Valier in 2006 may have saved a Conrad woman and her family from al-Qaida assassins.

The four men injured in the 2006 crash, who came from Suriname, Eritrea and Bahrain, had illegally crossed from Canada into Montana. They hid Qurans, laptops and disassembled weapons under their T-shirts. Shannen Rossmiller’s home address was programmed into a GPS device found in the vehicle.

“I often shudder to think what would have happened if they hadn’t been such bumbling drivers on a gravel road in a rental truck,” she writes in a new book. “If they hadn’t wrecked their truck that day, I might not be here, or, God forbid, my family could have been harmed.”

Rossmiller, a former municipal judge in Conrad and a mother of three, has published a new book, “The Unexpected Patriot: How an Ordinary American Mother is Bringing Terrorists to Justice” about how the Sept. 11, 2001, terrorist attacks led her to become an online terrorist hunter. She poses as a terrorist online to ferret out credible threats to security around the world.

“I am Abu Abdullah, an al-Qaida courier,” she wrote. “My name is Abu Latif, and I am a recruiter trainer. I am Abu Musa. I have weapons and supplies. My name is Abu Zeida. I am located in Af-Pak. I am radicalized, a bloodthirsty mujahedeen …”

In her book, Rossmiller also describes the sacrifices her cyber-sleuthing cost her.

Two years before the near miss, Conrad police officers pounded on her door in the middle of the night. The wide-eyed officers were shocked to see her when she answered.

“Oh, thank God, you are alive!” one told her.

The officers had just received an emergency call from the Teton County Sheriff’s Department asking them to find Rossmiller. Her car, which she had parked in her garage with its keys in her house, was found one county over totaled in a ditch ¿ and shot five times with a .38-caliber pistol.

Rossmiller had been unwillingly thrust into the spotlight after the trial of Army tank crewman Ryan Anderson — aka Amir Abdul-Rashid — who tried to defect to al-Qaida. He thought he was in contact with a recruiter, who was actually Rossmiller using one of her dozens of online personas.

Suddenly the secret she had tried to keep even from her family was exposed to the world.

As a high school senior, Rossmiller had been to the 110th floor of the South Tower of the World Trade Center and marveled at it. On Sept. 11, 2001, she became obsessed and decided to fight back.

A Conrad farm girl, she had always been a scrapper, “strong and determined,” but a little different. Her skills at research and analysis made her a natural fit as a judge for Conrad and Valier ¿ making her the youngest female municipal judge in American history.

She was injured in a fall the night of Sept. 11, 2001. She read books on al-Qaida, Osama bin Laden, the Taliban and Islam while she recuperated.

“My challenge to myself was to figure out where these people were coming from, to understand their teachings, their culture and how their world differed from the West,” she wrote.

She thought about enlisting in the military but didn’t because she had a young family. Then she heard about how Internet chatrooms were a forum for terrorists. She explored those chatrooms using a Arabic translation program. She began studying the language and the Quran. In 2002, she made her first post: “Death to America.”

She interacted with genuine and wanna-be terrorists, drawing out information while carefully avoiding entrapment.

“At first, in the forums, I was feeling my way around gingerly,” she wrote. “Now I know the tribes and their nuances so well, that I could probably whip out a new identity within 10 minutes.”

When Rossmiller first contacted the FBI, saying she had information about a man in uniform looking to harm his country, she was brushed off. She writes in her book that the local FBI agent she spoke with didn’t even know how to contact someone in the military about the threat.

She pressed, telling the agent she was a judge.

“A judge of what?” he asked “as if he expected the answer to be ‘pies,'” Rossmiller wrote.

She took the information she had gather to the agent’s office in Great Falls, expecting to get the “dumb-blonde treatment.”

“I had no way of knowing at the time, when I drove to Great Falls to meet with Agent Wilson for the first time, that this meeting would eventually bring my two worlds — my regular life as a judge, wife and mother and my secret online realm filled with terrorists and danger — into head-on collision,” Rossmiller wrote. “An American soldier would be prosecuted for attempted espionage and imprisoned for life. My entire family would be imperiled, and the foundation of my very existence would be rocked.”

Rossmiller’s pleas to keep her identity secret fell on deaf ears during Anderson’s trial. Her volunteer work brought adulation — and danger.

“Even with everything that had happened, the work was a watershed for me personally,” she wrote. “This was the first time in my life I was using all of my skills and talents, and the things that always make me ‘different,’ in a positive and reward way,” she wrote.

In 2006, she helped bring down Michael Reynolds, who thought he was working with al-Qaida to destroy the Alaska Pipeline and other energy targets, with the aim of creating chaos in the country and making money. Unemployed and living in Pocatello, Idaho, at the time of his arrest, Reynolds eventually was convicted of terrorism-related crimes, in part because ofRossmiller’s work. His defense argued that he, too, was engaging in Internet vigilantism.

In the wake of Reynolds’ case, Rossmiller began to speak about the role of cyber counterintelligence operations in the war on terror.

It’s “a tall order to get a whole nation of people behind a war like that,” she said.

She also thought that people should hear some good news in the war on terror.

Rossmiller worked at the Attorney General’s Office in Helena until 2009, when she began to work in — and shape — the security and intelligence field. She now argues for the development of a national public-private cyber corps.

“Even though I have been at this for many years, I am still haunted by the vehement hatred the jihadists feel for the U.S.,” she wrote.

Source: http://www.greatfallstribune.com/story/life/2015/12/01/conrad-woman-details-her-cyber-war-terrorism/76633082/

Hanna Bohman has been fighting ISIS in Syria on and off for most of 2015, and she hasn’t been impressed.

She said that as fighters, the Islamic State militants have “mostly been a disappointment.”

“Their numbers don’t seem that big and they’re eager to run away,” she told INSIDER in an email. “I suspect most of the experienced fighters have been consolidated in Mosul and Raqqa, and that’s where the big fights will be.”

She said that ISIS has successfully made themselves seem bigger and scarier than they are in reality through social media.

Although the group recently claimed responsibility for terrorist attacks that killed hundreds inParis, Beirut, Baghdad, and Ankara and over the Sinai Peninsula, its promise of statehood is quickly diminishing, The New York Times reports.

“They’re not some giant, holy juggernaut of ultimate damnation for unbelievers,” she said. “They’re just a bunch of filthy, mouth-breathing, knuckle-dragging pigs who run away at the first sign of resistance. Really nothing more than a thorn in the side.”

Video editing by Adam Banicki.

A former Canadian model who’s also known as Tiger Sun, Bohman, 46, is one of dozens of Westerners who have joined up with Kurdish nationalist groups to fight the Islamic State in Iraq and Syria. She was personally inspired to fight after watching an ISIS propaganda video featuring a Canadian who had gone to fight with the jihadists, she told the Daily Mail.

After recovering from a near-fatal motorcycle accident last year, Bohman, who had no prior combat experience, left Vancouver for Iraq in March. She joined up with the YPJ, the female fighting battalion of the People’s Protection Unit, a Kurdish nationalist fighting force.

Joining the YPJ was easy, she said, much easier than one would expect traveling from the West into the middle of war would be. Upon arriving in Iraq, she stayed in a safe house for a few days before taking a boat across the Tigris River into northeastern Syria.

She then received very brief training and was assigned to her first unit, though it didn’t see much action. Her role consisted mostly of watching over territory, and the only real threat was being the target of a suicide truck, according to Bohman. But once she transferred to a more experienced unit, she began to see fighting almost instantly.

“That’s where I was first shot at by a sniper while walking from the outhouse to our quarters,” she said. “We were a mobile [unit], so we moved around quite a bit and were part of a large offensive south of Til Temir.”

The most intense fighting she experienced was in the next unit she was a part of, albeit for a brief two days in June. Just one hour after joining the brigade, a German who was fighting with the group said they would be going to the front.

“It was a small group of six westerners and I was the only woman… but all of us, including the commander, were itching for a fight, so we went a bit rogue,” she said. “We became lost trying to find the front and thought we had accidentally pushed into Daesh country when we started seeing dead people lying on the roads. The drivers were frantically calling for help on their phones and radios, and the tension was the highest I’ve ever felt as we had no idea where Daesh was.”

The group made a “mad retreat” to get their bearings. The following morning, the six were ordered to take the city of Til Abyad, a northern Syrian city near the Turkish border that had been under ISIS’s control. Bohman, who posts videos of her endeavors with the YPJ on YouTube, uploaded a video prior to the start of the mission.

She laughed at how absurd it seemed.

“Six of us against what was supposed to be more than 100 Daesh, but nonetheless, we jumped into a tank and off we went,” she said.

As they closed in on the battle, her unit met up with 12 Kurds who were already in position near a bridge leading into the city.

The Kurds would have to take that bridge in order to take the city.

“We spent the rest of the day fighting for that bridge, which was also the last time a sniper would take a shot at me, the bullet passing so close over my head I felt it,” she said. “We held the bridge over night while reinforcements arrived, and the next day they took the city, which by now had mostly been abandoned by Daesh.”

She briefly returned to Canada after the battle, stricken by malnutrition after having lost almost 30 pounds since joining the YPJ. But almost as soon as she returned to Vancouver, she was itching to get back to the fight in Rojava, the name given to what is considered Western Kurdistan. She went back in early September and remains with the YPJ today.

But contrary to popular belief, life in Syria isn’t all about fighting, she explained. About “95%” of her time is spent sleeping, eating, cleaning, socializing, or being on guard.

“It’s not what people expect,” she said. “We’re not constantly locked in a life or death battle with bullets and mortars flying back and forth.”

Another misconception is that the real fight is against ISIS, she said.

“The real enemy is who Daesh works for,” she said, claiming that it’s really “Turkey’s genocidal [President Recep Tayyip] Erdogan… who will eventually turn Turkey into a dictatorship while trying to kill off the Kurds.”

Claims that Turkey supported the Islamic State go back more than a year, and it’s well-knownthat the Turkish government views the rise of Kurdish nationalism as a bigger threat to its security than the rise of ISIS.

After the Turkish military shot down a Russian plane last week, Russian leaders claimed that they have proof that Erdogan’s own family was involved in smuggling ISIS oil into Turkey. Erdogan said he would resign if that claim was proven true, and insists that his regime is working to diminish the threat of ISIS in the region. US officials said their NATO allies have been “great” in the fight against the Islamic State.

According to Bohman, Westerners who left their countries and bypassed their governments to fight ISIS are what has inspired her most since joining the YPJ.

“There aren’t many of us, but we represent a genuine concern for humanity,” she said. “We believe in doing the right thing, in stopping evil, and helping the helpless. We are the tip of a sword made up of people from all around the world who will no longer wait for their governments to fail again. We are [bringing] the change we want to see.”

Source: http://news.yahoo.com/canadian-model-fighting-isis-syria-202503999.html

By THE ASSOCIATED PRESS

GROZNY, Russia — Dec 2, 2015, 7:14 AM ET

Authorities in Russia’s predominantly Muslim republic of Chechnya have organized classes to stave off Islamic State recruitment.

Thousands of Russian Muslim have joined IS in Syria, and some have taken senior positions.

Islamic militancy has engulfed Russia’s North Caucasus, Dagestan in particular, following two separatist wars in neighboring Chechnya. While nearly 1,000 people are believed to have left Dagestan from Syria, the number of Chechen recruits is far lower.

Chechnya’s authoritarian leader, Ramzan Kadyrov, said last month that less than 500 Chechens are believed to have joined IS and that about 200 of them have already been killed. Kadyrov has recently gone as far as offering to send thousands of Chechen fighters as ground troops to fight IS.

Local students say many of their peers are tempted to go to Syria because they believe in a true Islamic state there.

“Even those girls who study well are trying to go there (to Syria),” said Grozny student Albina Maltsagova.

To counter IS propaganda, Islamic clerics and government officials are holding meetings with high school and university students on how to avoid IS recruitment, explaining that the group distorts the true meaning of the Quran.

Djamalulail Said-Khamzat, deputy head of Chechen parliament’s international relations committee, said young people from poorer families are more susceptible to IS recruitment and get lured by its propaganda videos posted online.

Source: http://abcnews.go.com/International/wireStory/chechnya-holds-classes-counter-propaganda-35525352

By Lara Seligman 8:37 p.m. EST December 2, 2015

WASHINGTON — In a world where long-range guided missiles and sophisticated radars are the norm, analysts and lawmakers are urging the Pentagon to rethink the way it operates in the electromagnetic spectrum to gain new advantages over near-peer competitors, such as Russia and China.

Over the past few decades, competitors’ advancements in sensor and missile technology have forced the US military to operate farther and farther away from its intended targets, according to a report released this week by the Center for Strategic and Budgetary Assessment (CSBA). The Pentagon must shift toward using low-power countermeasures to defeat enemy sensors, as well as low-power sensors and communications.

During a Dec. 2  event on Capitol Hill to release the report, the report’s co-authors and CSBA senior fellows Mark Gunzinger and Bryan Clark said the military must invest in technology to avoid detection and confuse enemy air defenses — for instance stealth aircraft, electronic jammers and decoys. Cheap, expendable unmanned vehicles, in the air or undersea, are crucial to this approach, they said.

Much of this technology is already fielded, but the Pentagon is not using it to its full potential, Clark stressed. Advancements like electronically scanned array (AESA) radars, the Navy’s Next-Generation Jammer and the Surface Electronic Warfare Improvement Program — an upgrade of the SLQ-32 shipboard electronic warfare (EW) system — are a good start. But the military could do much more with these systems, Clark said.

“So these new systems are coming out with these new technologies, but they are not necessarily being used in a way that exploits those new technologies — they are going to be used in a way that simply mimics how the predecessor system was used,” Clark said. “New operational concepts are necessary to leverage the technologies we’re already fielding.”

The Pentagon must invest in improving networking between the individual systems, agility in frequency and power, multi-functionality and miniaturization, Clark said. For example, operators could take a sophisticated jammer, currently deployed on  an existing aircraft, and install it on a low-cost, expendable UAV that could penetrate farther into enemy territory.

Gunzinger blamed a “stove-piped” acquisition process, both within and between the armed services, for slowing progress in developing new concepts of operations in electronic warfare.

“That kind of a structure doesn’t really facilitate — it’s not conducive to the development of multifunction capabilities, such as an array that can act as a radar or a jammer or [do] cyber, and perhaps other missions, all in one package,” Gunzinger said. “Who is going to be the guru who is the champion for developing a new capability across the DoD?”

Reps. Randy Forbes, R-Va., Jackie Walorski, R-Ind., Rick Larsen, D-Wash., and Jim Langevin, D-R.I., also spoke at the event.

One major program the Pentagon could rethink is the Air Force’s much-delayed effort to recapitalize its Joint Surveillance Target Attack Radar System (JSTARS) fleet, Gunzinger told Defense News before to the official report release. In a highly networked, contested environment, it does not make sense to use a non-stealthy business jet for battlefield management, he said.

DEFENSE NEWS

Pentagon Wants More Work on JSTARS

Although the Air Force has used JSTARS to great effect in the Middle East over the past few decades, the operational concept of the plane is “already untenable,” Clark said.

“JSTARS is getting flown really hard in places like the Middle East where there’s no threat, and even that is starting to be constrained because there’s places that it can’t fly anymore because of the air threat in Syria and from Iran and the air threat from Russia,” Clark said.

Some offices in the Pentagon are examining whether the military needs a dedicated, manned aircraft to conduct both battle management and intelligence, surveillance and reconnaissance (ISR), Gunzinger said. US forces might do better to disaggregate the ISR and battle management missions, he suggested. UAVs can conduct ISR undetected in enemy territory by using passive or low-power sensors, while ground or sea forces can do battle management from outside the immediate engagement area.

“When you start to think that the air environment in particular is becoming increasingly contested, certainly in the Pacific, certainly in Europe, certainly in the Persian Gulf region … you have to ask, well, how are you going to use this in the future in those environments, and is it worth it, frankly?” Gunzinger said.

JSTARS is particularly vulnerable to proliferating threats like Russia’s S-400 air defense system that can easily detect the aircraft’s high-power radar, Clark said.

Gunzinger and Clark’s comments on JSTARS echo concerns voiced recently by outgoing Air Force acquisition chief William LaPlante. The Pentagon may scrap the existing recapitalization program and go back to the drawing board, LaPlante said Nov. 24.

“There’s still debate in the building, outside the Air Force, on whether you do this or you do other things,” he said, explaining that some people want to trade JSTARS for unmanned platforms like Northrop Grumman’s Global Hawk remotely piloted surveillance aircraft.

Air Force Chief of Staff Gen. Mark Welsh framed the debate over JSTARS differently, arguing that combatant commanders want the capability, but budget reality may force the Pentagon to postpone the program.

“The question is where does it fit in the priorities of things? To the combatant commanders it’s high on the priority list, but so are a lot of other things,” Welsh said Dec. 1 at an event hosted by the Atlantic Council. “If there are people in the department that think there’s a different way to provide this capability for less money, we should have a debate about that.”

The Air Force will continue to “push hard” to fund the JSTARS recapitalization program in the fiscal 2017 budget, but nothing is certain, Welsh said.

Source: http://www.defensenews.com/story/defense/air-space/isr/2015/12/02/analysts-lawmakers-urge-dod-rethink-electronic-warfare/76670716/

This article was originally published by the Small Wars Journal on 17 November 2015.

The wars in Iraq and Afghanistan are conflicts of unparalleled complexity, but they reflect a larger trend of increasing complexity of conflicts throughout the world. Solutions to these conflicts have been elusive because the US military has focused exclusively on equipping its Soldiers with a narrow set of technical skills, an institutional mindset not suited to a complex world. By looking at the institutional shortcomings that hampered the efforts of the military using complexity theory and developmental psychology, we can effectively explain why the military has had a hard time dealing with complex conflicts and a whole range of other problems. Finally, a solution emerges that will enable us to handle greater complexity than ever before. The analysis presented applies mostly to the Marine Corps and the Army.

The Basics of Complexity Theory

Complexity theory is part of systems theory. It uses scientific principles to model and explain systems. Complexity theory applies equally to economies and ecosystems as it does to wars. There are four elements that combine to make something complex: adaptability, interdependence, interconnectedness, and diversity. According to the scientific definition of complexity, a problem is more complex if it has more of these characteristics. For example, building a house does not display these characteristics, whereas managing an economy has far more of each of these characteristics and is thus more complex.

Complexity Theory Applied to Modern War

Iraq and Afghanistan both exhibited the characteristics of complexity. The Afghan and Iraqi insurgencies were both very adaptable. They were constantly changing tactics and techniques. Both insurgencies took place in very interconnected and interdependent environments thanks to modern mass media. When a priest in rural Florida decided to burn a Koran, it sparked riots in Afghanistan.

By contrast, the first gulf war was not as complex. At the time, there was a lot less media interconnectedness which made public relations straightforward and information easier to control. The Iraqi military of the first gulf war was not very adaptable. It followed Soviet Doctrine emphasizing rigid planning and did not have developed junior leaders capable of taking initiative. Moreover, the players involved were limited to military leaders and statesmen, in stark contrast to the insurgencies in Iraq and Afghanistan where the diversity of players included religious leaders, tribal chiefs, cultural anthropologists, drug kingpins, development agencies, and anyone with a cell phone camera.

The insurgency in Afghanistan is more complex than that in Iraq. After 30 years of war, the national and provincial level political structures have eroded and lost their cohesion. This means that the agendas of political actors varied even at the district and village level, making it much harder for them to organize. In the area of Kandahar I was deployed to, elders might not know the other important elders within the same village. As a result, there was a large diversity of political actors and political agendas within a small area. In Iraq, tribal leaders were able to organize a provincial level uprising against al-Qaeda because the diversity of political actors was less and there was still strong political cohesion at the provincial level. The high complexity of Afghan politics explains why it was harder to develop workable solutions, even if the fighting was harder in Iraq.

As David Petraeus told me in a private conversation, “In Iraq we could see what the problem was and address it, in Afghanistan it was much harder to do so.” With political problems playing out at the provincial level in Iraq, it was possible for national level leaders to understand them and effectively address them. Not so with Afghanistan. This now famous power point slide, originally briefed to the top US general in Afghanistan, provides a remarkably accurate portrayal of the complexity of the problem.

It is important to note that if something is complex, it is not necessarily more difficult. There are plenty of incredibly difficult math problems that do not display the characteristics of complexity. If the Soviets had invaded Western Europe it would have been a traditional force on force fight against a rigid enemy with low interconnectedness and thus not very complex. But it would have been more difficult, costing more in blood and treasure than Iraq or Afghanistan.

Handling Complexity

Thriving in a complex environment requires a set of cultural and institutional attributes that the US military lacks. The whole institutional paradigm, from the personnel structure, to the aspects of warfighting that received emphasis, to the institutional culture, reflected a command and control optimization model suited to handling conflicts like the First Gulf War. As Dr. Scott Page, an expert in complexity theory, puts it: “If you take a command and control optimization approach, you set incentives with only outcomes in mind. You don’t necessarily think about the implications of those incentives on the future sets of behaviors and types. You discourage diversity…You control the structure of the organization and you make decisions from the top down…Command and control isn’t wrong. It’s great if you’ve hired a group of people to build a house or paint a bridge, but it’s not the right thing to do if we’re hoping to thrive in a complex world.”

Clinging to a command and control optimization model seriously hampered the military in Iraq and Afghanistan. It took the military four years in Iraq and the catastrophe of a sectarian civil war for it to adapt to the problem it faced despite the ideas it needed being present since the 1950s. The added complexity of Afghanistan means that an even greater emphasis on complexity would be needed to secure victory there.

Diversity

Diversity of thought is a key component to succeeding in a complex environment. Militaries, just like any organization, will have to temper their diversity. Too much means an organization will not be able to take coherent action. Too little means that it will fall prey to group think will not be able to cope with complexity.

The lack of diversity of thought in the military seriously hampered its ability to handle the Iraq and Afghan wars. For example, one of the most able and adept counter-insurgents, HR McMaster, had his promotion held up twice during crucial phases in the war, ostensibly for thinking on his own and applying a sound and successful plan in Tal Alfar in 2005. It took a heavy handed intervention from the civilian leadership to get him promoted. Then Secretary of Defense Gates took General Petraeus out of combat in Iraq and brought him back the US in order to ensure McMaster got promoted. In this case, clinging to a dominant logic meant that, in the middle of a war, one of the Soldiers best suited to fight it was prevented from reaching positions of authority with the influence necessary.

Crushing diversity has also had a significant impact on the ability of the military to retai those junior officers it needs most to cope with complex conflicts. A case in point is a junior officer who published an article that was mildly controversial but approved by his battalion commander. A new battalion commander took charge soon after and kicked the junior officer out of the unit with ten months of unrated time and drastic effects on his personal life, despite the fact he had been a top ten percent performer and had previously published articles on Afghanistan. That officer is now out of the Military. The lack of intellectual diversity means that senior officers sincerely ask me questions like, “what’s a smart guy like you doing in the Army?” As another junior officer wrote who wisely chose to remain anonymous, “What concerns me…is that among my peers, the ones with ideas are the ones getting out, because they just don’t feel the organization values them.”[1]

Be Careful How You Define Incentives

The way you define goals and incentives will have a major impact on your success dealing with a complex situation. The types of problems encountered solving a complex problem will be constantly evolving, diverse, and unpredictable. Institutions which set rigid and narrow goals and incentives will inevitably be confronted with unfamiliar problems and have difficulty adapting to them. Especially if those goals and incentives do not directly address the systematic causes of the problem.

The United States military has very rigid and specific incentives in every aspect of its organization. Rigid adherence to these have directly hampered it’s efforts in Iraq and Afghanistan. Former Defense Secretary Gates recognized this. In his memoirs, he speaks passionately of the armed forces’ tendency to focus on its own narrow bureaucratic objectives, despite them hampering the Iraq and Afghan wars.

Nearly every facet of the military’s organizational structure has been reduced into a set of narrowly defined and rigid bureaucratic objectives. The personnel system, warfighting, value, development, education, travel, and responsibility have all become a set of bureaucratic criterion that make adaptation to a complex problem almost impossible. Two of these, the personnel system and warfighting, deserve special attention because they have the most direct bearing on our ability to tackle the problems facing us as a country.

The Personnel System

The personnel system utilizes a system of very rigid and specific criteria to select, promote, and develop service members that do not prepare them well for handling complex situations. Overall, a Soldier’s worth is measured by his ability to meet narrowly defined gates in order to secure promotion. If he attempts to develop himself in a way slightly outside the norm he will seriously hamper his ability to get promoted. For example, a junior officer wanted to deploy with his same unit as it was going back to the same exact area. He knew that area as very well after serving as a district level governance officer and platoon leader on the last deployment. He still skype with some important elders. However, deploying with his unit would have been slightly outside of the bureaucratic norm. As such, his battalion commander told him he “needed to get back into the system sooner” and kicked him out of the unit. This kind of decision repeated often will have major implications for our ability to handle conflicts where relationships are paramount.

Rigid incentives also dominate life in the military on a daily basis. For example simple personnel actions, like a Soldier getting permission for his wife to live with him at his post, require such an asinine set of criterion of which even the agencies involved are unaware. As a result, such actions can stretch out into 9 month ordeals.

This personnel system is structured so that officers best suited for handling complexity are not valued and therefore leave the military. The kind of rigid incentives emphasized by the system value the type of person who struggles in a complex situation. Soldiers who remain are those who do best in narrowly defined roles, and they reach the top with a very narrow skillset. As some junior officers, who also remained anonymous, wrote “the reason we’re getting out is because the Marine Corps imposes a high degree of stress, yet accepts Mission Failure so long as all the boxes on the list are checked.”[2]

The system retains and promotes Soldiers who succeed in meeting objective gates, but who lack subjective skills. Thus, they have very little capacity for dealing with situations that are not as concrete, like Afghanistan, Iraq, or any complex one. The classic example of this is LTG Sanchez during the early stages of the Iraq war. He was considered a highly competent and charismatic leader, but unable to handle the complexity of the situation. This dynamic also explains combat arms Lieutenant Colonels who would be homeless were they not in the military.

The lack of developed subjective skills also explains many other problems in the military. A leader reaching positions of high responsibility with little interpersonal ability results in toxic leadership. The Military’s sexual harassment and assault problems result from poorly developed gender-relational development. The outdated attitude towards gender relations has pushed many talented junior officers out of the military. As one officer wrote in Foreign Policy, “many of my peers face this situation; married to an educated, professional spouse who can’t just pick up every 2 or 3 years to relocate to wherever the Military decides we should be, and continue their own meaningful professional career.”[3] Some senior officers have even gone so far as to deride top performing junior officers as being “wife hunters” for valuing a career minded women.

Warfighting

The Military’s approach to warfighting is not well suited to complex problems. Training and warfighting are centered on a set of narrow criteria encapsulated in the Military Decision Making Process (MDMP). MDMP naively assumes a situation that can be accurately described and controlled. The whole paradigm is based on a command and control optimization model and thus is not suited for handling a chaotic and fluid complex problem.

The emphasis on information flow in this process reduces officers from adaptable combat leaders to rigid information managers. For example, a top performing junior officer was recently fired for being “too quick to change information flow systems.” Powerpoint is the main vehicle for this management system. Our system of warfighting has put so much emphasis on it that some people spend their entire deployments trying to teach it to Afghans. This is a futile process. The Afghans’ computers rapidly become inundated with viruses from porn websites. Moreover, there are only a handful of people in the entire Afghan government with the skills necessary to master PowerPoint and create slide decks up to acceptable standards. They are sorely needed in jobs where they can address the root causes of the problem.

The military’s training philosophy reflects this same trend. It places almost exclusive emphasis on preparing for a simple problem set, and little effort goes into thriving in a complex one. Only a narrow set of tasks are emphasized and they are performed in isolation. For example, a typical infantry lieutenant may only encounter one enemy situation during a whole year of training prior to deploying: 2-6 enemy who fight and die in place, a scenario almost never seen in combat. Leaders trained in this system will be proficient in those tasks but are not prepared to adapt to an evolving complex problem.

The principles underlying the Army’s new warfighting philosophy, mission command are sound and generally get away from this trend. However, there is a general feeling it has had little influence. One of my peers said it best in a small group discussion: “We go to these mission command professional development sessions which sound great, but afterwards we go back to the same micro management.” Mission command is unlikely to have wide ranging influence unless the Military as a whole, including the personnel system, is better geared towards handling complexity.

Implications for a Conventional Fight

A military geared towards complexity is likely to succeed in a conventional fight as well. For example, in the first years of World War Two the German Army was able to defeat a superior French and British force because it was better suited to complex war. The French and the British assumed they could accurately understand and control the situation. They created system similar to the US military’s current warfighting philosophy focused on information flow and other narrow criteria. On the other hand, the Germans encouraged diversity of thought and did not define warfighting too narrowly in the years leading up to the war. They “accepted chaos as a natural substance of combat. For them, the fog of war and friction were paramount forces in which the methodology of combat should seek to harmonize, not suppress. By developing methodology of Auftragstaktik (decentralization of responsibility, regulated only what is to be done, not how to do it)….the Germans inured themselves to the effects of confusion and uncertainty in the tangled frenzy of combat. They accepted chaos as the inevitable and lived with it.”[4] The German victory was decisive because they created a system able to handle the complexity that arose out of technological and human changes during the interwar years.

Build Flexibility Into the System

Building flexibility into the structure of the military would go a long way to addressing the issues highlighted above. LTG Barno’s 2013 piece in Foreign Policy entitled “Loss Leader” gave very effective recommendations for just that. His ideas are in line with the recommendations of complexity science. Implementing them would go a long way towards increasing cognitive diversity, improving adaptability, and broadening the narrow objectives that dominate Military life.

The Human Factors of Complexity

There is a deeper human aspect to complexity that needs to be addressed as well. As top developmental psychologist Robert Keegan notes, “when we experience the world as ‘too complex’ we are not just experiencing the complexity of the world. We are experiencing a mismatch between the world’s complexity and our own at this moment.”[5] When the Military experienced the problems in Iraq and Afghanistan as too complex it meant that our own complexity was lacking.

Our own complexity is determined by our meaning system, a term in developmental psychology that refers to the way a group or and individual creates meaning and value. Developmental psychologists have identified several stages of meaning system growth. As an individual or organization grows into a higher developmental stage of meaning system growth, they can handle more complexity.

Developing a more complex meaning system is necessary for tackling complex problems. It is not hard and less dynamic organizations have effectively done it. The National Forest Service, which has a significant casualty rate amongst its fire starters, effectively implemented a method developed by Dr. Kegan called immunity mapping to better cope with their problems. There are many governmental and business organizations in the civilian world that have effectively adopted this approach.

Create a Warrior Statesmen Regiment

The most effective way to institutionalize complexity and develop a better meaning system would be to create a new school and unit. The Ranger regiment and Ranger school played a key role in creating a healthy military culture after the detritus from the Vietnam War. Similarly, a new unit would allow the military to move forward from Iraq and Afghanistan with stronger human capacities than ever before, crucial in an era of shrinking budgets.

The new course would cover the human factors necessary to handle complexity (the human dimension in Military vernacular) plus the essential elements of complex conflicts. Creating this course to be challenging, selective, and essential for career advancement would give it a significant influence over institutional culture. The school would serve as the anchor for a unit specifically tailored to deal with complex problems, called a Warrior Statesman Regiment. It would resemble a conventional military unit but would have the above-mentioned course as a prerequisite for all leaders, and would have civilian experts integrated into the chain of command. Having civilian specialists in development, cultural anthropology, and governance (on a reserve status) would give this unit the diversity and interconnectedness necessary to handle complex problems and ensure there is effective civil-military cooperation. Soldiers would be selected who show competency in basic soldier and physical skills but have strong intellectual credentials and high meaning system development, which is easily measured.

The service members best suited for this unit are exactly the types that are leaving the Military in large numbers. Creating this unit and stationing it near a major city would give them a place where they could contribute to the military and be well utilized. By rotating Soldiers through the unit and putting it up on a pedestal, it would give it a major influence over the Army’s institutional culture.

Moreover, this unit would be perfect for handling the increasingly complex problems cropping up throughout the world. It would be ideal for handling civil wars in Africa or conflicts like Iraq and Afghanistan. Currently, policy makers do not have a good tool for handling a conflict that is to unstable for peace keeping but not a full blown fight yet, the peace enforcement stage. The Warrior Statesmen unit would be perfect for keeping interventions small but effective and preventing the conflicts from growing into a full blown intervention. It could intervene as the backbone of an African Union or UN force and achieve major strategic goals without a large scale conventional commitment. If the conventional Military wants to stay relevant in a complex world, it needs its own specific capabilities.

The world is rapidly becoming more complex and so is warfare. We need to adapt our complexity to the world. Doing so would solve many of the most pressing problems plaguing the military. To meet future challenges, we need to adapt our institutions, cultures, and meaning systems. Using insights gleaned from science, the solution is to create a Warrior Statesmen Regiment.

End Notes

Alexander Frank is a JD candidate at Yale Law School. He served for five years as an infantry officer in the Army, including a tour in Kandahar province, Afghanistan. In Kandahar he served as an infantry platoon leader and worked with the State department to improve local governance. His bachelor’s degree is in Physics from Duke University.

Source: http://www.isn.ethz.ch/Digital-Library/Articles/Detail/?lng=en&id=195012

Editor’s note: It appears Russia is deliberately targeting civilian infrastructure, in this case, grain silos, in order to starve ISIS. This is a clear violation of the Laws of Armed Conflict, to which Russia is a signatory.

Soldiers’ rules for non-international armed conflict LOAC PPT 2, Introduction to the Law of Armed Conflict – 14 1. Only engage military objectives. Do not attack civilians or civilian objects.

• http://www.genevacall.org/wp-content/uploads/dlm_uploads/2013/11/The-Law-of-Armed-Conflict.pdf

Airstrike on “ISIS oil storage”.

Airstrike on grain silos near Surman, Idlib

Video

Russian Defense Ministry Video (from Russian Defense Ministry YouTube Channel)

Geolocation of the granary:http://wikimapia.org/#lang=ru&lat=35.597726&lon=36.864377&z=17&m=b

Typical granary.

Typical oil storage

From The Harvard International Law Journal: “Ownership or Use? Civilian Property Interests in International Humanitarian Law”.

“We suggest that when such items as hospitals, water wells, or grain silos are deliberately destroyed, the model should be applied by awarding a relatively small fixed sum to every individual in a given catchment area. This approach minimizes the cost to a tribunal of measuring civilian reliance, and provides a verifiable, objective measure that can be tailored to any situation.” – http://www.harvardilj.org/wp-content/uploads/2010/09/HILJ_49-2_Brilmayer-Chepiga.pdf

Source: http://www.liveleak.com/view?i=0b8_1449156208

Confirmation: http://syria.liveuamap.com/en/2015/3-december-ruaf-airstrike-on-grain-silos-geolocated-near

Confirmation: https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLNxwX7r4A554pHDwtt6ATyRRWRgQRYaHZ

A very interesting and quite accurate assessment of Russia in a global perspective. Not good at all.

A foreign expert asked me about trolling today and I responded with a question: which kind of troll?  A troll’s purpose is to:

1. Suppress opposition statements
2. Overwhelm opposition statements
3. Distract the conversation
4. Disrupt the conversation

There are more ‘purposes’, but the key idea is to not allow honest arguments of the topic at hand.

The MH17 aftermath is a prolific example. More than ten ‘alternate theories’ were offered by Russia to counter, obfuscate, distract from, disrupt conversation about, suppress and overwhelm opposition – namely the truth as revealed in the Dutch investigation report. ‘Evidence’ was wholly manufactured, yet somehow the world let Russia do that – for a lack of definitive proof. Russian President Putin lied, repeatedly and emphatically, which has been wholly disproved, yet the world has not held him accountable. Foreign Minister Lavrov also lied, echoing President Putin, yet his reputation has not been damaged in the least. Russian supported mercenaries and volunteers destroyed evidence at the crash scene, at times even stealing from the victim’s luggage, yet Russia has not been admonished.

Russia is, indeed, a troll state.

DECEMBER 2, 2015

BY ANDREW KORNBLUTH

In the eighteen months since Russia annexed Crimea, the world has been alternately captivated and bewildered by the wild swings and sudden shifts that describe Russian foreign policy under President Vladimir Putin. Particularly alarming for those who fear a direct clash between Russia and the West has been Putin’s tendency to swerve between antagonism and conciliation, or—even more bizarrely—to pursue both simultaneously.

In an attempt to put a name to this behavior, a variety of epithets, from “rogue state” to “spoiler,” have been dusted off and applied to the present Russian government. But insofar as the current state of Putin’s Russia represents a new kind of autocracy, none of these labels do justice to its innovative nature. Perhaps a better indication of what drives this system can be found in the Russian government’s well-documented embrace of Internet “trolling,” which corresponds surprisingly well to the seemingly random and contradictory fluctuations of the country’s relations with the outside world.

In its most basic form, trolling refers to the phenomenon of Internet users who post inflammatory messages in online forums like comment sections and social media threads with the aim of antagonizing others. Although most trolling is idle provocation, the Kremlin was famously revealed in the last year to be paying large numbers of professional “trolls” to both write and up-vote posts praising Russia’s occupation of Ukrainian territory and condemning its critics. But how can trolling be a technique of rule?

To begin with, trolls, regardless of the anger they unleash online, are not people who want to definitively cut themselves off from the real world. Trolls seek instant gratification and attention by spreading vitriol on the Internet, but resume their normal lives offline. With this in mind, Russia’s sudden intervention in the war in Syria can be understood as the latest in a long line of trolling campaigns, beginning with the suspension of foreign adoptions three years ago. These acts were intended to needle the West and cheer Russians, but without risking an actual breakdown in foreign relations (in this respect, the war in Ukraine proved to be a serious miscalculation).

The label of “rogue state” is therefore misplaced when it comes to Russia, which clearly desires to win readmission to the “clubhouse” of world powers. Thus the bombing of Syrian rebels, for all the consternation it has caused, has been accompanied by thinly-veiled pleas for Western governments to lift the isolation imposed on Russia over the Ukrainian crisis.

Trolling is also an effective substitute for constructive activity. By tormenting others, trolls create the illusion of action and assuage their own nagging feelings of powerlessness. Likewise, Putin’s military adventures in Ukraine and Syria have been remarkably successful at distracting attention from the worsening decay of Russia’s human and economic capital.

But the satisfaction derived from trolling is inherently short-lived. To sustain their short attention spans, trolls must constantly find new and varied ways to bait their opponents. Hence the dizzying pivot from promoting the so-called “People’s Republics” of Donetsk and Luhansk, which were banished from the headlines almost overnight, to heralding the creation of an “anti-terrorist coalition” in Syria.

Unfortunately, trolling is a tactic that cannot serve as a platform for a long-term vision or strategy. In place of ideology-based opposition to the West, Russia’s troll state offers up only irascibility and schadenfreude, the glee derived from other people’s frustrations. Perhaps it could not be otherwise. After all, Russia’s elite depends on the West—for recreation, money-laundering, medical treatment, and the education of its children. In many ways, Russia’s rulers have more in common with the West’s upper class than they do with the pensioners scraping by in the Moscow suburbs.

The danger, of course, is that even bloodless trolling can unintentionally escalate into life-or-death confrontation, a risk that was made real when, after months of Russian incursions into foreign airspace from the Baltics to Japan, Turkey shot down a Russian bomber passing over its territory. But the state’s reliance on trolling in an ideological vacuum gives some cause for hope. After all, a sustained and sober response, both online and in real life, is often sufficient to curb trolling. In the commotion set off by Russia’s Syrian interlude, many seem to have forgotten that limited sanctions and diplomatic ostracism appear to have persuaded the Kremlin to restrain its forces in the Donbas region. Although the conflict in eastern Ukraine continues to claim lives on a daily basis and has flared back up, no major offensive has been launched since February 2015.

To think of Russia as a troll state is not to assume that it has no real goals or that its targets are chosen purely on a whim. It does, however, help to explain a style of statecraft that might otherwise seem increasingly irrational and unpredictable. Certainly, the Russian public delights in the spectacle of their President poking Western leaders in the eye. And Putin does seem to have hit on something fundamental about the age we live in. As the unexpected popularity of Donald Trump’s run for the American presidency has demonstrated, trolling is a political technique perfectly suited to more than one easily-bored, confrontation-hungry modern society.

Andrew Kornbluth is a doctoral student in the Department of History at the University of California, Berkeley.

Source: http://www.atlanticcouncil.org/blogs/new-atlanticist/russia-is-a-troll-state-not-a-rogue-state?utm_content=buffere4e59&utm_medium=social&utm_source=twitter.com&utm_campaign=buffer

UK Jeremy Bernard Corbyn MP is a British politician who is the Leader of the Labour Party and the Leader of the Opposition. He has been the Member of Parliament for Islington North since the general election of 1983.

• Open source – ✓
• No way to confirm “data” received = ✓
• Probable nefarious Russian reason = ✓
• No way to confirm request made = ✓

Conclusion = (Too obvious) Russian smear for an unknown reason.

• Cover?
• Distraction?
• Future blackmail?
• Create distorted picture? (expect more)
• Russia – business as usual – ✓

By Jared Serbu | @jserbuWFED

December 2, 2015 4:46 am

After five years of a gradual rebuilding process, the Army’s nascent electronic warfare program has plenty of people. Now it needs to equip them to do their jobs, a process that will ramp up significantly beginning next year, officials say.

The Army has been slowly reconstituting electronic warfare as a warfighting discipline after having gotten out of the EW business at the end of the Cold War. But Col. Jeffrey Church, the chief of the Army’s electronic warfare division, said the improvised explosive device threat in Iraq and Afghanistan proved the decision was a mistake and the service is now completely committed to rebuilding its capacity to fight in the electromagnetic spectrum.

After having made EW a military operational specialty in 2011, the Army now has sufficient personnel in its ranks — just over 800 people — even if they’re underequipped to perform their missions right now.

“I often joke that in the Army, EW does not stand for ‘electronic warfare,’ it stands for ‘extra worker,’” Church told the Association of Old Crows’ annual convention Tuesday in Washington. “He’s highly trained, he has top secret clearances, but he doesn’t have much materiel to do anything with, so he ends up working in the operations shop, the intelligence shop, wherever the commander needs him.”

But Church said that’s about to change as the Army begins to field a key software suite known as Electronic Warfare Planning and Management Tool (EWPMT). It will be loaded onto laptops and deployed to electronic warfare soldiers around the world beginning next year.

“That will change things because for the first time, commanders are going to start to be able to see and visually understand the electromagnetic spectrum,” he said. “Army guys are traditionally in the business of blowing things up, standing on one hill and watching things explode on the other hill. But when I start slinging electrons, my soldiers say, ‘Where is it? I don’t see anything.’ EWPMT will allow us to show our leaders and commanders what’s happening in the spectrum. We’ll know where friendly emitters are, we’ll know where enemy emitters are and our commanders will start to be able to make informed decisions.”

The capability is crucial, Church said, as the Army forecasts a future in which it’s likely to face adversaries with robust electronic warfare capabilities of their own. He said having a clear map of a battlefield made up of radio waves will give commanders information ranging from where their logistics convoys are most likely to encounter radio-controlled IEDs to where their attacking forces might have their own communications jammed by an enemy’s EW tools.

EWPMT will also be used to help control the Multifunction Electronic Warfare system, the Army’s new integrated platform for electronic attack, soon to be fitted on many of the service’s traditional, kinetic weapons platforms.

“It’ll be remote and dynamically operated by the EW operator back in the operations center, and transparent to the soldier on the ground; he just knows he’s in his tank and he’s killing other tanks,” Church said. “Meanwhile, in the background, things are happening on his antenna, controlled by a guy hammering away on EWPMT based on all of the sensors he’s got and his ability to see what’s happening in the spectrum. The end result is that the tank platoon just has crystal-clear communications all the time. Part of the plan is also to use this to deliver cyber effects. How do you do that? You break the wire and use the RF spectrum to deliver a cyber effect.”

Church said Army leaders have been committed to reestablishing a credible EW program for several years now, but the new electronic warfare community took on greater cachet within the broader Army and DoD beginning in 2014, when alleged Russian “volunteers” invaded the Ukraine using, among other things, electronic warfare capabilities as part of an integrated information operations campaign.

“The enemy has EW equipment right now. I joke with a lot of folks that one of my favorite people right now is Vladimir Putin, because he’s given the Army EW program more traction than I ever could have,” he said. “One good thing is that now that the Russians are doing things in Ukraine and Syria, they have to turn their stuff on. So guess what I get to do? Watch them and learn from what they’re doing in the spectrum and their training and their equipment. They look at information operations as one integrated battlespace that they work in, and they’re good at it. They’re trained. And we will get there too.”

But in some ways “getting there” is a function of time. Since the Army allowed its electronic warfare program to lie dormant for two decades, Church is now the most senior electronic warfare officer in the entire service. And he only became certified as an EWO five years ago.

“The Army is committed, but you also have to realize that we haven’t done this for 25 years. So the best of us have all come in from a different career field — some from the infantry, some from field artillery, pick a branch,” he said. “We are back into the spectrum. We have the people, now we’ve got to figure out material solutions, get our formations right and get our leaders trained so that they trust the capabilities we deliver.”

Source: http://federalnewsradio.com/army/2015/12/armys-electronic-warfare-program-enough-soldiers-not-enough-experience-equipment/

By James Andrew Lewis

APR 18, 2014

Edward Snowden, perhaps under duress, recently participated in a call-in program where selected viewers can pose pre-screened questions directly to Vladimir Putin. Snowden asked President Putin, “Does Russia intercept, store or analyze in any way the communications of millions of individuals?” Putin denied Russian mass surveillance, saying “Thank God, our special services are strictly controlled by the state and society, and their activity is regulated by law.”

Byline: Mike Collier, eng.lsm.lv chief editor