The Sirens of Central
While viewing some Tucker & Benz
The Library Sirens Commenced...
"Take all of your stuff !"
urged Librarian Gruff
We may not re-open Post-Hence !
A Timely Limerick
© Chuck Darling Public Domain
August 28, 2024
Read:
I’m Sorry for Creating the ‘Gerasimov Doctrine’
By Mark Galeotti, principal director of the consultancy
MARCH 5, 2018, 2:04 PM
"I was the first to write about Russia’s infamous high-tech military strategy. One small problem: it doesn't exist.
Everywhere, you’ll find scholars, pundits, and policymakers talking about the threat the
— named after Russia’s chief of the general staff — poses to the West. It’s a new way of war, “an expanded theory of modern warfare,” or even “a vision of total warfare.”
There’s one small problem. It doesn’t exist. And the longer we pretend it does, the longer we misunderstand the — real, but different — challenge Russia poses.
I feel I can say that because, to my immense chagrin, I created this term, which has since acquired a destructive life of its own, lumbering clumsily into the world to spread fear and loathing in its wake. Back in February 2013, the Russian newspaper Military-Industrial Courier — as exciting and widely read as it sounds — reprinted a speech by Gen. Valery Gerasimov. It talks of how in the modern world, the use of propaganda and subversion means that “a perfectly thriving state can, in a matter of months and even days, be transformed into an arena of fierce armed conflict, become a victim of foreign intervention, and sink into a web of chaos, humanitarian catastrophe, and civil war.”
It largely passed unnoticed, but Robert Coalson of Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty, the U.S. government-funded TV and radio service broadcasting to Russia and other unfree countries, picked up on it and translated it. He sent it to me and, with his permission, I published the translation on my blog, with my own comments.
A blog is as much as anything else a vanity site; obviously I want people to read it. So for a snappy title, I coined the term “Gerasimov doctrine,” though even then I noted in the text that this term was nothing more than “a placeholder,” and “it certainly isn’t a doctrine.” I didn’t think people would genuinely believe either that he came up with it (Gerasimov is a tough and effective chief of the general staff, but no theoretician), less yet than it was a “programmatic” blueprint for war on the West.
But then came the annexation of Crimea, when
“little green men” — commandos without insignia — seized the peninsula with scarcely a shot fired.
This was followed by the Donbass war, fought initially by a motley collection of local thugs, separatists, Russian adventurers, and special forces, accompanied by a barrage of lurid Russian propaganda.
Suddenly, it seemed that Gerasimov had indeed been describing what was to come, had we but realized it. Prone, as ever, to overcompensation, Western mainstream opinion swung from ignoring Gerasimov’s pronouncements to enshrining them as some kind of bleeding-edge blueprint for a new way of war." -Mark Galeotti
*****
Valery Gerasimov was actually
describing what "The West" does...
Gerasimov was claimed by Ukrainian authorities to have been killed during the Russian invasion of Ukraine on 7 March 2022 near Kharkiv, along with several other senior Russian officials. The Ukrainian defence ministry offered no proof, and US officials and CNN were not able to verify the claim.
Huh.
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