Russia periodically updates its military doctrine and has done so again at the end of 2014.
What is interesting in the the amount of emphasis they are putting on cyber and information warfare. Cyber and media warfare has worked very well for them over Ukraine. In the Donbass region one of the first things they did was capture the TV masts and turn off all Ukrainian channels and replace them with more Russian ones. It has worked in forming public opinion there for people who have little interest in getting their opinion forming information from anywhere but TV (this generally applies to 80% or more in all societies).
It has worked well in the West through obvious sources like RT and soon to join them Sputnik TV, but also where most of the MSM is much pro-Russian in UK and US than most people realise. This is party because most reporters covering Eastern Europe are based in Moscow. If you have lived there for 10-20 years, have a good lifestyle, house / flat with mortgage and children in local schools, your outlook is inevitably Russian orientated and also means why would you risk life being made difficult or being expelled by straying too far from the Putin line? In Western Europe media circles, the BBC is often mentioned as the most western pro-Russian news channel in Western Europe! The BBC is often ridiculed on Twitter, by somebody using the name "Vladimir Putin", along the lines of: "I made $32 last week where I bet Medvedev 50 rouble on how often the BBC would use the word Separatist in Ukraine reports"! The trolling in the comments sections of most Western media, with each Russian troll favouring their fellow trolls and building a barrage of aggressively defended opinions against anybody that posts more pro-Western ones has also been reasonably effective, when uncontested and quite often counter-productive when it is, where the trolls quickly resort to using over-aggressive language.
The West is going to have to do much more is this information age to catch up especially as it is expected that Russia and China are going to sign a joint cooperation agreement to up the ante in early 2015. It is always going to be much more difficult for the West to counter this information warfare, where by the very nature of our societies we are much more open than closed society dictatorships than Russia, which is rapidly increasing Internet censorship and China where is ringed by a Western information censorship firewall.
The next level up from this is obviously cyber warfare and I think Guffer is going to be kept busy on this. The West in general and NATO in particular is going to have to do much more to counter this threat in the future. The hacking last week by Russian hackers of Merkel's and German Government websites while the Ukrainian PM was visiting Berlin protesting about German friendship towards Ukraine is a recent example. The West is also much more dependent on using connected computers, control systems and the Internet and this will continue to grow with the Internet of things. There is plenty of scope here for undermining and changing our societies, with an example being more and more MSM Internet publications are now removing their comment sections in part due to Russian trolling.
For those that think what has happened in Ukraine is a minor aberration, it isn't, it is the start of the next cold war and a much more dangerous one, where the first one was about different ideologies, this one is about keeping Putin in power for the rest of his life at any cost. Putin puts a high cost on his own life and like most ex-KGB colonel's virtually nothing on everybody elses.
For those that would like to read more, here is a link to the source of the information. It is in Russian so you will need to use Bing or Google translate to read:
http://sprotyv.info/ru/news/11034-informacionnye-akcenty-novoy-voennoy-doktriny-kremlya
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Topic: New Russian Military Doctrine (Read 841 times)