Taking a Spoon to a Gunfight: The West Dealing with Russian Unconventional and Political Warfare in Former Soviet States

As the Russians now try to reach a diplomatic solution in order to consolidate their gains in Crimea – as evidenced by Putin’s call to Obama and SECSTATE’s meeting with the Russian foreign minister – it is useful to try to understand how Russia has used all of its elements of national power to achieve its objectives.

While the United States has spent the last decade-plus trying to learn to “eat soup with a knife,” the Russians have been reaching back to some tried and true methods from the Cold War.  Some in the U.S. national security community want to continue to focus on expeditionary counterinsurgency warfare and armed nation building while others long for large-scale maneuver warfare along the lines of the Fulda Gap.  However, while we debate these two forms of warfare and the proper balance between them, the Russians are practicing something different: unconventional warfare in support of political warfare to achieve its strategic objectives.

A friend asked me recently if the Russians were conducting unconventional warfare in Ukraine and in particular in Crimea.  Even a superficial analysis shows that they are using much of the standard definition of unconventional warfare:

activities to enable a resistance or insurgency to coerce, disrupt, or overthrow a government or occupying power through and with an underground, auxiliary and guerrilla forces in a denied area.

Read the Remainder at War on the Rocks HERE.