{"id":6012,"date":"2015-06-18T07:00:53","date_gmt":"2015-06-18T12:00:53","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/hcstx.org\/?p=6012"},"modified":"2015-06-18T07:00:53","modified_gmt":"2015-06-18T12:00:53","slug":"taking-a-spoon-to-a-gunfight","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/thetacticalhermit.com\/index.php\/2015\/06\/18\/taking-a-spoon-to-a-gunfight\/","title":{"rendered":"Taking a Spoon to a Gunfight"},"content":{"rendered":"

\"gunfights\"<\/a><\/p>\n

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David Maxwell<\/a><\/div>\n
April 2, 2014<\/abbr> \u00b7 in Commentary<\/a><\/span><\/div>\n

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Taking a Spoon to a Gunfight:\u00a0The West Dealing with Russian Unconventional and Political Warfare in Former Soviet States<\/em><\/strong><\/p>\n

As the Russians now try to reach a diplomatic solution in order to consolidate their gains in Crimea \u2013 as evidenced by Putin\u2019s call to Obama and SECSTATE\u2019s meeting with the Russian foreign minister \u2013 it is useful to try to understand how Russia has used all<\/i> of its elements of national power to achieve its objectives.<\/p>\n

While the United States has spent the last decade-plus trying to learn to \u201ceat soup with a knife,\u201d the Russians have been reaching back to some tried and true methods from the Cold War. \u00a0Some 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.\u00a0 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.<\/p>\n

A friend asked me recently if the Russians were conducting unconventional warfare in Ukraine and in particular in Crimea.\u00a0 Even a superficial analysis shows that they are using much of the standard definition of\u00a0unconventional warfare<\/a>:<\/p>\n

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.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

Read the Remainder at War on the Rocks<\/em> HERE<\/a>.<\/strong><\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

David Maxwell April 2, 2014 \u00b7 in Commentary   Taking a Spoon to a Gunfight:\u00a0The 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 \u2013 as evidenced by Putin\u2019s call to Obama and SECSTATE\u2019s…<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_is_tweetstorm":false,"jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":false,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","enabled":false}}},"categories":[74,1286,17],"tags":[1555,1563,1564,1565,1453,1566,1567],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/thetacticalhermit.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/6012"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/thetacticalhermit.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/thetacticalhermit.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/thetacticalhermit.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/thetacticalhermit.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=6012"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/thetacticalhermit.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/6012\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/thetacticalhermit.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=6012"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/thetacticalhermit.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=6012"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/thetacticalhermit.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=6012"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}