Ensures Russian hybrid war.
Ronfeldt & Arquilla 18 (David, Independent Analyst, retired analyst for the RAND Corporation. John, phD in political science from Stanford University, Faculty at US Naval Postgraduate School, coined the concept of “netwar.” “The Continuing Promise of the Noösphere and Noöpolitik — Twenty Years After.” May 2018. p 18. Available at SSRN: https://ssrn.com/abstract=3259425 or http://dx.doi.org/10.2139/ssrn.3259425 //shree)
What are these darker forms? They go by many names: cognitive warfare, information warfare, information operations, political warfare, memetic warfare, epistemic warfare, neocortical warfare, perception management, strategic deception, along with such older terms as the war of ideas and the battle for hearts and minds, and newer expressions about weaponized social networks and weaponized narratives. What these terms have in common is that they all represent ways to work on the mind — sometimes for good, other times for ill. By way of contrast, we view noopolitik as a way to work with the mind.
For a while, our non-state adversaries — notably Al Qaeda and ISIS — seemed to have the lead in mastering the arts and techniques of cognitive warfare. But they no longer pose the threats of a few years ago. Now our state adversaries have the lead in using dark varieties of noopolitik against us.
In the case of Russia, this means influence operations that go by names like Active Measures, kompromat, dezinformatsiya, reflexive control, and hybrid warfare. These operations also involve Moscow’s deployment of strategic narratives that extol “Eurasianism” and disparage democracy. Actually, Russian use of political warfare is deeply rooted in Russian history — partly in Grigory Potemkin’s use of deception and disinformation in the late 18th C. to make people think things were better (or different) than they really were, as in the creation of “Potemkin villages”; and also in Ivan Pavlov’s work on reflexive conditioning in the late 19th C., resulting in “Pavlovian conditioning”. To say that Russian strategy has Potemkin-ed and Pavlov-ed many American minds may sound odd, but may well be accurate. (See Pomerantsev & Weiss, 2014; Walker & Ludwig, 2017)