{"id":178928,"date":"2018-07-17T18:53:00","date_gmt":"2018-07-17T23:53:00","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.panix.com\/~msaroff\/40years\/2018\/07\/17\/about-that-gerasimov-doctrine\/"},"modified":"2018-07-17T18:53:00","modified_gmt":"2018-07-17T23:53:00","slug":"about-that-gerasimov-doctrine","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.panix.com\/~msaroff\/40years\/2018\/07\/17\/about-that-gerasimov-doctrine\/","title":{"rendered":"About That “Gerasimov Doctrine”"},"content":{"rendered":"
The academic who created the idea of the “Gerasimov Doctrine”, which was alleged a Russian blueprint for social warfare through chaos, has has completely disavowed his analysis<\/a>.<\/div>\n

It turns out Mark Galeotti, who created the concept on his a blog as a sort of throw away on his blog,*<\/sup> realized on further analysis that General Valery Vasilyevich Gerasimov was not writing about Russian strategies.<\/p>\n

The general was writing about what he saw as a deliberate US strategy which had been promulgated through various color revolutions and the Arab spring, and was discussing how to combat this:<\/p>\n

Everywhere, you\u2019ll find scholars, pundits, and policymakers talking about the threat the \u201cGerasimov doctrine\u201d \u2014 named after Russia\u2019s chief of the general staff \u2014 poses to the West. It\u2019s a new way of war, \u201can expanded theory<\/a> of modern warfare,\u201d or even \u201ca vision<\/a> of total warfare.\u201d <\/p>\n

There\u2019s one small problem. It doesn\u2019t exist. And the longer we pretend it does, the longer we misunderstand the \u2014 real, but different \u2014 challenge Russia poses. <\/p>\n

I feel I can say that because, to my immense chagrin<\/a>, 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<\/i> \u2014 as exciting and widely read as it sounds \u2014 reprinted a speech<\/a> by Gen. Valery Gerasimov. It talks of how in the modern world, the use of propaganda and subversion means that \u201ca 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.\u201d<\/p>\n

\u2026\u2026\u2026<\/p>\n

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 \u201cGerasimov doctrine,\u201d though even then I noted in the text that this term was nothing more than \u201ca placeholder,\u201d and \u201cit certainly isn\u2019t a doctrine.\u201d I didn\u2019t 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 \u201cprogrammatic<\/a>\u201d blueprint for war on the West.<\/p>\n

\u2026\u2026\u2026<\/p>\n

The problems with this formulation are numerous, though. Gerasimov was actually talking about how the Kremlin understands<\/a> what happened in the \u201cArab Spring\u201d uprisings, the \u201ccolor revolutions\u201d against pro-Moscow regimes in Russia\u2019s neighborhood, and in due course Ukraine\u2019s \u201cMaidan\u201d revolt. The Russians honestly \u2014 however wrongly \u2014 believe that these were not genuine protests against brutal and corrupt governments, but regime changes orchestrated in Washington, or rather, Langley. This wasn\u2019t a \u201cdoctrine\u201d as the Russians understand it, for future adventures abroad: Gerasimov was trying to work out how to fight<\/a>, not promote, such uprisings at home.<\/span><\/p><\/blockquote>\n

<\/a>So basically, we are accusing the Russians of doing what the Russians are accusing us of doing.<\/p>\n

*<\/sup>Note to self, people actually read this stuff. Plan accordingly.<\/span><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

The academic who created the idea of the “Gerasimov Doctrine”, which was alleged a Russian blueprint for social warfare through chaos, has has completely disavowed his analysis. It turns out Mark Galeotti, who created the concept on his a blog as a sort of throw away on his blog,* realized on further analysis that General …<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[],"tags":[389,455,549],"class_list":["post-178928","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","tag-history","tag-russia","tag-tactics"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.panix.com\/~msaroff\/40years\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/178928"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.panix.com\/~msaroff\/40years\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.panix.com\/~msaroff\/40years\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.panix.com\/~msaroff\/40years\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.panix.com\/~msaroff\/40years\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=178928"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.panix.com\/~msaroff\/40years\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/178928\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.panix.com\/~msaroff\/40years\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=178928"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.panix.com\/~msaroff\/40years\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=178928"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.panix.com\/~msaroff\/40years\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=178928"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}