Vladimir Putin teaches Australia a lesson in hybrid warfare

Keeping his distance: Vladimir Putin chairs a meeting in the Kremlin on Monday. Picture: AFP

For the last eight years Russian President Vladimir Putin has been providing the West a lesson in hybrid warfare, applying a relentless kinetic and non-kinetic campaign against Ukraine, while simultaneously undermining the West’s resolve to resist.

Putin’s war did not begin last week. Yet only when the tanks roll in does the West consider war to have begun. Instead, Putin combined cyber, psychological, active measures, ‘little-green-men’, carving out separatist regions, and bare-chested threats with raw military power. It is as much about probing the West’s reactions as it was about shaping the battlefield.

With the exception of ‘little-green-men’, Australia is subject to the same campaign by the Chinese Communist Party. As Australia enters a federal election, no matter who wins, we must demand a national security strategy that defends our entire system.

In Three Dangerous Men, Russia, China, Iran and the Rise of Irregular Warfare, American international security expert Seth G. Jones, outlines how Moscow, Beijing and Tehran have been targeting the US through irregular warfare. Jones explains cyber attacks, covert action, proxy conflicts, information and disinformation campaigns, espionage, and economic coercion will be the tools dominating conflict and reshaping international relations. Legitimate targets include our culture, economy and information systems.

Putin has been deploying all these non-military means against Ukraine, and the West, combined with the Russian strategy of maskirovka, deception and denial. Given a choice between controlling submarine routes or controlling deep-sea fibre optic cables, go for the deep-sea cables. Ideally best to control both.

Last year’s ransomware attack on the Colonial pipeline, one of the most critical pieces of energy infrastructure along the US eastern seaboard is a good example. The attack came from a bunch of hackers called DarkSide. Nothing to do with the Kremlin of course. Remarkably during their June 2021 Geneva summit, US President Joe Biden handed Putin a list of 16 sites he said were off limits to hackers. No consequences for Putin. The NotPetya cyber-attack first targeting the Ukraine then spreading across Western finance, energy and logistic systems cost an estimated $US10bn in damages. Still no response from the West.

Neither Putin nor Chinese President Xi Jinping see a distinction between state and non-state actors or between military and civilian resources in the prosecution of their warfare strategy. Iran uses Hezbollah, Hamas and drug traffickers, while the CCP deploys fishing vessels to dominate and deny access across the Indo-Pacific.

Retired general H.R. McMaster, who served as US national security adviser during the Trump administration, explains what China’s campaign of co-option, coercion and concealment has in common with Putin’s objective of collapsing the free, open and rules-based order. Our opponents despise us and our system. No amount of stroking crocodiles will make them purr. Tragically, our future is being compromised by many politicians, big-tech companies such as Facebook, Amazon and corporate elites who have become enablers of the CCP. Those who acquiesce, apologise or appease are our opponent’s biggest useful idiots.

In the end the biggest useful idiot of them all might well be Putin. The CCP has been cunning in its support of Putin in his war to take Ukraine. Using Putin to test how far he can go while watching and learning the limits of the West’s reactions.

Three years before the 9/11 terrorist attacks, two senior officers from the Chinese military, colonels Qiao Liang and Wang Xangsui, wrote Unrestricted Warfare, advocating the use of non-military methods of war. This included disrupting the West’s dependence on trade networks, telecommunications, transportation, electricity grids, information technology (such as incessant hacking), as well as mass media and financial and economic manipulation. Consider TE Lawrence’s 1929 piece on guerrilla warfare, where he observed the need for “the adjustment of spirit to the point where it becomes fit to exploit in action”. Feels like this is already in play for Australia.

Conflict is now dominated by the synthesis of technology, extremism, human trafficking to a create humanitarian crisis, economic punishment and terrorism employed to advance the strategic interests our opponents. All unconventional and all before a shot is fired.

As John F. Kennedy described in his speech to the US Military Academy graduating class of 1962, since the end of the Second World War there has been a relentless series of conflicts, none of which involved nuclear weapons. Instead, war by guerrillas, insurgents, subversion and insurrection. War by ambush and infiltration rather than conventional combat. Seeking victory by eroding and exhausting the enemy. Dividing and isolating our neighbours and allies from those who inherently share our values. This is the future we face now.

Jason Thomas is vice-president of the Australia Pacific Island Business Council, teaches risk management at Swinburne University of Technology and is director of Frontier Assessments