It’s not new, we’re just ignorant: our modern Maginot Line does little against political warfare
APRIL 5, 2024~ MATT ARMSTRONG
A reminder to the reader: at present, and for the past two years, I am posting at mountainrunner.substack.com. The blog you’re reading – mountainrunner.us – has largely been dormant since then, save the occasional cross-post here, like this one, to direct you to the substack page. This blog will be maintained indefinitely as it remains a resource for many and contains material cited in books and reports over nearly two decades.
The following originally appeared at
https://mountainrunner.substack.com/p/its-not-new-were-just-ignorant yesterday. If you have a comment, do so there instead of here. If you share, please share that link rather than this link. Thank you.
In the early 1980s, a Soviet defector gave lectures and interviews on “ideological subversion,” which, he noted, could also be called “active measures” or “psychological warfare.” I would add it could also be referred to as political warfare. In public engagements, Yuri Bezmenov described the four stages of this ideological subversion that intended to change how target audiences perceived reality. For an overview, see the interview below; for a deeper dive, see this one-hour lecture he gave in 1983.
Two weeks ago, I had the pleasure of sitting on two panels at the Connexions24 conference in Austin, Texas. For the first panel, “From Reactive to Proactive: The United States & Information Warfare,” I spoke a bit about the misunderstanding of “information warfare,” a term that tends to focus minds on a munition and thus how to “counter” that munition rather than the myriad of other salient issues related to the aggression, and the more fitting label of political warfare. I also spoke about the need to fix the pipelines to leadership – the schoolhouses, from public administration schools to political science to international relations and beyond – to expand the aperture and include the role of public opinion in foreign affairs and national security. I pointed out that political warfare is cheap asymmetric engagement that our adversaries would be stupid not to use, especially since they’ve suffered virtually no repercussions. It enables them to bypass the Maginot Line of our military deterrence, where we’ve placed virtually all of our proverbial eggs of national defense. I shared that I didn’t come up with the Maginot Line analogy myself, but rather, I began using this reference after reading a 1955 article on the gray areas and military deterrence by a guy the audience likely heard of, Henry Kissinger. I had the opportunity to discuss the propaganda of the word propaganda and its damaging effects on understanding, education, organization, and policy.
As it is my habit of emphasizing the issues of today are not new, I shared two quotes from the past as part of my eight-or-so-minute opening and in the Q&A.
https://mountainrunner.us/2024/04/its-not-new-we-are-just-ignorant/
