BY JOSEPH TREVITHICK
The U.S. Army’s Asymmetric Warfare Group, tasked with finding ways to counter emerging threats, recently sounded the alarm about the dangers of Russia’s hybrid warfighting concepts and warned that the U.S. military as a whole may be ill-suited to respond to them in a crisis. Now, American troops and their NATO allies say they have been subjected to a campaign of surveillance and harassment via their cellphones, the internet, and social media, hallmarks of this so-called “Russian New Generation Warfare.”
On Oct. 4, 2017, The Wall Street Journal published a report detailing a number of cyber attacks and other electronic assaults on NATO forces stationed in the Baltic States of Estonia, Latvia, and Lithuania, as well as Poland, all of whom are members of the alliance. U.S. officials and their allies all indicated that Russia was almost certainly behind the interference.
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“It had a little Apple map, and in the center of the map was Moscow. It said, ‘Somebody is trying to access your iPhone,’” U.S. Army Lieutenant Colonel Christopher L’Heureux explained to The Journal about an attack on his cell phone. “They were geolocating me, whoever it was. I was like, ‘What the heck is this?’”
L’Heureux is presently in charge of the NATO battle group in Poland, a unit consisting of rotating troops from various alliance members. There are similar organizations in each one of the Baltic States as part of the alliance’s Enhanced Forward Presence concept aimed at deterring Russian aggression. The program is a direct response to Russia’s continued intervention in Ukraine and its revanchist foreign policy that has included a number of veiled threats against a countries along its western borders.
http://www.thedrive.com/the-war-zone/14867/russia-breaks-into-us-soldiers-iphones-in-apparent-hybrid-warfare-attacks
