Hybrid War Techniques - Cognitive Warfare
A smart coup is the coup you have when you don’t know you are having a coup™
Editors Note:
Last October we released “A Hybrid World War”. Its aim was to contextualize the interconnectedness between the major global conflicts that are currently underway. The aggressors have an advantage in that the targeted people cannot see the connections. This prevents the people from banding together to resist, domestically and internationally.
Hybrid warfare reverses the concepts of strength and weakness. The Western concept of these measures is material, whereas the Axis concept is ideational… The strength of the Axis is its ability to manipulate the West’s speech freedoms to convince target populations to believe self-defeating lies… This works because Western populations have reached epistemic collapse. They are so bombarded with up-is-down propaganda and both side-isms that they are largely unable to tell fact from fiction.
The article discussed strategies of the weak, including Mao’s Revolutionary Warfare which has been adapted to ideational battle. Variously called “cognitive warfare” , “narrative warfare”, “mindwar”, “political warfare”, “black propaganda”, or “psyops”; it is concerned with destroying enemy resolve through narrative.1 Military Innovation Labs define peak cognitive warfare (or victory) - as “convincing the enemy to passionately and unquestioningly adopt your political objectives as their own, thereby making traditional warfare (violence) redundant”.
Because this concept is not well understood, MIL has decided to deepen the discussion on subversion. We have chosen the lens of “a coup” for this investigation. The public think they know what is meant by “a coup”. We contend that the common understanding of that term shields the public from realizing subversive operations being conducted all around them. Long term subversion campaigns are not new. The Allies have been subjected to them for years with marginal results.2
What is new is the technology of subversion. Traditional Axis subversion operations like planting conspiracy theories in a few 3rd rate newspapers or dropping white-nationalist handouts in black neighborhoods never got very far. Planting psychometrically targeted narratives in deep in the recesses of peoples minds from their trusted “friends” and encouraging them to simply press a button to instantly spread them - sent subversion viral.
An under appreciated element of the technology of subversion is the power it gives tiny minorities - usually numbering just 20 or 30 people - to become (witting or unwitting) propaganda superspreaders. The rapid growth of the far right in Europe, the attacks on the European Union - especially Brexit, and the hollowing out of American democracy, are all examples of Mao’s Revolutionary Warfare adapted to cognitive warfare using new technologies of subversion.
By definition, political warfare is partisan.3 It is a divide and conquer strategy whereby one party in a target state is supported against its domestic opponents. The selected side is the one deemed most naturally amenable to the narrative or the easiest to manipulate into agreement. Like traditional espionage, this is usually because of some weakness. A judgement will be made that party leadership, senior members and/or base are vulnerable to MICE-based manipulation (Money, Ideology, Coercion or Ego). Inevitably, any case study of cognitive warfare will result in a partisan focus. That will upset some readers because they are not ready to accept that their political party has been subverted by the Axis. That is the whole point of the article.
In America, one party has openly and aggressively adopted Axis narratives. If it was ever unwitting, it has transitioned to the witting phase. The Democratic Party has not declared it will abandon the constitution, install a dictatorship, and imprison anyone who disagrees with the leader. The Republican Party leader and its elected senior members have made those declarations while attacking the rule of law. The Democratic Party has not abandoned the post-war bipartisan foreign policy of resisting authoritarianism and supporting the spread of democracy and the rule of law. The Republican president publicly declared fealty to Vladimir Putin over the US intelligence Community in Helsinki, has promised to abandon NATO, and has publicly declared Putin “can do whatever the hell he wants” in Europe in exchange for continued electoral interference in 2024 of the same kind proven by Republican Senators (inter alia) to have occurred in 2016. On the floor of the US Congress, Republicans demonstrated their revolve to support Russian shelling of civilian apartment blocks in Ukraine by attempting to cut all support to a country whose leader has said “I need ammunition, not a ride” and like Putin, called him a Nazi. House Foreign Affairs Committee Chair Michael McCaul (R-Texas), was forced to admit that Russian propaganda has "infected a good chunk of my party's base."
By contrast, President Biden’s remaining living son, a democratic senator, and various democratic legislators are all currently being prosecuted by the US Justice Department. President Biden even promised he will not pardon his son if he is convicted. If Biden is a dictator, he is ignorant of the art and pathetic at its implementation. Naturally Axis propaganda’s sole intent is to paint its enemy - Biden - as hateful, corrupt, autocratic, and savage - willing to imprison his opponent. This glosses over the fact that his opponent and his inner circle are all convinced felons who have been found guilty by juries of regular Americans for serious crimes like interfering in the election they lost but claim they won. One is not like the other. Except in the world of cognitive warfare.
The astonishing thing is authoritarianism has gone from antithetical to America’s national narrative to leading in the polls. This is not because the people yearn to have their rights taken away or because they love seeing Ukrainian civilians shelled in their homes. They have been manipulated into learned helplessness. On one side the American people are unable to understand they are supporting fascism (they are, after all, “The Patriots”) and on the other, they are helpless to realize what is happening is gravely serious and (if current polling is accurate) will result in losing the 2024 election to extremists supported by the Axis. If the polling is wrong and they lose, they have been primed to hate elections as rigged affairs and violence as the only way to save the republic. Either way, the Axis win. Can you hear the champagne corks popping in Moscow, Beijing, Tehran and Pyongyang?
Hybrid War Techniques - The Coup - Part I
Washington DC 16 May 2024
Coup in Progress
The United States is under attack. A coup is in progress right now. But you cannot see it. This article explains the role of the coup in hybrid warfare and outlines the who, what, where, when and why, of current coup activities directed at the United States. It is not a simple story. If it were, this article would not be necessary. Adding to the difficulty of understanding what is going on is the unprecedented nature of events and a cultural bias against history and things that happen “in other countries”.4 When things that usually ‘only happen to others’ start happening here, there is no basis for seeing it, let along making sense of it, let along moving fast enough to prevent or defeat it. Adding to the problem is a politico-cultural blindness resulting from American exceptionalism. Americans still cannot accept a coup is possible here - despite the fact one has just happened. They have blind faith that America’s exceptional institutions can survive anything - despite the pillars of the constitution collapsing in plain sight. There is an inevitability to events that will alarm anyone who knows anything about mid 20th C history. So, almost no one.
What is a coup?
The popular trope of a coup d'etat is a rebel force seizing a palace, key military bases, airports, ports, and TV and radio stations. The success or failure of the coup then rests on whether the military supports the rebels or sticks with the government. Yet this type of coup rarely happens any more. It is a bit too blunt and obvious. It is a ‘dumb’ coup. The concept has evolved in cleverly deceptive ways to mask the same outcome achieved by very different routes. ‘Smart’ coups throw everyone off balance by capturing the polity unawares.5 The ultimate smart coup occurs when illegal systemic change takes place that is weakly or ineffectually resisted or, better yet, undetected.6 A smart coup is the coup you have when you don’t know you are having a coup™.
A smart coup is the coup you have when you don’t know you are having a coup™.
The word ‘coup’ originates from Old French meaning “a blow” or “strike”. Speed, surprise, and shock are integral to the original concept. In the political context, a critically important second element is added: forcing change on a system that cannot be lawfully achieved by established political processes. ‘Coup’ is frequently used just to convey the latter meaning.
The concept has evolved. Modern masters of subversion have inverted the concept of speed to mask their agenda. The absence of shock gives the appearance of normality while the system is hollowed out from the inside over time. They may also run hybrid coups where slow change is then ‘shocked’ over the line.
Traditionally, there are three key usages of the term:
Coup de main: A sudden attack or move that takes the enemy by surprise.
Coup d’état: A sudden, irregular (i.e., illegal or extra-legal) removal or continuation of the executive authority in a government.
Coup de grace: Is a final blow given to kill a wounded animal, person, or political system.
To these we will add a new adaptation:
Coup d'increments: A reset of expectations of what is acceptable in society and politics. An incremental erosion of norms, rules and laws to create instability and radicalize the population towards a tipping point.7
Coup d'increments eschews shock for guile. The outcome is the same - overturning the will of the majority as expressed through legitimate constitutional processes. The ways and means are different - influence, persuasion, and manipulation designed to convince people that their society is bankrupt, fragile, and on the verge of collapse. The facts are irrelevant. Control of messaging channels and narrative is vital. It is premised on Voltaire’s truism that “Anyone who can make you believe absurdities can make you commit atrocities.” It is a mindset where “The Patriots” are taught the only way to defend the country from attack, is to attack fellow citizens on behalf of foreign interests, based on their embrace of destructive foreign narratives. This is the strategy of a weak minority who seek relative advantage over their stronger opponents using psychological and political manipulation over the course of a protracted campaign. It is a strategy of erosion: the lies they tell are the water that can wear a hole through granite.
The constitution of the United States has endured both basic mismanagement and active subversion for many years. As government, by, for and of, the people has strayed from the ideal, a gap has opened for sustained attack that has softened the power and authority of the constitution. Attacks have always come from outside. What is new is that now they are being joined from the inside. Critically, they are not just originating from fringe groups but from within substantial elements of every branch of government. This is new, unprecedented, and dangerous.8
One of the most striking things about this moment is the super-empowerment of a handful of radicals over the vast majority of unsuspecting people at home and abroad. As a device for overturning the legal authority of the majority, coups are tailor made for imposing the will of a few on all. The tyranny of the minority. It is ironic that the US Constitution is lauded for protecting minority rights. Those mechanisms have been turned against the constitution in an effort to destroy it.
America has been subject to three of the four types of coup, and is becoming ever more vulnerable to the fourth and final stage (coup de grace). J6 was a spectacular coup de main that very narrowly failed to achieve a coup d’état. It severely wounded the constitution as evidenced by the absence of consequences for the perpetrators. This has encouraged them to redoubled their efforts as the next opportunity crests the political horizon. A coup de grace is within their reach. Once it is achieved there will be no turning back. This is not Europe. There is no America coming to save America™.
There is no America coming to save America™.
There is more than one kind of coup
Coups come in a variety of forms that go far beyond storming the palace.9 This is due to the fact that governments are multidimensional: their political-type and constitutional-structure, vary widely. Equally, their enemies vary in form, substance, location, techniques, resources, and organization. Each system stipulates different acceptable and unacceptable methods for the transfer of political power. There is no one-size-fits-all definition.
There is a coup spectrum. It is not always about rebels seizing power. With increasing frequency, coups are mounted by governments to stay in power. An “Autogolpe” is the Spanish term for a ‘self-coup’ or an ‘executive-coup’. This refers to a situation when a government already occupies all the critical nodes of power in the state and goes rogue refusing to leave, in defiance of the rules established in a constitution.
A Coup d'increments, sometimes called “democratic backsliding” concerns the gradual erosion of institutions, laws and norms. There is no bold stroke, but a series of barely detectable alterations that ebb away from democracy and toward authoritarianism.
“The electoral road to breakdown is dangerously deceptive… People still vote. Elected autocrats maintain a veneer of democracy while eviscerating its substance. Many government efforts to subvert democracy are ‘legal,’ in the sense that they are approved by the legislature or accepted by the courts.”
Backsliding is a good concept when political deterioration lacks intentionality. However, that rarely happens. Look hard enough and you will find the hand of someone’s interests in play.
A Coup d'increments has become the most common form of coup in the western world. The downside of a Coup d'increments is time. The upside is a much higher chance of success precisely because it does not draw attention to the fact a tiny fanatical minority is seeking to illegally overturn an established political system. It is the smart man’s coup. It is also a popular choice of autocrats seeking to suborn an adversary.
Coups are not always organic
Another common misperception about coups is that they arise from local grievances organically occurring in a population. However, states interfere in the internal affairs of each other all the time. If you keep the enemy busy at home they are less able to cause trouble overseas. To have a chance of success, a coup is required to feel organic to the population, but frequently foreign influence will be in the mix at some stage. Entry points for foreign influence can be years in advance, or just before a coup gets off the ground, jumping in the middle of a long running feud, a last minute effort to boost a dying cause, or offering support to a defeated group to encourage them to reject their defeat and return to the attack. In each case, the objective is the same - exacerbate tensions and direct the crisis toward a tipping point that suits the interests of the external provocateur.
In a stable political system, opponents will exclude international actors from influencing domestic disagreements. This is typically a matter of national pride. More often, it is sheer pragmatism. Smart domestic players understand the short term gain is never worth the long term cost. The aim of outsiders is singular - internal division. The more extreme the better. They may even assist and/or provoke both sides simultaneously. It is far better to make an enemy fight itself than to expend your own resources and will on a protracted and costly war. As they kill one another, you get double the benefit at no loss.
International revisionists hit the jackpot when domestic groups seeking an edge on a political opponent ignore these dangers and choose the short term gain. The degree of engagement with enemy states varies. Its visibility is often masked by both sides. For the local dependent party, it is embarrassing to have to rely on a foreign power. It is a clear sign of weakness. If news gets out about collusion with foreign powers, locals will be exposed to accusations of treachery and treason. For the enemy state, there is no advantage in showing their hand. Except perhaps after a successful coup in order to further divide and conquer the people of the target state via humiliation. Bipartisanship in foreign policy, where domestic issues “stop at the waters edge” is a strong preventative measure to exclude foreign manipulation. It is a clear sign of trouble if it breaks down.
Revenge of the Autocracies
A KGB colleague of Putin said he realized the USSR wouldn’t last when he could see the shimmering lights of West Berlin across the dark shadows of the east. Russia and China failed because new technologies (smuggled VHS tapes, fax machines, and tv and radio broadcasts pushed over the wall) enabled their people to realize for themselves that communism was a failure. New tech also allowed them to communicate and organize, building pro-democracy resistance movements that culminated in the Velvet Revolution in Europe and Tiananmen Sq in China.
Rapidly collapsing empires tend not to be good for global stability. The overnight disappearance of the Russian, German, Austro-Hungarian and Ottoman empires left a vacuum filled by three alien political concepts: democracy, communism and fascism. That didn’t end well. People didn’t fight in the streets for democracy - that defeats its purpose. Instead, fascists and communists went at it. Determined to avoid the same mistakes, the West managed the threat of post-Cold War instability with creativity and deft diplomacy that enabled democratization to ripple around the world. This chart shows the huge spike in the uptake of democratic governance models.10
There are two ways to see 1989. One interpretation is that a surge of long-suppressed freedom swept the world and toppled totalitarianism almost everywhere.11 The other is two proud ancient civilizations were humiliated by their own people.12 There was a valuable lesson in all that chaos for the autocratically minded. Find better ways to control people - at home and abroad.
Russia and China have been engaged in a survival-turned-revenge project ever since.13
Their aim is to reverse democratization with “autocratization”. It is an interesting challenge. How do you make people yearn for dictatorship? How do you make them willingly give up their political rights and desire an economic model that is a proven failure?
This they were unable to do until America came to the rescue! Incredible as it may seem, America simply gave the Axis the most powerful cognitive warfare weapon system ever devised in human history. A weapon tailored particularly to Russia’s unique political culture, a weapon to which they are invulnerable, a weapon that costs nothing to acquire and operate, a weapon that incurs devastating mass effects, and a weapon against which the west is utterly defenseless.
More on that in a minute. First it is necessary to explain the unique inversion of power enabled by hybrid warfare. In hybrid war, Thucydides dictum becomes: the weak do what they can and the strong suffer what they must. On the edge of collapse in 2024, the weak are in the process of tricking the powerful to self destruct. All indicators point to a very close run race that will go down to the wire. Nothing is guaranteed. Sometimes the bad guys win.
“There are meaningful warnings which history gives a threatened or perishing society. For instance, a lack of great statesmen. No weapons, no matter how powerful, can help the West until it overcomes its loss of willpower.” Alexandr Solzhenitsyn 1978
The weak bandwagon
America fell blissfully asleep in 1989, safe in the knowledge that history had ended on their terms. By contrast, the desperate, struggling despots of Moscow and Beijing found common cause with other nationalists, religious zealots, and criminals who preferred not to play by the rules of the international system run by the evil “globalists”. The Axis of Authoritarians (or Autocracies) refers to a desperate loose “alliance” of revanchists dictatorships led by Russia, and consisting of China, DPRK, Iran, and their proxies and enablers (terrorists, organized crime, mercenaries, rogue banks, corporations, and tax havens).14
The axis is not a formal alliance like NATO, with a HQs and a joint operations force, based on a legal treaty where an attack on one is automatically considered an attack on all. It doesn’t need all of that to be effective. The arsenal of autocracy does not need a navy. Instead, it is armed with something much more powerful: narrative. Militarily, the axis is weak. This is why they are forced to rely on one another more than a “great power” would like to admit. For example, Russia and China famously declared their “friendship without limits” just before Russia dramatically escalated its invasion of Crimea to the rest of Ukraine in February 2022. The subsequent failure of the “3 day war” to capture Kiev, started 834 days ago, saw a dramatic role reversal where Russia became the minor partner dependent on China for its economic survival.
Simultaneously, Russia endured the humiliation of becoming dependent on Iran and the DPRK for munitions. Even among the autocracies, the hermit kingdom has always been a laughing stock. Dictator hierarchy dictated that Kim would travel on his train to Beijing or Moscow for audiences with his great and powerful friends when he needed something bad enough. Not any more. Losing a war has consequences. Putin was just in Pyongyang rattling his tin cup for bullets. At least the late Ebrahim Raisi, leader of a country that is nothing more than a cabal of terrorists with prayer mats, went to Moscow seeking a “strategic alliance”. Oh how the mighty motherland has fallen, Tzar Vladimir.
The axis coordinate their programs mostly informally and preferably in person. It is possible to predict in advance an upsurge in axis activities based on leadership summits where they talk face to face away from America’s prying ears (or so they think). Putin and Xi will meet, like they did a few weeks ago in May 2024, then a few weeks later Lavrov will meet with an Iranian delegation (including for example some Hamas members). A few weeks after that a “surprise” will happen that “shocks” the international system. This was the pattern prior to the Hamas attack on Israel.15 The recent May meeting is sufficiently distant from the planned “October surprise” for the US election that most people will not connected the dots.
In line with that timetable, following the May meeting, a Russian government jet was parked right next to Trump’s plane in Washington DC. What is the threat? People do not have to walk from one plane to another to have meetings. Specialist military grade localized high-tech communications technology offer a variety of covert coms channels in such a scenario. Let alone “contractor” ground crews, and other staff and services moving around a major international airport.
This incident might have been a huge coincidence. Once discovered, the airport authority could have allocated different locations for the aircraft. Equally, Secret Service Counter Intelligence (CI) should have ruled this out in advance or reversed it upon discovery. Yet the aircraft were side by side for days.16 More importantly, if this was a routine Russian diplomatic milk-run, FBI CI, would have been aware of it and ensured separation as standard protocol. Equally, even separated, FBI (CI) should have been all over ground crew movements and electronic emissions as SOP for adversary aircraft visits in general. Given that stagecraft (not statecraft) is in Trump’s DNA, it is a fair judgement to conclude this was not accidental. It was messaging. “Stand back and stand by” all over again.
The recent May meeting is sufficiently distant from the planned “October surprise” for the US election that most people will not connected the dots.
Axis regimes are a failure - but they are winning the war
The Axis is comprised of weak states on the wrong side of history that continue to exploit and oppress their people. In varying degrees, they are all failing states whose regimes are hated at home and abroad.17 All of them have serious economic, financial, industrial, social and demographic challenges. Their chief exports are failure, chaos, terror and war. None of them have compelling answers to their own, let alone global challenges. Their only innovation is: narrative driven cognitive warfare under the conditions of social media and emergent AI. None of the axis states are popular places to invest, trade, migrate or even visit. The world’s disadvantaged people do not clamor at their borders hoping for a better life. Indeed, the Axis have a brain drain problem. The hermit kingdom simply shoots people who try to escape.
The mismanagement in Russia and China are plain for all to see.
Russia
David von Drehle writing in the Washington Post put it thus: Russia’s “lone economic bright spot in a country that Sen. John McCain (R-Ariz.) properly described as ‘a gas station masquerading as a country’ has been snuffed by Russia’s deranged leader.” He explained that
Its entire economy is smaller than that of Texas. Russia is not a country that can afford to destroy profitable businesses. The catastrophic idiocy of Vladimir Putin’s war in Ukraine is found in an internal study commissioned by Gazprom, a state-controlled energy firm and largest company in Russia. The analysis concluded that the loss of European customers for Russian natural gas in response to Putin’s aggression cannot be made up by exports elsewhere for at least a decade. In coming decades, the war will be seen as one of history’s worst self-inflicted wounds, an own-goal of epic proportions for which the long-suffering Russian people will suffer further.
The Kremlin's own economic development minister expects the country's economy will shrink by 7.8% this year, and in an understatement, the central bank chief said that it is unlikely to bounce back anytime soon.
Russia is under sustained pressure to survive the most damning sanctions in world history. It is in a race for time to win in Ukraine or be convulsed by the kind of turmoil that historically followed every lost war in its history. Read: ‘hanging from a lamppost’-bad. When the Victory in Europe Day parade can only muster a solitary tank dragged out of a museum, because everything else is in a meat grinder in a repeat of the WWII battle of Kursk, any claim Russia has to power is simply laughable.
Russia is running out of tanks and armored personnel carriers. They are being lost at much higher rates than industry can refurbish museum pieces or build new ones. Russia’s Air Force is kept well inside its own borders, launching long range glide bombs, and does not dare go near places in Ukraine defended by allied advanced missiles. About 1/3rd of Russia’s once mighty navy has joined its flagship on the bottom of the Black Sea, thanks to jet skis with artillery shells operated by a country without a navy. Russia is almost at the absolute limit of manpower. Having run out of male convicts, it is now sending women dragged out of its prisons into the meat grinder. In all of these categories and many more, Russia is right on the brink. Putin is madly dashing all over the world to cobble together enough support to make it through to the US election. It will be his salvation or the beginning of the end.
PRC
China’s economy is the second largest in the world but its economic indicators have been trending downward for some years under the great helmsman, Xi Jinping.
Consumers are gloomy. Private investment is sluggish. A big property firm is near collapse. Local governments face crippling debt. Youth unemployment has continued to rise.
“More than a quarter of all economic activity” has suddenly plunging into the abyss of a bursting property bubble that makes destroying brand new buildings more cost effective than keeping them vacant.
Hong Kong businessman, Lew Mon-hung, put it succinctly. “The problem is the economy, the root lies in politics.” The internal contradictions of Xi’s agenda are becoming impossible to hide. He may resort to a war with Taiwan as a distraction from his incompetence. Meanwhile, Iran (inflation 30%, unemployment 8.7%, 80% of the population reject the regime resulting in constant turmoil) and DPRK (last reported inflation 551% no other statistics available) are simply basket cases.
America is booming - yet it is losing the war
America’s economy is booming. Its essential indicators are the envy of the OECD, let alone the absurdist economies of the axis states. Covid inflation reached its peak at 9% has been brilliantly managed down to 3.4% avoiding a recession. Real wages are growing for the first time in years (4.87%). The last time unemployment numbers were this good, an American was walking on the moon. Economic growth is a robust 3.4% and the US stock market is by far the biggest, highest growth, and most stable in the world. In the past few months stocks have thundered up the charts, breaking all historical records. All forms of crime, including violent crime, are at historic lows.18
“America and everything it stands for are in decline” Xi Jinping
Yet tens of millions of Americans public think the economy is a disaster and the country is ruled by a communist dictator. They believe crime is completely out of control - encouraged by the government. Consumer confidence is at major recession levels. Political instability is at a flash point. A coup d’état has been attempted and another is immanent. Threats against government officials have skyrocketed and actual violence is occurring with growing frequency, occasioning death on a number of occasions. Fears of a civil war grow by the day as confidence in the constitution and elections has dissolved. The legislature and the judiciary have both collapsed and parts of the executive have been politically compromised by extremists.
Rampant self doubt is not limited to America. The Axis have convinced the free world that democracy has failed and that autocracy is preferable because it is “efficient” and preserves “traditional values”. In 2024, more than half the world’s population in 65 countries will vote in elections. The results will be an indicator of the power of revisionist cognitive warfare. Early polling among 28 democracies indicates that the autocracies have had stunning success in influencing the democracies to believe the following about their own countries (US results match closely):
“Society is broken” - 57%
“The Country is in decline” - 58%
“The economy is rigged to advantage elites” - 67%
‘The country needs a strongman willing to “break the rules”’ - 49%
A strongman is needed to “take the country back” 63%
Far right winning elections in Europe
The “gardeners” in St Petersburg have been constantly working Western Europe’s political soil, spreading fertilizer far and wide, as they have carefully cultivated cynical self-destructive crops. The first bloom in their coup d'increments was of course Brexit. Few know the central role Steve Bannon played in that event. While Paul Manafort was trying to preserve a Putin-backed dictatorship in Kiev, Bannon and the Mercers were using Cambridge Analytica to psychometrically manipulate this critical division within the EU. All of these techniques were refined through the Brexit campaign then brought to the US in the run up to 2016 and have intensified ever since.
Years of Nazi occupation are evidentially far enough in the read view mirror that The Netherlands voted in its first far right government this year. Italy, Slovakia, and of course Hungary are all now far right. British extremists scored an upset result and gained 4 seats in the Parliament as the conservatives fell in a landslide to labor. The first round of France’s election suggested a landslide for the far right. Miraculously, that was sufficient to scare the public into a major correction in the second round, narrowly avoiding catastrophe.
America
The jewel in the crown is the United States. Accordingly, the US has born the brunt of autocratic cognitive warfare. Instead of enjoying a booming economy and collapsing enemies, in a few short years America has been adroitly turned against itself. These are some of the beliefs that have taken hold here:
A YouGov poll has a majority of both Democrats and Republicans agreeing that America will one day “cease to be a democracy.”
Roughly 59 percent of Americans said they believed their country is in decline.
58% say they are just a little or not at all confident that elections reflect the public’s will
67% of likely Republican primary voters say that, even if Trump did try to steal the 2020 election, it doesn’t matter.
Forty percent of Americans said they believed we need a strong leader who will “break the rules”.
This has resulted in around 40% of the American population in favor of authoritarianism… specifically 18 percent of Americans are highly disposed to authoritarianism, a further 23 percent or so are just one step below them on the authoritarian scale.
In 2021 almost 100 million Americans openly admitted to strangers that they believed political violence is justified to protect the “traditional American way of life”. These results were reconfirmed this year by different polling when the same numbers agreed that "violence against the government can at times be justified". The view is partisan, “40% of Republicans, 41% of independents and 23% of Democrats saying violence is sometimes justified.” Those that have faith that the next presidential election will result in a peaceful transfer of power is a correspondingly low 38%. These numbers are not normal. They are far outside the norm.
This points to the fact that in a few short years as many as 100 million Americans have been radicalized, and that radicalization itself has been normalized. This radical change in the outlook of the population did not occur in a vacuum. It was cultivated for a purpose.
The American population has not only been manipulated to turn on itself, it has been radicalized for violence. Polling and studies have shown that around 5m Americans are ready to go to war to fight for autocracy. They are “very or completely willing” to intimidate, injure, or kill for a political goal. They are ready to “commit violence against government, election and health officials, & police and military”.
All of this has been completely manufactured out of thin air. All of this is real, yet none of it is authentic. Millions of Americans have decided they want to abandon democracy. They actively want to surrender their rights and freedoms to the federal government. Many of the people who now hold these views are radical anti-government types. No better example of the power of cognitive warfare exists. This incredible turn of events is completely manufactured by the axis and their friends using a super-weapon America gave them years ago.
All of this is real, yet none of it is authentic. Millions of Americans have decided they want to abandon democracy. They actively want to surrender their rights and freedoms to the federal government. This incredible turn of events is completely manufactured by the axis and their friends using a super-weapon America gave them years ago.
“America is a fake democracy - and there will be a revolution”
The axis is on the cusp of the single greatest strategic victory in world history. The weak have convinced the strong to self destruct. The last standing superpower, the world’s oldest democracy, and largest economy - currently on the upswing of a boom cycle - is weeks away from tearing itself apart for no objectively good reason. The axis could not be about to achieve this stunning victory without widespread support from tens of millions of Americans - millions of whom are ready to die for the axis cause. These masses did not just wake up one day hating their country ready to kill fellow-citizens to gain dictatorship from democracy. They have been created and cultivated.
End of Part I
Part II - coming soon
In the next installment, we will show how this chaos has been created by both Russians and their America allies. Unlike extremist Americans, the Russians never lost sight of their true enemy. Their long term focus on cultivating useful idiots, along with naturally occurring disintegration of the Republican Party, combined with a general failure in the American political system writ large, has culminated in the transformation of the party of Reagan into the party of Putin. These developments would not have merged the way they did had it not been for the weapon America developed and gave Russia.
Part II will chart how elected representatives in Washington have worked with their Russian backers to undermine US national security and the Western alliance system. American instability has been created and cultivated to the point where extremists have poured into every branch of government, hell-bent on destroying the constitution. They have been sent to “destroy the administrative state”, overturn the ancient common law tenant of stare decisis, and undermine the local electoral system: all with the purpose of claiming the next election is rigged - but only if they lose.
Internationally, their purpose is also destructive: to upend the liberal world order. Putin is dependent upon maga extremists winning or simply taking office. His genocidal war in Ukraine has ground to a halt. The only way he saves face is to have America cut support to Ukraine. Maga extremists have tried this in congress, failing but inching closer with each attempt. Forcing Ukraine’s surrender is the declared policy of the Trump Vance campaign. A collapse of the current world order into wars of conquest and trade wars, perfectly suits the Russian economy that already operates on mafia principles. The US and western economies will suffer extreme setbacks. All of which suits Putin.
One of the most remarkable aspects of American extremism is it has no alternatives with which to replace what they are destroying. The most evident form of this was health care. They tried countless times to repeal it but they had no alternative. This is true of their entire agenda. Pure destruction.
What is unfolding before our very eyes is a textbook case study in hybrid warfare. The Russians are on the cusp of either a stunning defeat (if democracy in America and Western Europe can be preserved) or a spectacular victory, by the skin of its teeth.
These terms are all related despite having different backgrounds and specific meanings in some contexts. Rather than have definitional arguments over angels on the head of a pin, MIL is going to use these terms throughout this article.
One distinction is important, that between war and warfare, and operations. War is politics by other means (ends), warfare is the ways and means to achieve those ends. Operations are discreet warfare activities that, in aggregate, are designed to achieve the political aim of the war. Cognitive warfare, is distinct from the traditional concept of warfare in that the ways and means are ideas and narrative - not physical violence. Although the latter can result from cognitive warfare, by design or accident.
The revisionists also believe they have been subjected to them. All internal dissent in Iran is blamed on the west for example. The problem is the people in revisionist regimes resist oppression naturally because they know life in the west is better.
The fact that this has to be said is also proof of the problem. A whole population will be lost to this article because they will see it as they have been taught to see it - as enemy propaganda. Yet notice such claims come as declaratory statements and never as reasoned argument, using verified evidence, to build a case. Everything presented here is fact - in many cases it is on film for anyone to see. But it will be denied with slogans. This too is proof of the problem. That public discourse has dissolved so quickly from evidence based point-counterpoint to a slogan-accusation-slogan based cycle too is proof of the corrosive power of subversion.
America’s cultural bias is for technology and commerce - two things that Americans believe will solve any problem. After all, America has done very well from the focus on both driven by a powerful sense of optimism. All of that is terrific when you are on an upswing. When things start to falter a different sensibility, awareness and outlook is needed. One that can see and respond to negative influences. Even this is perceived as a “European” way of seeing the world and is rejected on these grounds. The problem is America is no longer a scrappy, adolescent, upstart country with vast unrealized potential - what I would call “Peak Teddy Roosevelt”. It is a long established global power that has learned, or should have learned, that its idealism and realism are contradictory impulses that lead to confusing outcomes - that are also perceived as hypocrisy. This didn’t matter as America came up but it matters a lot as a global power. The world is a contradictory place where a one size fits all solution and ideological purity are possible. A global power has to compromise and choose least worst outcomes that conflict with its values. How it manages these tensions at home and abroad - whether it hews as closely as possible to the ideal of just gives up and does whatever - are grounds for evaluating the greatness of a country.
American historical amnesia is widely known and exploited by others. Additionally, if you think you are exceptional, you don’t really need to know what the state of the art might be elsewhere. In such a mindset, other countries just don’t matter. It is remarkable how pervasive this thinking is here. The debate about changing America’s notoriously bad health system simply rejected out of hand the fact that almost every other OECD country had a better system. The attitude was, nothing can be learned by the way other countries do things. It was stunning to observe.
A note on terminology.
MIL uses the Clausewitzian/Thucydidean trinities to define ‘the state’. Namely - people, military, government / fear, honor, interests. States are political entities responsible for legally defined territories. Nations are groups of people who share a common bond. They rarely coincide. The only nation-state might be Japan.
‘Revisionists’ seek to change the existing order outside of lawful mechanisms to do so domestically and in the international system. ‘Revanchists’ are those that seek revenge through revisionist programs of action. Their opponents are sometimes referred to as ‘status quo’ or ‘satisfied’ powers. In this case, we will add ‘constitutionalists’, meaning those who support the lawful mechanisms of change outlined in a constitution.
Revisionists/Revanchists seek to radicalize the public to their position. The non-radicalized public remain committed to the status quo in the form of the constitution.
Or better yet, when smart coup leaders to speak publicly in ways that others do not understand but followers understand as a code. “Stand back and stand by.” “Russia if you are listening”.
Coup d'increments is a MIL invention. Democratic backsliding sounds too aimless and random. Autocratization is a better term. However, CWII wanted to highlight the speed and shock factors. Indeed, their absence is such a good mask for the political intent of a coup - illegal subversion of a constitutional order.
Foreign powers have always attacked Americas strength - its ideals and values. There have been periods in the past when domestic political actors agreed not to adopt or amplify divisive offshore criticisms in the national interest. When this policy fails, the gap through which foreign powers seek to divide America grows very wide indeed.
For recent academic literature (that I read so you don’t have to) see the following for a sample,
Bermeo, Nancy. 2016. “On Democratic Backsliding.” Journal of Democracy 27 (1): 5–19. https://doi.org/10.1353/jod.2016.0012.
Felix Wiebrecht Yuko Sato, Marina Nord Martin Lundstedt Fabio Angiolillo, and Staffan I Lindberg. 2023. “State of the World 2022: Defiance in the Face of Autocratization.” Democratization 30 (5): 769–93. https://doi.org/10.1080/13510347.2023.2199452.
Lührmann, Anna, and Staffan I Lindberg. 2019. “A Third Wave of Autocratization Is Here: What Is New about It?” Democratization 26 (7): 1095–1113. https://doi.org/10.1080/13510347.2019.1582029.
Maeda, Ko. 2010. “Two Modes of Democratic Breakdown: A Competing Risks Analysis of Democratic Durability.” The Journal of Politics 72 (4): 1129–43. https://doi.org/10.1017/S0022381610000575.
Miller, Michael K. 2020. “A Republic, If You Can Keep It: Breakdown and Erosion in Modern Democracies.” The Journal of Politics 83 (1): 198–213. https://doi.org/10.1086/709146.
Pion-Berlin, David, Thomas Bruneau, and Richard B Goetze. 2023. “The Trump Self-Coup Attempt: Comparisons and Civil–Military Relations.” Government and Opposition 58 (4): 789–806. https://doi.org/DOI: 10.1017/gov.2022.13.
Powell, Jonathan M, Salah ben Hammou, Amy Erica Smith, Lucas Borba, Drew Holland Kinney, Mwita Chacha, and Erica de Bruin. 2022. “Forum: A Coup At the Capitol? Conceptualizing Coups and Other Antidemocratic Actions.” International Studies Review 24 (1): viab062. https://doi.org/10.1093/isr/viab062.
Democratization was not perfect and the degree of uptake of democratic ideals varied. But it was an unmistakable rejection of totalitarianism and the greatest mass liberation of people since the end of WWII.
The CCP survived in name only. The Chinese were no longer communist. What exactly they had become was unclear, but it wasn’t democracy.
The Russian, German, Ottoman and Austro-Hungarian empires were terminated by WWI. The critically wounded British empire was finally extinguished by the next war created by the mismanagement of the peace. The collapse of the Soviet empire was no less dramatic and dangerous. By any measure, militarily, economically, ideologically, societally, Russia had definitively lost the war. They were broken, weak, vulnerable, and faced total collapse. The Chinese communists had managed a little better than the Soviets. Deng Xiaoping had seen the writing on the wall and started liberalizing the economy in 1978. It was working but was insufficiently advanced by 1989 to pacify a desire for change. Gorbachev knew sending in the tanks would only postpone the inevitable because Russia’s economy had not liberalized. Deng gambled that sending in the tanks would save the party. As the Chinese economy turned Tiger in the 1990s, the memories of Tiananmen Square were offset by the greatest shift out of poverty in world history.
The victor of the Cold War walked away with what it believed as the universal lesson of world history - capitalism creates an inevitable desire for democracy. Capitalism is the most efficient form of economics. It would create a middle class who would demand a greater share of power until democracy was achieved. This was the story of the transformation of primitive to modern England with the Magna Carta as the pivot. Variations of the story happened is so many places that it had to be a universal rule of history regardless of local society and culture.
The achievement of capitalism and democracy is the crowning triumph of civilizational struggle. Nothing but eternal peace could possibly follow. Thus everything should be done to spread capitalism and encourage democracy.
To its credit, the west did not grandstand over the defeated foe. Instead, they made major efforts to integrate Russia into the international system to help it transition to a normal country for the first time in its history. However, knowing only feudalism, and faced with myriad temptations arising from chaos, Russian economic liberalization turned into klepto-oligarchy and a spluttering democracy turned into Putin.
Not unlike the fate of Weimarian democracy. It is hard to establish a culturally alien political system that empowers the masses against a backdrop of centuries of dictatorship. (Post-1989 Russian chaos cant be underestimated. CWII knew a Russian woman who at 23 led a gang that hijacked an entire train loaded with goods and sold them on the black market. That windfall got her enough money to escape to the West and live a good life.)
As China had already abandoned communism for capitalism, the west saw the battle there as already half won. America in particular went into overdrive transferring labor-intensive industries to China and opening new markets with preferential treatment for the goods about to be churned out for 10% discount sales at Walmart. It took a decade for the impact of de-industrialization of the American heartland to be felt and another for the political backlash to rise. China developed a huge middle class and soon, billionaires. Contrary to American theory, they did not challenge the CCP for political power. Instead the party’s power to surveil and control the population rapidly grew at the same time it build a powerful military to block the US from getting close to its shores. This ensured impatient America would not get any ideas about more direct efforts at encouraging democracy in China. Instead, America got distracted and went to install democracy by gunpoint in the middle east instead.
Both abandoned Marxist Leninism in favor of autocracy. The CCP is communist in name only and in recent years ‘the party’ really refers to one man - Xi Jinping. Russia dabbled in democracy and capitalism but that didn’t last long and Russia reverted to type - dictatorship, oligarchy and feudalism.
In one of the great ironies in world history, the GW Bush Administration’s use of the term “Axis of Evil” helped create the Axis where one did not exist. Iraq never mattered. The true enemy was always Iran. 9/11 caused a psychotic break with realitypolitik in Washington. Russia and China were not propping up Saddam. That had long been Americas job! Sweeping up one of our misbehaving tyrants into some grand scheme with the bad boys of international affairs suited selling a needless war to the population but was especially stupid and ruinous in the medium term. If you issue dumb ultimatums to everyone, don’t be surprised when the fence sitters chose “against us”. You didn’t have to be Otto Von Bismarck to work that out. In the years since a serious axis has formed and yet the earlier frivolous usage of the term undermines its needed gravitas.
For example, Lavrov met with the political head of the Hamas terror group in Moscow on 13 September 2022 two days before Putin and Xi met at the Shanghai Cooperation Organization. Hamas attacked Israel a few weeks later.
Based on flight tracking the following covered the period the aircraft were together.
June 27 at 9:55 a.m.: Russian plane with registration RA-96018 arrived at IAD
June 28 at 12:39 a.m.: Trump plane arrives IAD from Atlanta
June 28 at 1:58 p.m.: Trump departs IAD to Norfolk International Airport for a Chesapeake, Va., rally
June 28 at 6:38 p.m.: Trump departs Norfolk to return to IAD
June 28 at 7:13 p.m.: Trump arrives at IAD
June 28 at 7:43 p.m.: United Arab Emirate plane with registration UAF1229 arrives at IAD [Note: Erick Prince, late of Blackwater, adviser to Trump, has extensive contracts with the UAE military - his current company is considered an arm of their military].
June 29 at 3:17 p.m.: Russian plane RA-96018 departs IAD
June 30: United Arab Emirates plane UAF1229 departs IAD, lands in Scotland at 10:18 p.m. local time. It takes a commercial jet about seven hours to fly from IAD to Edinburgh, so we can assume the United Arab Emirates plane left at some point before 10 a.m. on June 30.
June 30 at 6:19 p.m.: Trump departs IAD for Palm Beach International in Florida.
In varying degree’s China is an outlier in some of these factors.
Violent crime across the country dropped by more than 15% between January and March compared to a year earlier. "This data makes clear that last year's historic decline in violent crime is continuing," Garland said Monday in a statement.
