Politics: losing the information war

By Richard North - February 17, 2022

An interesting piece in the Guardian has it that the West is fighting an information war with the Russians, fending off an invasion in Ukraine by making their intelligence public.

“The information isn’t meant for Americans or British citizens. It’s meant for one consumer: Vladimir Putin”, according to John Sipher, described as “a veteran of the CIA’s clandestine service”.

Sipher says: “He’s the one who knows whether it’s true or not. So if we put out intelligence that the Russians thought was secret, and Putin knows it’s true, he’s got to decide how it has consequences for what he was trying to do, and how it’s affecting his strategy”.

The theory is that, if the decision is on a knife-edge, any small factor, such as taking away the surprise element and Putin’s satisfaction of catching the west off-guard, could make a difference.

Going public, we are told, also serves a domestic political purpose, “especially for a US administration that has been widely criticised for failing to predict the collapse of the Afghan government and Taliban takeover last year”. If there is a Russian attack, no one will be able to say the Biden White House was taken unawares.

But the down-side is that, if Putin does not attack, US and British intelligence will be accused of crying wolf and getting it wrong once more, especially as neither has shown evidence for their assertions (my italics). The Kremlin is already taunting the western media for reporting US and allied claims of imminent war.

This, for me, crystallises my unease about the entire approach to this issue. As I noted yesterday – in contrast to the official detail offered in the 1962 Cuban Missile Crisis – we are being encouraged to rely on the unsupported claims of anonymous officials, with sweeping assertions from politicians who have not troubled to release the intelligence on which they supposedly rely.

Instead, we get a mishmash of blurred, low resolution satellite images from commercial providers and endless repetition of social media footage, all largely without context, reinforced by video and stills from the Russian Ministry of Defence. We must then suffer much pontification from a claque of think-tank pundits and journalists, offering scenarios which often lack that vital element of plausibility.

This culminated yesterday in an absurd headline from the Mirror which excitedly declared: “Russian invasion of Ukraine set for ‘3am today’ with missiles and tank attack”.

Mirror hack Chris Hughes, actually filing from Ukraine – and apparently unable to tell the difference between am and pm – offered us the fruits of those notorious anonymous sources, telling us: “The Mirror’s senior American source warned our team in Kyiv with a simple one line message saying: ‘3am Wednesday'”. Senior sources told him the Moscow attack would be “almost certainly from multiple points” over Ukraine’s southern, eastern and northern flanks.

This sort of self-regarding bullshit was not enhanced by a later contribution from The Times, headed: “Russia moving troops into ‘attack areas’ near Ukraine, minister warns”, referring to comments from Ben Wallace, the UK’s defence secretary.

Wallace was doing his best to ramp up the tension prior to a meeting in Brussels of Nato defence ministers, arguing that the risk of invasion was still high. Despite the much-publicised movement of “tanks” from the Crimea, he held that Russian troops had moved from holding areas to “more aggressive launch areas”.

Thus, he maintained, the number of Russian troops was increasing in “key areas” and he had seen no evidence of a withdrawal, then offering this immortal line that may come back to haunt him: “I’ve been a soldier … you don’t deploy strategic weapons systems, you don’t build field hospitals, if you’re just going for a training exercise”.

This seems to be very much in the territory of the two most dangerous things on earth: an officer with a map and a sailor with a gun. To this we must add a third: a defence secretary who’s been in the Army. After seven years in uniform, leaving in 1998, he had risen to the rank of Captain – the third most junior commissioned rank in the Service – having never attended Staff College.

As to his comments, indeed you don’t deploy strategic weapons systems if you’re just going for a training exercise. But if Wallace is referring to the Iskander missile, with a range deliberately limited to 500 km, this is most decidedly not a strategic missile or it would come within the terms of the 1987 Intermediate-Range Nuclear Forces (INF) Treaty – something the Russians have been at pains to avoid.

When it comes to building field hospitals, though, that is precisely what armed forces do in military exercises, as Wallace might recall from the Nato exercise Saber Guardian held in July 2017 the “largest training exercise in the Black Sea Region” then so far conducted.

Following that, there was Vigorous Warrior 19 in March 2019. It became Nato’s largest-ever military medical exercise, “uniting more than 2,500 participants from 39 countries to exercise experimental doctrinal concepts and test their medical assets together in a dynamic, multinational environment”.

So valuable are such exercises judged that there was another in 2021 called Hospex 2021, setting up a 4-day real-time exercise with casualty simulation.

Yet, amongst the claque of military wonks, the presence of structures thought to be field hospitals is taken to be one of the key indicators of an impending invasion. By that token, with so many Nato field hospitals being set up, one can quite see why the Russians might be nervous about Western intentions.

Alongside this, we get the steady dribble of propaganda talking up the threat with such pieces in The Times as this, telling us that: “Years of investment leave Putin with a modern lethal force”.

However, even within its own terms, the piece is inconsistent, citing Dr John Chipman, director-general of the International Institute for Strategic Studies who concedes that Russia has effective mobile air defence systems and an increasingly modern air force, but adds: “Less progress may have been made in modernising army equipment”.

This we have seen with our own eyes, in the parade of geriatric equipment in what amounts to an antiques roadshow of 50-year-old equipment. We’ve also observed a replacement programme for tanks, MICVs and APCs which was announced in 2015 and has been put back to 2025, the gaps being filled with “upgrades” salvaged from types destined for the scrapyard. You will find a more detailed appraisal here.

And, with that, Chipman goes on to say that rather than a full-scale invasion considered possible by the West, there were probably [only] enough troops present to conduct a “more limited ground operation”, including seizing eastern regions.

One can hardly be surprised, therefore, when Russian officials start mocking Western predictions, with Russian foreign ministry spokeswoman Maria Zakharova jokingly asking American and British media outlets to release a schedule of Russia’s “upcoming invasions” of Ukraine for the current year.

“I’d like to request US and British disinformation: Bloomberg, The New York Times and The Sun media outlets to publish the schedule for our upcoming invasions for the year. I’d like to plan my vacation”, Zakharova said.

Thus, despite Stoltenberg once again sounding off with a call to arms, his words are falling on deaf (and cynical) ears.

Yesterday in Brussels he was claiming that “Russia maintains a massive invasion force ready to attack with high end capabilities from Crimea to Belarus”, wrongly asserting that: “This is the biggest concentration of forces in Europe since the cold war”. It was only to be expected that Zakharova should dismiss him completely, saying: “He’s not a person whose statements will be regarded in Moscow as serious arguments. He’s a NATO has been”.

Essentially, if this is an information war, as the Guardian asserts, then the West is losing it hands down. As the “crisis” has almost completely disappeared from today’s front pages, Uncle Vlad doesn’t need to send his ageing tanks to storm the border. With the idiots who represent us in charge of our response, mockery is his most powerful weapon.