Understanding Russian Hybrid Warfare: A Comparative Case Study Analysis of Soviet Active Measures and Russian New Generation Warfare

Abstract

Russian Hybrid Warfare is a popular Western term for contemporary Kremlin operations that directly target adversaries without conventional force. Often described as the mistaken "Gerasimov Doctrine" or "New Generation Warfare," Russian Hybrid Warfare operations utilize unconventional tactics to achieve grand strategy objectives in domains where the Kremlin believes it has advantages over Western forces, such as through informational and digital battlespaces. International relations and national security scholars acknowledge these operations as a revolutionary and new way of conducting warfare by the Russians, attempting to invent analyses to examine the Kremlin's strategies. I argue that this is unnecessary, and scholars should employ currently neglected analyses and Soviet tactics from the Cold War era. In attempting to answer the question, "How do Soviet strategies in asymmetric and political warfare compare to contemporary Russian counterparts?" I hypothesize that Russia's new way of warfare, or New Generation Warfare, is revisioned Active Measures tactics from the Soviet era for use in the twenty-first century's conventional battlespaces. Utilizing covert action, psychological operations, sabotage, espionage, and other unconventional tactics used by Soviet intelligence agencies, the Kremlin deploys comparable strategies for directly targeting its adversaries in the twenty-first century without requiring conventional forces, but implements the stages that allow a conventional deployment. This research intends to answer this question through a comparative case study analysis of Soviet active measures and Russian New Generation Warfare using historical cases where unconventional-to-conventional operations occurred. These case studies include the Warsaw Pact invasion of Czechoslovakia in 1968 and the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan in 1979 for analyzing active measures and the invasions of Ukraine in 2014 and 2022 for New Generation Warfare. Consequently, this research fills many gaps in the current Russian Hybrid Warfare discourse by including neglected Soviet active measures strategies and military thought, ending the argument that the Kremlin developed a new way of warfare and allowing Western states to accurately deploy defenses for countering future operations.