Christian Tripodi
Introduction
Michael Koffman’s observation, made in the early months of the Ukraine war, was important in two respects. Firstly, it provided much needed logic to what appeared otherwise to be an inexplicable series of decisions by Vladimir Putin and his senior civilian and military advisors where Russian military strategy was concerned. What Koffman was arguing was that the evident failings at that point in Russia’s conventional military capabilities were real but were never really meant to matter.Footnote2 This was because the employment of those conventional capabilities was always intended take place in the context of an adversary that had already been fatally paralysed by multiple forms of irregular ‘shaping’ actions – espionage, infiltration, cyber-attack, subversion, assassination – prior to the invasion. Russian conventional forces would thus mount their assault with the political and psychological disintegration of the enemy having been largely achieved before a shot had been fired.
Koffman’s observation mattered in another way, however. Namely that Russian methods not only exemplified the use of irregular warfare as a strategic enabler for the effective prosecution of interstate conflict, but simultaneously encompassed a wide range of non-military and indeed non-violent shaping actions, e.g. espionage, cyber-attacks, information operations and organised crime, carried out by non-military actors.Footnote3 Why is this important? Because at the time of the full-scale Russian invasion of Ukraine in early 2022, let alone the fait accompli in Crimea 8 years previously, Western military doctrinal thinking on irregular warfare was notable for its entirely different approach to the subject. This was one in which the focus remained primarily upon counterinsurgency, stabilization and counterterrorism missions in which states and non-state actors (NSAs) violently contested one another in the context of intra-state dysfunction.Footnote4
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