Hybrid War

By MAURO VOERZIO

Disinformation is a bad virus for Democracies and a vaccine can never be discovered to render it harmless. With the help of everyone, however, we can contain it and make it less effective.

The book talks about the techniques used by disinformers, the terminologies that are used every day by journalists and insiders whose meaning is often unknown, disinformation in history, the psychological aspects of disinformation, case studies, objectives that disinformation sets for itself.

Disinformation is certainly one of the most important components of the new hybrid wars. A hybrid war is underway against the fundamental values ​​of the West, a hybrid war that aims to collapse the project of the European Union, the largest peace project in history.

Recognizing disinformation and disinformers will help us recognize our enemies, those who want to destroy the society we built, with not a few sacrifices, by our grandparents and our parents. As in all wars, in hybrid war, there are generals and soldiers. It is up to us to decide which side of the fence to stand on in this modern call to arms.

• Language: English
• Publisher: BadPress
• Release date: Oct 7, 2021
• ISBN: 9781667415239

Book preview

Introduction

My name is Voerzio Mauro and I am neither an academic nor a professional writer. In reality, I cannot even boast the title of journalist in Italy as I do not have the much coveted accreditations. On the other hand, in Ukraine, my adopted country, they appreciated my work and had no problem recognizing my activity at the Kyiv University of Journalism.

I have been studying the so-called hybrid wars since 2014 and how disinformation and propaganda affect societies today. It all started when in the winter of 2013 - 2014, almost by chance, I found myself on the barricades of Maidan Square in Kyiv. In Ukraine, an event was taking place that would make the history of the country and, in the following years, would take the name of the Revolution of Dignity. I was lucky enough to be an eyewitness to that incredible page of history, which will find its rightful place in books perhaps only in a few decades, when it can be analyzed not in terms of geopolitical usefulness but with an objective and detached gaze. At the same time as Maidan, the world imagined by Orwell materialized. There, nothing is what it seems, and everything becomes relative. Before my eyes, people from all walks of life, with different political beliefs, but all united by the idea of ​​building a state based on European fundamental values, sacrificed their lives. Arbitrary arrests, tortures, injuries and killings had not stopped them. I collected their testimonies, slept with them in tents when the temperature was minus twenty-five degrees, ate the food cooked in the set up camp kitchens and marveled at how that protest had spared cars, shop windows, public furnishings, of how there was no garbage and how much civic education there could be in a tragic event like a revolution. When I could, I connected to my PC and watching international news or reading what was reported in Italy in online newspapers, I realized how distorted or manipulated the final information was. I did not immediately think of a hidden message, of a plan devised to put the revolutionaries of Maidan and the Ukrainians in general in a bad light. I limited myself to believing that journalists were simply reporting the news with a different slant, because they were not physically on the square and maybe they wrote articles after hastily searching in Google.

Basically, I thought it was just misinformation.

After the Maidan revolution, in February 2015, the Russian-Ukrainian war immediately began and the first doubts about manipulated information turned into certainties. It became clear, day after day, that what was happening in the world of information was not accidental, it could not be a simple misinformation. This was the moment when I began to study the mechanisms of disinformation, discovering a precise design behind which secret services and military academies were also working, a project in which someone is investing a lot of money to power an extraordinary new war machine. I still had a limited view of the Ukrainian scenario, but I soon realized that the same techniques, the same dynamics, are also present in other scenarios thousands of kilometers away. The goal was and still is clear, to attack democracies at the heart with a new weapon called disinformation whose patient zero of the experiment was the great polygon of Ukraine.

During a conference at the Ukrainian Crisis Media Center, to which I had been invited as a speaker, I was approached by Yevhen Fedchenko, director of the Kyiv University of Journalism, and one of the founders of the Stopfake project. He offered me to collaborate on a project whose mission was precisely to counter the disinformation machine set up by the Kremlin. Obviously, I accepted with enthusiasm, and in the years that followed I had the opportunity to study closely this new weapon used not only in Ukraine but also during the presidential elections in America, in the referendum for Brexit in the United Kingdom, in the Italian, French, Austrian and German elections, and in recent months, during the Covid-19 pandemic

A long course of study that has never been interrupted and continues to this day, because today's disinformation is based on already extensively tested schemes. It, however, demonstrates an extraordinary evolutionary capacity thanks also to the evolution of technology and it is rapidly transforming our society into something that increasingly resembles the world described by Orwell.

To date, no one seems to have yet identified the antidote to this virus that is devouring Western democracies from within. In a sense, today the first enemy of Democracy is perhaps Democracy itself. Democratic systems offer backdoors to illiberal regimes, giving them the possibility of infecting our society, a kind of epidemic that acts slowly in the minds of the populations by manipulating and modifying them, changing their perceptions.

The Europe that has known more than seventy years of peace is now called to face a new form of war, a hybrid war. Those who move their digital armies against us need to sow chaos, divide populations by creating imaginary enemies, create suggestions and let peoples not understand that their choices are actually choices based on false assumptions. Experts in psychology and communication, following a very specific model, design a new world order that will probably take its final shape in the coming years.

One of the greatest advantages of those who want to influence our way of life lies precisely in the fact that those who should defend us have not yet understood (or pretend) what is happening. Generally, we respond immediately without showing an ability to plan a response for future years, thus always finding ourselves one step behind, slaves to a game that others lead.

Being aware of the scenario in which we are immersed is at least a first step to heal from an invisible disease. It is  the first necessary act for the establishment of a defensive system, a system that closes the backdoors left open by democracies without affecting individual freedoms, the foundation of our democracies.

It is therefore essential to take note of being under attack to activate defensive measures at the height of a war scenario, without leaving any advantage to the enemy. Our enemy is the one who floods us with disinformation every day and is not a virtual or imaginary opponent but a damn real one.

Democracies are proving extremely vulnerable to these types of attacks and, to date, have not been able to develop a valid defense model. No one has yet proposed a recipe to remedy the Orwellian drift. The same debunkers[1] and sites specialized in fact checking are proving to be quite inadequate and they are simply administering an aspirin to a terminally ill patient.

We have political systems conceived a century, or two, ago almost static, while the world in the last twenty years has undergone profound transformations that it had not known in the previous two hundred years. Propaganda also existed in previous centuries, and it was a method of channeling the masses. Those who managed power, before the advent of the internet, could limit themselves to controlling some major television channel and infiltrate a few trusted journalists in two or three major newsrooms. By controlling part of the information, the masses could be manipulated through the filter of the news that was published or through large-scale awareness raising operations on issues that interested to those at the top of power. All of this was effective as long as the control was in the hands of a few powerful networks.

The system, at least in much of the West, jumped about twenty years ago when the Internet began to become a trusted friend of all of us. Raises the stocks because the media, which are companies devoted to profit, understand that what is published on the net is news and sells. So, it happens that it is no longer the network that decides what is published in the media, but exactly the opposite. Having skipped the scheme that had ensured decades of balancing within democratic systems, the old democratic establishment found itself unprepared in this new scenario where old acquaintances with imperial ambitions are trampling. We experienced a phase of great euphoria, the imagination had apparently come to power, everyone could be the protagonist of information, everyone could express their ideas without filter. In reality, it was only appearance because the great military powers have never stopped studying and adapting their manipulative models.

In this book, I try to summarize the various aspects that make up today's disinformation and the hybrid war currently underway, both from a technical point of view, analyzing the various techniques used, and from a practical point of view by analyzing the practical cases of the last years. I try to tackle the issue by analyzing several aspects that are only apparently unrelated to each other, because disinformation represents only one, but very important, piece of the new hybrid wars.

This is an extraordinarily paradoxical war because it is a war in which there is no peace, in the sense that no information warfare treaties are signed, nor people mobilized to fight it. Of course, these are paradoxes of the traditional form of war as it is known. In information warfare, there are no weapons, but tools of knowledge, screens and computers. The information conflict does not start with a declaration of war and does not end with a peace treaty. The borders of the States are not crossed, but there is a fight in the world of media and information. I must admit that I am not the foremost expert on the disinformation campaigns of the US, China, Iran or India. However, according to a recent study by Princeton University[2], Russia is responsible for 72% of all foreign-influenced operations in the world. This means that all other actors combined are responsible for only a third of what Russia is doing in the world of disinformation. Of course, we should also be concerned about the fact that more and more states around the world are adopting the Russian model and using the same weapons as the Kremlin.

I hope and believe that my work can be an incentive for many people to take a greater interest in this issue in a new form that is as objective and not subjective as possible, stripping away from belonging to a political creed and restarting that critical spirit that exists within each of us, that free will that everyone possesses but that someone is trying to steal from us today.

The text is the result of years of work and study, and obviously includes works by other people that I have mentioned throughout the text. In case I have forgotten someone, I apologize, but given the informative and non-commercial intent of the work, I am sure that you will not mind it.

Post Scriptum: When I wrote this text, the Covid-19 pandemic was not yet on the horizon. It proved to be an extraordinary case study on disinformation techniques and proves that those who misinform take advantage of situations of chaos.

Propaganda and disinformation in history

Disinformation has jumped to the headlines in the Italian news with the guilty delay of a ruling class that has not been able to identify the potential danger to which Western democracies could have been exposed. Many countries realized they had a big problem at home when this was already well established and developed in the previous decade. Often, we hear speak of ‘Fakenews’, ‘Hoaxes’ and other related topics without the interlocutors possessing, in the vast majority of cases, the cultural tools to handle such a delicate subject. They deal with disinformation in the media with the same lightness as a post-football comment without giving it the right dimension of the potential danger that we are all exposed to. Social networks, the perfect breeding ground and spread of the disinformation virus, are used by all politicians. If some of them make use of specialized teams that operate using an established network, others move like a disorganized army with poor results. It will certainly not be the parliamentary committees of inquiry made up of people, who do not have adequate knowledge, that will solve the problem, and neither will the do-it-yourself approaches that often tend to underestimate the threat.

We often hear the message that it is enough to have a website, some brilliant ideas and some trolls available to become true disinformers. Old career politicians and parlor philosophers continue to insist on the primacy of politics over disinformation in a theorem that always sees the good win over the evil. Drama within drama. These characters, who have largely not yet understood what is happening, by having access to the media, explain to a television audience that has even fewer cultural tools to understand what is happening in the field of communication in Italy, often handling terms that the average user does not even understand.

Disinformation is a serious problem in our society, just as it was a hundred years ago, with the only, but important difference, that the means of spreading ‘the contagion’ were different and less efficient, such as radio, images, free newspapers. etc., compared to the current ones amplified by digital communication. History can teach us what nefarious effects a clever propaganda and disinformation campaign is capable of. It is therefore necessary to re-evaluate the professional skills and give space to those who have studied and analyzed these problems, that is, to abandon the concept that one is worth one and that knowledge is not a value.

Although modern propaganda, as an object of study, dates back to the twentieth century, the presence of the propaganda phenomenon can be traced to all the historical periods in which man began to organize himself in societal terms. Just think of Sun Tzu's military strategy treaties, according to which ‘all war is based on deception’; to Arthasastra, the treatise on strategic political science of ancient India, written by Kautilya, minister of King Chandragupta Maurya, offers numerous advice on the importance of deception in the art of government; to Plato's reflections on the use of the ‘noble lie’ by the rulers to strengthen the cohesion of the state and society; to Machiavelli, who supports the political use of lies aimed at maintaining power[3].

Already in pre-Roman times, propaganda was a widespread tool for winning consensus, for building public opinion and maintaining a social balance. Emblem of its use is Pisistratus, tyrant of Athens. He is considered a sort of propaganda genius. He used modern elements such as the public enemy and what we now call fake news.

The Romans, on the other hand, despite the insertion of information within the propaganda as a new element, concentrated more on messages of adoration towards the emperor of the moment.

Pisistrato's ability, combined with his natural gift of eloquence, was to use various means (which today we define mass media) masterfully coordinated with each other in such a way as to be able to give the message the characteristics of coherence and redundancy , useful for a more effective propaganda campaign. He directed his propaganda policy not only within (internal propaganda) his regime, but also outside, seeking to extend his influence beyond the borders of his city (external propaganda). In addition, he used disinformation and false news as elements of psychological action. In Pisistrato, therefore, we find many elements that characterize modern propaganda: the multi-channel approach which, through various means, promotes a single message, the exploitation of popular beliefs, the dissemination of false news and the identification of a public enemy. We find all these elements in the most advanced and modern propaganda campaigns.

In Roman times, Julius Caesar himself used information to promote the greatness of Rome. The Acta Diurna were posters containing various information regarding social life, summaries of laws, the work of the Senate, and any other type of information useful to the Roman cause. They were posted in public places in the city and disseminated thanks to the army in different corners of the Empire. Their use made it possible to exalt the greatness and virtues of Rome, with the trappings of objectivity. This initial soft approach, under which the propaganda intent was hidden, will be replaced by a more evident propaganda, made up of praise and adulation of the emperor of the moment. This change will make the tool lose its effectiveness, as propaganda is more incisive when it manages to disguise itself under the guise of free and independent information.

Johannes Gutenberg's invention represents the Google - iPad - Amazon - Facebook - Instagram of his time.

It allowed the circulation of ideas and opinions to a wide and dispersed audience, in a way that had previously been impossible. The will of such an audience could thus become a decisive political factor. He brought into being the notion of public opinion and with it the first stimuli of democracy to emerge from