Political warfare
Political warfare is the use of hostile political means to compel an opponent to do one's will. The term political describes the calculated interaction between a government and a target audience, including another state's government, military, and/or general population. Governments use a variety of techniques to coerce certain actions, thereby gaining a relative advantage over an opponent. The techniques include propaganda and psychological operations, which serve national and military objectives, respectively. Propaganda has many aspects and a hostile and coercive political purpose. Psychological operations are for strategic and tactical military objectives and may be intended for hostile military and civilian populations.
Political warfare's coercive nature leads to weakening or destroying an opponent's political, social, or societal will, and forcing a course of action favorable to a state's interest. Political war may be combined with violence, economic pressure, subversion, and diplomacy, but its chief aspect is "the use of words, images and ideas". The creation, deployment, and continuation of these coercive methods are a function of statecraft for nations and serve as a potential substitute for more direct military action. For instance, methods like economic sanctions or embargoes are intended to inflict the necessary economic damage to force political change. The utilized methods and techniques in political war depend on the state's political vision and composition. Conduct will differ according to whether the state is totalitarian, authoritarian, or democratic.
The ultimate goal of political warfare is to alter an opponent's opinions and actions in favour of one state's interests without utilizing military power. This type of organized persuasion or coercion also has the practical purpose of saving lives through eschewing the use of violence in order to further political goals. Thus, political warfare also involves "the art of heartening friends and disheartening enemies, of gaining help for one's cause and causing the abandonment of the enemies'". Generally, political warfare is distinguished by its hostile intent and through potential escalation; but the loss of life is an accepted consequence.
Concept
Peaceful
Political warfare utilizes all instruments short of war available to a nation to achieve its national objectives. The best tool of political warfare is "effective policy forcefully explained", or more directly, "overt policy forcefully backed". But political warfare is used, as one leading thinker on the topic has explained, "when public relations statements and gentle, public diplomacy-style persuasion—the policies of 'soft power'—fail to win the needed sentiments and actions" around the world.The major way political warfare is waged is through propaganda. The essence of these operations can be either overt or covert. White propaganda is maximally overt: there is attribution to a promoter; the attributed promoter and the actual promoter are one and the same; and no attempt is made to hide the fact that a viewpoint or "line" is being promoted. Most television advertisements are white propaganda turned to commercial ends. Grey propaganda ranges in overtness from maximal to a slightly lesser degree: as in white propaganda, there is honest attribution to a source; but it differs from white propaganda by being less forthright either about the link between the source and the line being promoted or about its status as propaganda in the first place. Grey propaganda has alternatively been defined as the "semiofficial amplification of a government's voice"; guerilla advertising uses the tools of grey propaganda to sell products and services, while in public service, examples include Radio Free Europe and Radio Liberty. Black propaganda is covert: this may be limited to the anonymous dissemination of internally consistent talking points, but it may also be the impersonation of a widely trusted organization under a false flag, or a strategy as complex as the use of a botnet to inundate a social network with self-contradictory disinformation as if through a firehose of falsehood, amplifying the botnet's posts with so-called Likes and Retweets, and frustrating genuine users' bona fide searches for pertinent information by diminishing the signal-to-noise ratio. What unifies these disparate strategies implementing black propaganda is that, in all cases, it "appears to come from a disinterested source when in fact it does not".
There are channels which can be used to transmit propaganda. Sophisticated use of technology allows an organization to disseminate information to a vast number of people. The most basic channel is the spoken word. This can include live speeches or radio and television broadcasts. Overt or covert radio broadcasting can be an especially useful tool. The printed word is also very powerful, including pamphlets, leaflets, books, magazines, political cartoons, and planted newspaper articles. Subversion, agents of influence, spies, journalists, and "useful idiots" can all be used as powerful tools in political warfare.
Aggressive
Political warfare also includes aggressive activities by one actor to offensively gain relative advantage or control over another. Between nation states, it can end in the seizure of power or in the open assimilation of the victimized state into the political system or power complex of the aggressor. This aggressor-victim relationship has also been seen between rivals within a state and may involve tactics like assassination, paramilitary activity, sabotage, coup d'état, insurgency, revolution, guerrilla warfare, and civil war.- Foreign infiltration or liberation occurs when a government is overthrown by foreign military or diplomatic intervention, or through covert means. The campaign's ultimate purpose is to gain control over another nation's political and social structure. The campaign could be led by the aggressor's national forces or by a political faction favorable to the aggressor within the other state. Paul W. Blackstock describes three stages involved in the extension of control by the aggressor over the victim:
- Penetration or infiltration: the deliberate infiltration of political and social groups within a victim state by the aggressor with the ultimate purpose of extending influence and control. The aggressor conceals its endgame, which goes beyond the normal influential nature of diplomacy and involves espionage.
- Forced disintegration or atomization: "is the breakdown of the political and social structure of the victim until the fabric of national morale disintegrates and the state is unable to resist further intervention". The aggressor may exploit the inevitable internal tensions between political, class, ethnic, religious, racial, and other groups. This concept is a similar strategy to 'divide and conquer'.
- Subversion and defection: Subversion is the "undermining or detachment of the loyalties of significant political and social groups within the victimized state, and their transference to the political or ideological causes of the aggressor". In lieu of total and direct transference, the aggressor may accept intermediate states that still meet its objectives, such as the favor of politically significant individuals. Furthermore, the formation of a counter-elite, made up of influential individuals and key leaders, within the victim state establishes the legitimacy and permanency of a new regime. Defection is the transference of allegiance of key individuals and leaders to the aggressor's camp. The individual could relocate or stay-in-place in the victim country, continually influencing local issues and events in the aggressor's favor. Defectors also provide insider information to the aggressor.
- Coup d'état is the overthrow of a government through the infiltration of the political, military, and social groups by a small segment of the state apparatus. The small segment exists within the state and targets the critical political levers of power within a government to neutralize opposition to the coup and post-coup governing force. Several pre-existing factors are necessary for a coup: political participation being limited to a small portion of the population, independence from foreign power influence and control, and power and decision-making authority concentrated within a political center and not diffused between regional authorities, businesses, or other groups.
- Paramilitary Operations: transitional political warfare ranging from small-scale use of violence with a primitive organizational structure to full-scale conventional war. The transition and escalation include a series of stages and depend on tactical and strategic objectives. Paramilitary activities include infiltration and subversion as well as small group operations, insurrection, and civil war.
- Insurgency: an organized, protracted political warfare tool designed to weaken the control and eliminate the legitimacy of an established government, occupying power, or other political authority. An insurgency is an internal conflict, and the primary struggle is to mobilize local populations for political control and gain popular support for the insurgents' cause. Insurgencies include political and military objectives, with the end goal of establishing a legitimate, rival state structure. Insurgencies are unconventional military conflicts which incorporate a variety of methods, ranging from coercive tools like intimidation and assassination, to political tools like propaganda and social services. An insurgency's approaches and objectives could involve perpetual disorder and violence demonstrating the government's inability to provide security for the populace, weakening the government and killing or intimidating any effective opposition against the government, intimidating the population and discouraging its participation in – or support for – political or legal processes, controlling or intimidating police and military forces or by creating government repression by provoking over-reactions by security or military forces.