In both Crimea and the subsequent fighting in the Donbas region of Ukraine, Russia’s signature tactic has been the use of so-called “Green Men,” soldiers without identifying insignia whose identity as Russian soldiers the Kremlin denied. Ukraine, Georgia, and even NATO members like Estonia now fear that they could be the next target for Russia’s Green Men. NATO, alarmed by the need to prepare for this unexpected tactic, has committed to develop new countermeasures to defend against this threat. Green Men, or deniable forces, are a central part of what has come to be called “hybrid warfare” in the “gray zone” between war and peace. All of this seems to be a new and innovative departure from traditional tactics, perhaps even a new model for conflict in the 21st century.
However, deniable forces are nothing new. Nor, in fact, is the specific phenomenon of using them to seize a piece of territory, as Russia did in Crimea. There is a long history of hybrid warfare in general and of intervening with deniable forces in particular. This history points not just to the enduring nature of the threat, but also to the contours of a “counter-hybrid” strategy to defeat it.
In the course of a broader research project for which I compiled data on every land grab since 1918, 105 land grabs in total, I found three instances before Crimea of deniable forces seizing territory. In 1999, Pakistani forces crossed the Line of Control in the Kargil region of Kashmir, occupying positions overlooking strategically important roads in Indian territory. Like the Russians, Pakistan used deniable forces that they described as Kashmiri insurgents. Unlike the Ukrainians, the Indians counterattacked, absorbing heavy casualties to expel the Pakistanis.
Pakistan did not invent this gambit. On the contrary, these tactics predate Pakistan. In 1932, armed Peruvians dressed as civilians seized the remote border town of Leticia. As Colombia amassed the forces needed to remove the invaders, the Peruvian military intervened openly to back them. Colombia then dispatched a flotilla of gunboats that journeyed through the Atlantic and all the way up the Amazon River to engage the Peruvians, retaking part of the territory and recouping the rest through negotiation.
Russia has even been the victim of a land grab by deniable forces. In 1919, Finnish volunteers acting ostensibly on their own initiative (but in actuality with government sanction) invaded parts of Russian Karelia with Finnish populations, hoping to annex them to Finland. This Finnish attempt to exploit the political disorder of the Russian Civil War was short-lived. The Red Army was able to muster the forces to repulse the Finns.
Deploying deniable forces to intervene in an ongoing war, as Russia has done during the fighting in Donetsk and Luhansk, is yet more common. Even without deceiving informed observers, Moscow seems to believe that a semblance of deniability offers some hope of minimizing the repercussions of aggression. This is not a new assumption for those deploying deniable forces. During the Korean War, Russian pilots flew Russian aircraft in combat against the U.S. Air Force under the guise that they and their planes were Chinese. This continued even after radio chatter in fluent Russian confirmed American suspicions about the pilots’ identities. Mussolini’s Italy dispatched tens of thousands of soldiers without their normal identifying insignia as “volunteers” to intervene on behalf of the Fascists in the Spanish Civil War. The Italian Navy even launched attacks using submarines in lieu of surface warships in order to avoid culpability for their actions, in effect deploying submarines as deniable forces at sea. These are time-honored tactics.
The anxiety about hybrid warfare as a novel and innovative form of aggression is misplaced, but a threat need not be new to be dangerous. For those in the Baltic and elsewhere worried that Russia will again employ the tactics used in Crimea, however, it is perhaps encouraging that Russia’s success at seizing territory with deniable forces is atypical. Russia succeeded in Crimea with the same tactics that failed Pakistan in Kargil, Peru in Leticia, and Finland in Karelia, for an overall record of one success to three failures since 1918.
In each instance, the defender countered hybrid tactics in the same way. They accepted the fictitious terms of the conflict and mobilized enough strength to defeat the deniable forces on the battlefield. They sought to engage the deniable forces without also attacking any uniformed forces of the aggressor or striking targets in the aggressor’s territory, keeping the fighting contained. On the battlefield (although not in their rhetoric), both sides maintained the fiction that the conflict was something less than an open attack by the aggressor. India was extremely careful in this regard as it retook Kargil, even avoiding airstrikes that would require planes to overfly Pakistan’s side of the Line of Control.
In each case, the defender amassed enough military force to defeat the invading deniable force in a stand-up fight. This compelled the aggressor to make a difficult choice: intervene openly to salvage the operation (as Peru attempted) or accept that the gambit has failed and withdraw the deniable forces (as Pakistan and Finland elected). The objective of the defenders was to force the aggressor’s hand, obliging them to choose withdrawal.
There is an irreducible risk to this counter-hybrid strategy, because it can induce the aggressor to double-down and intervene openly. However, there is also risk in letting aggression go unchallenged. The choice of whether to confront hybrid tactics belongs to the nation under attack. If the choice is to resist, this counter-hybrid strategy has been the way to fight back.
Asked how he would counter “green men” crossing the border from Russia, Riho Terras, Estonia’s top general, gave a simple answer, “You shoot the first one to appear.” Although this statement may first appear to be the bombastic rhetoric of a reckless David insufficiently awed by the Russian Goliath, this approach is in fact supported by both the most relevant historical precedents and a calculated strategic logic.
For this counter-hybrid strategy to succeed, the defender must have enough military strength to be able to prevail in the initial, limited conflict fought under the guise of a purely internal armed struggle. This is why Ukraine has had so much trouble with hybrid warfare. Until Ukraine can strengthen its forces to the extent that Russia would need to intervene beyond the breaking point of an already threadbare veil of deniability in order to prevail (for instance, with its air force), Kiev will continue to struggle to defeat hybrid warfare. And it is Ukrainian capabilities that matter most, not those of the United States or NATO. Due to the desirability of maintaining the pretense of an internal conflict, defeating future deniable forces is a task best suited to the military of the state under attack, not its allies.
Ukraine, Georgia, Estonia, and other Russian neighbors will never be strong enough to defeat the Russian military on their own, but that is the wrong barometer. These countries need only be able to defeat a force small enough that Russia can deny responsibility for it. Taking that option off the table leaves Russia only the options of open war and acquiescing to the status quo. This amounts to the classic deterrence problem, with the added threat of hybrid warfare nullified.
Dan Altman is a U.S. Foreign Policy and International Security Postdoctoral Fellow at the Dickey Center for International Understanding at Dartmouth College.
Photo credit: Anton Holoborodko
Or, you counter escalate somewhere else. Like during the 1965 India Pakistan war, India counter escalated in the coastlines, after being bogged down in the mountains.
Going by Putin’s grand strategy, it might happen sooner than we think. http://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=2747764
One slight correction. Most of the action took place in Punjab and not near the coastline.
Polish hibrid warfare in 1920
https://pl.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bunt_Żeligowskiego
In the 3 examples you give of this tactic not working, an inferior power was attacking a larger one, so if they took the option to “double down” and reinforce their deniable forces, they would expect to be defeated in open war.
In the one example that worked, it was the larger power attacking the smaller. If the defender did as the Estonian general advocated there is a much greater risk of the aggressor “doubling down”, as he would expect to win that way.
This was the dilemma for Ukraine. Attacking the green men could be spun as an attack on Russian minorities in the region and illicit a stronger response from Russia.
In the case of Estonia however, one could consider Estonia the greater power as it is backed by NATO. Arguably, Russia would have to “break” NATO so to speak (before attempting this strategy), by demonstrating that the allies won’t all stand up for each other in some crisis. Estonia without NATO backing would be less inclined to react strongly to green men in Narva. In this sense, conflict with Turkey could be a huge opportunity for them, as most members of NATO are becoming unhappy with Turkey for a number of reasons.. Kurds, refugees, Erdogan etc.
What the author leaves out of this piece as does just about every WoTR author and MSMer is that Russia isn’t the only power to have sent advisors if not combatants to Donbass and disavowed them. During the Ukrainian campaign to encircle Slavyansk and squeeze the first rebels out of that town Italian journalists spoke with a ‘Ukrainian’ National Guardsman who spoke perfect Italian.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=en4h-VQh7TQ
A Turkish journalist attempted to carry on a conversation with Ukrainian soldiers who could only speak in broken Russian to angry Donbass locals but who almost certainly spoke English briefly with Polish accents.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0DIOfm5r8v8
There was also the infamous footage of locals shouting ‘Blackwater’ at ‘Ukrainian’ special forces in Donetsk before the start of real fighting in that city in March 2014, with StopFake.org laughably insisting they were yelling ‘go to work’ in Russian instead of ‘Blackwater’.
Then there was the world famous ‘out of my face please’ guy in Mariupol with the Azov Battalion, whom an army of Kiev/NATO trolls lamely insisted was a British de-mining volunteer Chris ‘Swampy’ Garrett. But Garrett appeared on a video filmed in Mariupol the same day, looking nothing like ‘out of my face’ guy who unlike the Brit had no red beard, but dark features instead. Garrett also made no attempt to cover his face, unlike the other man.
Sorry Interpreter Mag and StopFakers but your efforts at damage control fail there were clearly non-Ukrainians staying mum in that March 2014 Donetsk footage, and that was almost certainly a U.S. merc or at least CIA contractor with an upstate NYer sounding accent caught on video by a Ukrainian TV crew.
The point I’m getting at is that any NATO assistance beyond training in the Yavoriv complex or the smattering of ex-US Army Ukrainian/Russian speakers now joining the Kievan Rus battalion is likely to get caught and exposed, limiting the extent of covert U.S./NATO direct operational assistance to make Kiev’s heretofore spectacularly incompetent offensives more successful. So when the author cites an Estonian general who says the way to counter ‘little green men tactics’ is to shoot the first one you see, a Russian GRU colonel somewhere is nodding his head and saying, “Yes, and the way you counter plausible deniability in targeting Russian personnel in Syria or Donetsk or Lugansk who ‘aren’t’ there is to send a few of the Swedish, Croat or even Polish NATO foreign legionnaires who ‘aren’t in the Ukrainian Army or volunteer battalion’s ranks (especially those like ‘out of my face please’ guy with Azov in Mariupol) home in body bags so the British and Americans get the message”.
We’ve already seen an account in DefenseOne following up on Lt. Gen. Ben Hodges complaint about the Russians ‘eye watering’ electronic jamming capabilities in support of the DNR/LNR in which the Ukrainians admitted they didn’t want to use U.S. encrypted radios — because the Russian ELINT triangulated their locations and hammered them with DNR artillery fire, assuming there were American spooks or instructors at that frontline location and killing several Ukrainian soldiers.
So dear WoTR readers, the moral of the story is — ‘shoot the first little green man you see in Estonia’ has the inverse of ‘Russia hammers with arty or a spetsnaz ambush the first combined NATO/Ukrainian forces CP in Mariupol you all thought was safely behind the lines in Donbass they see’ if the next Administration (especially under HRC) decides to ‘show the Russians who is boss’ and escalate via ‘plausibly deniable’ means.