New generation warfare (NGW; ) is a Russian theory of unconventional warfare which prioritizes the psychological and people-centered aspects over traditional military concerns, and emphasizes a phased approach of non-military influence such that armed conflict, if it arises, is much less costly in human or economic terms for the aggressor than it otherwise would be. It was first enunciated in 2013 by Valery Gerasimov as part of his Gerasimov Doctrine.
Numerous analysts cite the 2014 Russian annexation of Crimea and war in Donbas as specific examples that followed the guidelines of new generation warfare.
According to one analyst, "the Russian view of modern warfare is based on the idea that the main battlespace is the mind and, as a result, new-generation wars are to be dominated by information and psychological warfare, ... morally and psychologically depressing the enemy’s armed forces personnel and civil population. The main objective is to reduce the necessity for deploying hard military power to the minimum necessary."
Terminology
The term new generation warfare was first introduced in Russian () in 2013, as synonyms for grey zone and hybrid warfare in the Gerasimov doctrine. These are all terms that refer to modern military theories of warfare that go beyond conventional warfare. The terms began to spread and take on various meanings, and were not always used with clarity. Some analysts use them more or less interchangeably, while others identify differences among them.
In his 2009 paper, Frank Hoffman noted the rising use of the term hybrid threat, and analyzed the multiple meanings of the term. Hoffman pointed out that there had been resistance among some analysts for the new term, who preferred older concepts of "conventional" and "irregular" warfare, while Hoffman believed that the older terms were insufficient to describe conflicts in the modern world. He defined hybrid threat as an adversary that "simultaneously and adaptively employs a fused mix of conventional weapons, irregular tactics, terrorism and criminal behavior in the battle space to obtain their political objectives".
Since being introduced, the term hybrid warfare has become trendy and is used often in debates on modern warfare. The term has gone through various stages of evolution of its meaning, and has been criticized for being overused. The term is used in official doctrines of nations, and permeates academic and policy discussions. The meaning has been extended to non-state actors, and shifted to be synonymous with "malign Russian activities" under Vladimir Putin. At first, the term was not used in Russia, but has recently been adopted and undergone its own shifting usage: before the Russo-Ukrainian war it tended to refer to trends in American military thinking, but after 2014 Russia views hybrid warfare as entirely emanating from the West, in that every conflict anywhere in the world, from hot wars to sports to vaccination to the Eurovision song contest are all aspects of "hybrid warfare" waged against them by the West. The West on the other hand views it more as a way of preventing subversion and interference from Russia, including cyberwarfare.
Russia created the concept of new generation warfare, but has also absorbed the hybrid warfare term. According to Suchkov (2021), the difference for Russian analysts is that new generation warfare is outward-facing, i.e., it's about "how to pro-actively engage with foreign adversaries", whereas hybrid warfare is about how to defend against interference from the West.
Background
The Cold War was a period of geopolitical tension between the United States and the Soviet Union and their respective allies, the Western Bloc and the Eastern Bloc, which began following the end of World War II and lasted until the dissolution of the Soviet Union in 1991. A period of openness under the last Soviet leader Mikhail Gorbachev and the first post-Soviet one Boris Yeltsin ended with the 1999 accession to power of Vladimir Putin, who took a harder line and sought to reestablish Russia as a world power with a sphere of influence including the former Soviet republics.
Cold War
The Soviet Union was one of the Allied powers of World War II fighting on the same side as the United States to defeat the Nazis. After victory over Hitler in 1945, the Allies disagreed on what the map of Europe should look like and where the borders would be drawn. The Soviets effectively occupied Central and Eastern Europe, while US and Western allied forces remained in Western Europe. The Soviet Union sought to establish a sphere of influence and dominate the internal affairs of countries in its border regions. Soviet-style regimes arose in the Eastern Bloc.
The US government pursued an increasingly hard line against the Soviets, and prime minister Winston Churchill delivered his famous "Iron Curtain" speech in Fulton, Missouri and called for an Anglo-American alliance against the Soviets. Stalin dismissed the accusation that the USSR was exerting increasing control over the countries in its sphere. He argued that there was nothing surprising in "the fact that the Soviet Union, anxious for its future safety, [was] trying to see to it that governments loyal in their attitude to the Soviet Union should exist in these countries".
Forty years of simmering tensions, rearmament, and proxy wars followed between the two nuclear-armed nations, and their allies. The western bloc created NATO to protect western Europe and contain the Soviets, and the Soviets created the Warsaw Pact in response, uniting eastern European countries behind the Iron Curtain. Direct armed conflict between the two nuclear-armed superpowers was avoided (sometimes only barely), such as during the Berlin Crisis of 1961 and the Cuban Missile Crisis. In the 1960s, the United States became bogged down in the "quagmire" of Vietnam in an attempt to contain Communism; twenty years later the Russians were bogged down in Afghanistan; each superpower left an Asian war without a victory. Conflicts multiplied in Third World nations, including in Latin America, Indonesia, Israel, South Asia, and Africa. After a period of détente in the 1970s, tensions were reawakened in the 1980s and US president Ronald Reagan "went all out to fight the second cold war". Pope John Paul II provided a moral focus for anti-communism; a visit to his native Poland in 1979 stimulated a religious and nationalist resurgence centered on the Solidarity movement that galvanized the opposition, which was met by a harsh crackdown in 1981.
Thaw and end of the Cold War
Massive spending in the Soviet Union on the arms race exacerbated already deep-seated structural problems in the Soviet system, In response to the massive buildup on the Soviet side, US presidents Carter and Reagan built up the US military, culminating with the Strategic Defense Initiative ("Star Wars"), which the Soviets were not able to respond to. By 1985, when Mikhail Gorbachev became General Secretary, the Soviet economy was stagnant. Gorbachev announced economic reforms called perestroika, or restructuring. and glasnost ("openness") which increased freedom of the press and the transparency of state institutions. This contributed to the accelerating détente between the two nations, resulting in agreements which led to a scaling-back of the arms race. Tensions subsided; the START I arms control treaty was signed, Soviet forces withdrew from Afghanistan, and the Berlin Wall came down in 1989.
On 3 December 1989, Gorbachev and Bush declared the Cold War over at the Malta Summit. By 1990, Gorbachev consented to German reunification, and later that year the two former rivals were partners in the Gulf War against Iraq.
Dissolution of the Soviet Union
In 1989, the Soviet alliance system was on the brink of collapse and communist leaders of the Warsaw Pact states were losing power. The Pan-European Picnic in August 1989 in Hungary became a test of how far the Soviet leader Gorbachev was willing to go with glasnost. Thousands of holiday-makers exited Hungary at the border with Austria without interference by Hungarian border guards, and the Soviet Union did nothing to stop it. The dam broke, and tens of thousands of East Germans crossed into Austria. The Hungarian borders were opened on 11 September, and the Berlin Wall fell on 9 November. The 1989 revolutionary wave swept across Central and Eastern Europe and peacefully overthrew all of the Soviet-style east-European states; Romania was the only Eastern-bloc country to topple its communist regime violently. The Warsaw Pact disintegrated in 1991.
Greater political and social freedoms in the Soviet Union instituted by the last Soviet leader Mikhail Gorbachev created an atmosphere of open criticism. The Soviet Union finally collapsed in 1991 when Boris Yeltsin seized power in the aftermath of a failed coup that had attempted to topple reform-minded Gorbachev. The Baltic States seceded, and Ukraine and Belarus were recognized as independent on 8 December. The Soviet flag was lowered at the Kremlin for the last time on 25 December 1991, replaced by the Russian tricolor. The successor state was headed by Yeltsin until 1999.
Putin era
Since 1999 Vladimir Putin has headed Russia either as president or Prime Minister. The economy has improved, but he has also been widely accused of corruption, authoritarian leadership, and widespread human rights abuses.
Precursors
Phillip Karber at the National Geospatial-Intelligence Agency identified 1999 when former KGB agent Vladimir Putin came to power in Russia as a "pivotal turning point in European security". Putin has stated that "the collapse of the Soviet Union was the greatest geopolitical catastrophe of the century." Ever since, Putin has labored to reestablish Russia as a world power and dominance in Eastern Europe, and pushed to restructure the armed forces, and introduced new tactics in the 2000 Second Chechen War.
The Russian Army General Staff redesigned the Russian Army for decentralized operations including the possibility of unconventional operations, conventional weapons, and tactical nuclear environments, in order to face different kinds of threats from the high-tech West, massed armies in the east, and unconventional threats from the south. This was used in 2008 in the Georgian conflict, and practiced in field simulations against NATO, through 2013.
It was also in 2013 that publications by Russian military writers about "new generation warfare" became available, and Chief of the General Staff General Valery Gerasimov called for "rethinking on the forms and methods of warfare." Many analysts consider the Gerasimov doctrine the best description of Russia's modern strategy of total warfare, which uses politics as well as war, and attacks on multiple fronts at once including hackers, business, media, disinformation, as well as military means. The internet has made available the possibility of new tools and approaches to destabilize or influence foreign actors, and the Gerasimov doctrine describes a framework for using them, and says that they are not just adjuncts of military force, but are in fact, the primary or preferred means to victory. The strategy is to foment chaos within an enemy state, and develop permanent unrest and conflict there. West Point analyst John Chambers uses the terms Gerasimov doctrine and new generation warfare synonymously. Chambers views the Gerasimov/new generation warfare doctrine as having been formulated specifically to exploit the weaknesses of large enemy bureaucracies such as the United States.