The War in Ukraine is a War on Our Minds

I need to finally comment on the torrent of fake news barraging our minds since the beginning of the Russian “invasion” of Ukraine. I know that the majority of these videos and photos are fake, and I have the credentials to back that statement. We are witnessing the single biggest disinformation campaign ever, and I would really like to know how much it cost, in billions USD. We’re probably spending more on this information war than all participants in World War II combined, and I’m not exaggerating.

So here’s my take on the bullshit and why it’s bullshit.

-Photography and video from a combat zone has an inordinately exhaustive clearance process with multiple authorities reviewing and signing off on it. In Iraq as of 2016, it took my photos an average of 2 to 3 weeks to be cleared for release. Even if they were boring and stupid photos you could find on Wikipedia, like soldiers at the USO or a chinook sitting on the airfield. Sensitive footage involving our weapon capabilities and SOPS generally take months to release.

-UAS footage is even more complex to release, and 99.99% of the time can’t be released at all. When you zap an enemy, you OBVIOUSLY don’t want to explain to him how you did it so he can adjust his defenses. The Russians already announced they destroyed these Turkish drones, and was literally the first thing they wanted to destroy. These drones have been slaughtering civilians for months and are deeply hated by the Russian public. If they were wrong and missed a few why would we tell them?

-Information is a warfighting function. Like all of the warfighting functions, they are the responsibility of the commander. He and only he has release authority. Of course a commander usually delegate release authority but if he wants to be a dick and personally review and approve everything, he can. That’s his right because if someone fucks up he’s the one who gets fired. In peacetime back in the states, brigades can clear their own products. In war, not so much. In Kuwait and Iraq, I was having to send my shit to ARCENT, but it’s actually worse than that. If your product involves or even mentions another component or, God help you, another nation, that’s even more people in the chain who need to approve it. 

-For anyone who might argue “oh but these videos are good propaganda so they were given expedited approval” – yes they are great propaganda and that’s possible but extremely unlikely. The DOD prioritizes risk management and force protection over media relations, and always has. Most commanders do not give a shit how the unit Facebook page is doing, and to be brutally honest, they’re right. Whatever is gained by quickly releasing a product is NOT worth the risk of accidentally revealing valuable information to the enemy. If you think I’m lying, go look up AR-360-1, and tell me where in that document it says it’s okay for a product to violate OPSEC if you think it’s really cool. High level commands have to review hundreds or even thousands of information products and it is not a fast process.

-For anyone who argues “oh, but it’s the Ukrainian resistance, they’re plucky resistance fighters who are not burdened by the same bureaucracy as the American military. Well They were trained by us. They have the same doctrine and SOPs. They had hundreds of American and British military advisors, and, let’s be honest, at least some of those advisors are still there embedded with and possibly even leading Ukrainian units. I know the Pentagon loudly announced they were withdrawing, but I see no compelling evidence that they actually did.

-It’s not just one or two videos. Only a few “go viral” in the West, but the Ukrainians are vomiting HUNDREDS of these onto the web. How are they doing it so fast, especially when their communication networks must be at least partially disrupted? Remember, you can’t just drop a zipped file into an email, hit “reply all” and ask “Hey guys is it cool if I post this drone video?” Fuck no. I was spending hours wrestling with agonizingly using slow NIPR/SIPR networks, and burning stuff to DVD to deliver by hand, I’m pretty sure it is even more difficult in Ukraine right now.

-The “muh 13 Spartans, the “muh Kiev ghost” and a hundred other examples have been proven to be fake. Why should we believe anything Ukraine is saying right now when they’re quite clearly willing to tell as many lies as necessary to manipulate the American public?

-The Pentagon has people who are exceptionally good at producing fakes. In Afghanistan in the early 2010s, I met an IO shop with guys who could forge extremely convincing photos and hand-written documents meant to cause confusion and distrust in the Taliban. I’m sure they’re even more sophisticated a decade later. And it is common knowledge that we trained a Ukrainian disinformation machine and put it in Crimea. In 2014 they escaped to West Ukraine. They must be using the hell out of it right now, and they’ve had 8 years to produce a mountain of fakes they can drip-feed onto the internet.

There is one last element of propaganda that I need to mention, and this is the most crucial one. The audience. There are two broad categories of audiences in public relations. Internal audiences, and externals. Us and them. Propaganda can be tailored to affect one specific audience, but the best propaganda affects all of them. Like any other type of marketing, propaganda should be a clear call to action to every person who looks at it.

Perhaps the most amazing quality of this propaganda campaign I’m witnessing first hand is how strongly it affects everyone on both sides of the pond. These lies are perfectly tailored to be effective against both American and Russian audiences. We can only speculate on their possible goals at this point. But the first possibility that comes to my mind is provoking open warfare between the American and Russian people.

Every nation has an overarching idea that they dream about, and their personal fantasies tend to revolve around this idea. Of course real life cannot match idealism, and very often doesn’t come close. Sometimes as a nation strays further away from its ideal, people feel that and become desperate. They reach out for that idea and get more desperate as it drifts further away. This is the moment but the people dream of it. This can be the “sweet spot” when that people is most vulnerable to propaganda. They’ll accept a provocation without question and can be tricked into doing something very foolish.

So what do these two “adversary” nations stand for, at least in an ideal fairy world?

America stands for individual liberty. We’re cowboys who stand up for the weak against bullies. We love the underdog, even though it has been a very long time since we could ever truthfully claim to be an underdog, but we still find the idea intriguing.

We also have a weakness. We have never had a truly devastating war on our own soil. We have never lost a quarter or a third of our population to war. Let me rephrase, Anglo Americans haven’t. Indigenous Americans might disagree with my statement. But regardless, Americans have become overly accustomed to one-sided battles against people without the proper arms to do anything but quickly die under our bombs and bullets. When combined with our quest to defend individual liberty, we can be tricked into walking into foolish and difficult wars, and we seem to fall for this trick no matter how often it is played on us. As we fight more and more of these devastating wars, our hearts blister, and those blisters harden to stone.

We’ve come to see all of our enemies (and this list has grown to include almost everyone who isn’t an immediate ally) as subhuman and pathetic, and they deserve to be slaughtered. Of course they deserve to be slaughtered. We love individual liberty, and a man who is too weak to properly defend his liberty is worth less than the bullets in our guns. I am not sure when exactly this rot started, but I do know when it became obvious. August 6, 1945, the atomic bombing of Hiroshima. Why nuke a population of people who could not realistically harm us or even defend themselves? Because, we said, it was better for a hundred thousand Japanese to die, than it was to risk the life of even one more American serviceman. That’s the story we told ourselves, and we’ve come to believe it.

Now the propaganda, it tugged our heartstrings! The Ukrainian people successfully freed their homeland from Russian tyranny. But now, their freedom is in peril again, and they are greatly outnumbered. Ukraine alone stands against the Russian hordes. They did everything in their power to prepare for the inevitable battle with the red menace. Ukraine is truly the defender of Europe in every sense of the word. But then, when the cowardly Russian sneak attack began, the Ukrainian people were betrayed. A knife in the back. Abandoned by the cowardly politicians in the West. Their brave president desperately called every NATO partner, begging for someone, anyone, to come to his aid. No one answered, and Ukraine was left alone in the darkness, condemned to certain death.

Then, first blood was drawn. The 13 Spartans of Serpent Island. The cowardly, arrogant Russian navy called and demanded a surrender. The Ukrainians defiantly gave an answer that was unprintable, but good for emblazoned t-shirts and viral social media posts.

After that, Russian hordes approached the Ukrainian border. Bandera’s sons stood their ground, patriotism and pride giving them the courage to face hopeless odds… and then, a miracle happened. They held the line!  The enemy casualty reports to come in, and they were amazing. Dozens of Russians killed. No, hundreds. Thousands! Tens of thousands! Millions! Billions! Trillions!

As it turned out, the Russian army was overconfident. And more importantly, they were weak. It was astonishingly easy to slaughter the Russians. Even a Ukrainian grandma or a child could easily overpower a thousand Russian soldiers. The strongest Russian is weaker than the weakest Ukrainian.

For now, the Ukrainians are holding their own, but the Russian army has unlimited numbers and will continue attacking until the Ukrainians run out of bullets. The cavalry must come to their aid! Need I go further? Americans have been given a Ukrainian people who deserve to live free, and an enemy who is weak and doesn’t deserve to live at all.

Disputed or not, this is the truth that is printed, and once printed, the story is true and believed forever.

Now how about the Russians? I’m not a Russian, and would hardly call myself an expert in Russian mentality. However, she is a country that has gradually lured me in over the years. Then finally, I went on a pilgrimage to see her for myself. All of these experiences came together and I decided I was here to stay.

So I came home for a brief time to organize my affairs, gather my things, and pick up my dog. Then the war happened. Despite the endless hysteria from the White House, the Russian special military operation caught me completely by surprise. I suppose that’s the point of special military operations. To be honest, if I had known this was going to happen, I would have stayed in Russia. The irony of this situation is not lost upon me. I spent a month roaming Moscow region, but I did not meet even one person who treated me with anything less than kindness and patience. But now in my own homeland, friends eye me with suspicion. I had gone to Moscow and a military invasion happened shortly afterward. Okay, I admit it! I am guilty! Putin had called me to the Kremlin for a personal consultation. The special military operation was all my idea. I gave him the perfect attack plan and the ideal moment to spring it.

So how would Russians be provoked? I cannot really say as an expert, but I think anyone can guess. To depict Russian soldiers as demoralized conscripts is in itself a provocation. And let’s not allow history to be memory-holed by amnesiac newscasters. Week-old headlines are in reality a war going back 8 years. Or more honestly, 30 years. 100 years, really.

Even if every shelling was a “Kremlin false flag,” there are provocations that cannot be denied. Rather, they are amplified by the democratic West herself. Tearing down memorials to the red army soldier and replacing him with idols to Bandera, this is a moral provocation. To say that the “red fascists” were worse than the nazis themselves, and the nazis were the true heroes of World War II, is this the diplomacy I’ve heard so much about? To tear up a person’s legends and symbols is an incendiary act more provocative than bombs and shells. 

And why resurrect viral photos and videos of Donbass in 2014? Couldn’t the fake news warriors find more discrete images? Instead, they took photos of Russian martyrs and refugees, and rebranded them to be Ukrainian victims of Russian fascism. That’s an insult equal to or worse than what was done to the red army soldier.

These are all my guesses, take them or leave them. I will say that I am disappointed. It is depressing to watch Americans disgrace themselves, taking sides and expressing hatred in a conflict they know nothing about. I would rather sit out Cold War II in Russia, and that is still the plan, if I can manage a backpack and a dog past the iron curtain.

UPDATE: Please see my next post, about why our elites hate Russia.

I Finally Understand Why We Hate Russia

Ian Kummer

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