Tuesday, September 15, 2015

Quotable: General Breedlove on “drag the false narrative into the light”


publicdiplomacycouncil.org

Monday, September 14th 2015
“Hybrid war” was the subject of a briefing by the Supreme Allied Commander of NATO, USAF General Philip Breedlove, on March 23, 2105.  The defense.gov website provided a summaryof Breedlove’s remarks:  “Russia’s illegal occupation of Crimea and continued actions in the rest of Eastern Ukraine is a form of hybrid war,” and “Russia is using diplomacy, information warfare, and its military and economic means to wage this campaign . . .”

One of the first aspects of the hybrid war is to attack credibility and to try to separate a nation from its support mechanisms, the general said.

“Informationally, this is probably the most impressive new part of this hybrid war, all of the different tools to create a false narrative,” he said. “We begin to talk about the speed and the power of a lie, how to get a false narrative out, and then how to sustain that false narrative through all of the new tools that are out there.”

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“The way you attack a lie is with the truth,” Breedlove said. “I think that you have to attack an all of a government approach with an all of government approach. The military needs to be able to do its part, but we need to bring exposure to those diplomatic pressures and return the diplomatic pressure. We need to, as a Western group of nations or as an alliance, engage in this information warfare to … drag the false narrative out into the light and expose it.”

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