Crimea: Psychological Warfare in Real Time
By Major Matt Cavanaugh
Emile Simpson wrote in his book – War From the Ground Up – about the psychological aspect to warfare (p. 35):
“War is a competition to impose meaning on people, as much emotional as rational, in which one’s enemy is usually the key target audience. Defeat is not a ‘verdict’ handed out by an independent arbitrator of war; defeat is a perceived state which typically is violently forced (or successfully threatened) by one side upon the other.”
In a forthcoming paper for Military Review, I took a hack at defining this tricky psychological battlefield relationship/space – calling it the “human environment” (*as opposed to “domain,” which I prefer, but more on that another time). I defined the human environment as “the sum of physical, psychological, cultural, and social interactions between strategically-relevant populations and operational military forces in a particular war or conflict.”
Either way one chooses to term it, we’re seeing this play out at the last Ukrainian military garrisons in Crimea – in particular Belbek Air Base. The Russians surrounded, and eventually took, the base. Interviews provide a glimpse of the decision forced upon the trapped troops.
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