Russia’s New-Generation Warfare (NGW): Reflexivity, Disruption, and the Politics of Uncertainty
摘要
Emerging from the fault lines of digital geopolitics, Russia’s New-Generation Warfare (NGW) redefines the grammar of conflict by transforming perception into a weapon and ambiguity into a strategy. Serving as both culmination and rupture within the Fifth-Generation continuum developed across Chapters 9 and 10, NGW exemplifies a distinct cognitive doctrine—one that fuses information, legality, and technology into a self-reinforcing system of reflexive control. Whereas the United States pursues algorithmic prediction and China embeds influence through infrastructural governance, Russia operationalises uncertainty itself as a strategic asset. The chapter traces NGW’s intellectual lineage from Soviet maskirovka and reflexive control to Gerasimov’s twenty-first-century synthesis, situating it within a comparative theoretical framework. Drawing on case studies from Ukraine, Syria, and Western election interference, it demonstrates how hybrid forces, cyber-kinetic operations, and information-psychological campaigns converge within a reflexive ecosystem that blurs the divide between cognition and command. Philosophically, the analysis suggests that NGW’s true innovation lies in its epistemic architecture—the ability to weaponise instability, narrative, and perception as instruments of systemic balance. It concludes that Russia’s model of cognitive sovereignty foreshadows the quantum-inflected transformation of warfare examined in Chapter 12, where the contest over data, law, and human reasoning becomes the final frontier of global power.