RUSSIA VS. ESTONIA: 21st Century State vs. State Conflict.
What does “guerrilla” war between interdependent states look like in the 21st Century? Very much like the war now going on between Estonia and Russia. Russia is using the removal of a statue commemorating Russian war dead from Tallinn (the capital of Estonia) as a pretext to launch an information/economic war against Estonia in order to destabilize the state (the likely real reason is that Estonia is blocking the construction of a Baltic pipeline to Germany). So far:
- Oil shipments have been severed. Passenger rail service has been cut.
- Flash mobs have been generated both in Moscow (against the Estonian embassy) and in Estonia (through the mobilization of ethnic Russians living there). These mobs have been energized by a Russian propaganda machine that depicts Estonia as a fascist antagonist of Russia.
- Russian criminal bot networks (used for phishing and other types of criminal endeavors) have been rented to conduct denial of service attacks against Estonian government computers (to prevent normal functioning and stymie its ability to counter Russian propaganda)
Of course, Estonia like Singapore and other small states, do have substantial asymmetric advantages against larger more complex big states in this type of war, if they would only use them. The key is to make the decision to become a micro-power, which requires resilience and a capacity to enlist commercial partners in defensive/retaliatory warfare, before being subjected to assault.
Remember: Vulnerability to disruption accelerates with size while the capacity to disrupt (using these methods) is scale-free (based on self-replicating computer resources and thereby within the budget of any state, no matter how small). [Global Guerrillas]