I came across this article in the Washington Post about how Russia's GRU, or military intelligence directorate, has stepped up their use of cyber warfare to implement attacks against Ukraine and other targets in the West, including the United States.
The most telling part of the article is this quote:
“Ukraine is to 21st-century hybrid warfare what Spain was in the 1930s for battlefield blitzkrieg techniques — the place where the bad guys try out what they may use against us later on,” said Daniel Fried, a former senior State Department official who helped lead the West’s response to Moscow’s aggression against Ukraine.
I was really struck by this, as from my studies of military history, especially the Spanish Civil War of the 1930's, made me recall how both the German Army (Heer) and Air Force (Luftwaffe) perfected their techniques used later with devastating effect against Poland, Scandinavia, and Western Europe in the first 2 years of World War II. Combined with an apparent renewed nationalism by Russians, it definitely bears watching in the coming months and years.
Should President Trump fail at reelection in 2020, the next incoming Democrat administration may decide to ignore or downplay foreign affairs much as the US did during the late 1930's in regards to Europe, allowing the Nazis to finalize their initial plans for dominating Europe. Only later events caused the US to reverse such isolationism and join with the other Allied powers to defeat Nazi Germany and its allies.
I really hope that a similar scenario does not come to pass, as it wound up costing a lot of lives and the expenditure of countless financial and material resources in the end, not to mention launching the Cold War between the West and the Soviet Union.
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