1. Fragmentary Notes on History of Wars
Wars are a phenomenon accompanying humankind ever since the dawn of its existence. The map of the World has been changed a lot by swords and their contemporary technological counterparts, reincarnations of different generals, conquerors or in more general terms—politicians.
Ever since Antiquity, territorial, resource and power conflicts have been endless. Machiavelli has every right to claim that about 80% of the time that the world exists is spent on constant conflicts, whilst the remaining 20% has been spent in peace.
The author of the most notable military work “On War” (Vom Kriege), the Prussian scientist and military general Carl von Clausewitz, laid his theory on the interaction between politics, the military and the civilians (Murray & Mansoor, 2012). He sees wars and politics as one whole and claims that to achieve its goals, the war should remain under the control of political leaders. One of his most cited thoughts is that “War is nothing more than the continuation of politics by other means.” Later, many contemporary war researchers, as well as acting politicians, developed Clausewitz’s theories further, but in essence, this thought remains one unavoidable constant quantity.
2. Classification of Wars
There are different criteria for classifying wars. If we consider them from the point of view of their scale, then they can be global, regional or local and accordingly divided into internal and external. Each war uses different means and has its distinctive characteristics, so from the so-called classical point of view, they can even be classified according to whether they take place on land, in the air, in space, on the water surface or under water. Historically traced and classified by time, we encounter wars from antiquity, when conquering campaigns enslaved tribes with low social development.
The wars of the New Age include colonial, civil, national-liberation, wars of states and coalitions of states, hybrid wars, and post-industrial wars include ethnic conflicts and counter-terrorist operations.
According to one of the most common classifications, wars can be:
· war for hegemony—a war for control over the whole world order and domination over the international system on the whole. It can be a world war, a global war, an overall war or a systematic war;
· a total war—characterized by total mobilization of people and resources;
· limited war—war waged for achieving limited goals;
· local war—waged in a particular geographical region;
· nuclear war—a war where nuclear weapon is used;
· conventional war—war enlisting conventional (non-nuclear) weapons;
· civil war—war waged on the territory of a single state;
· asymmetric war—armed conflict where the involved states have unequal (different) military capabilities, for example between rebel groups and strong countries;
· hybrid war—conflict combining conventional and unconventional actions. Cyber-attacks, psychological and economic influence, disinformation campaigns, infiltration of the information environment, creating panic, financing deliberately created political subjects aiming to change the external political line of designated enemies and other actions for achieving political and strategic goals (Bogdanov, 2021).
At the end of the 20th C., in Africa and Eastern Europe began to develop a new type of organized violence, one of the aspects of the current globalized era (Kaldor, 2012). Unlike the common concept of war, the worldwide community coined the term “New Wars”, which was how military operations of a definitely political character began to be called which diluted the difference between internal and external wars.
New wars can be global and local, differing from both typical interstate wars and typical civil wars. What characterizes them is the blurring of boundaries between war as violence between states or organized political groups; organized crime, such as violence undertaken by privately organized groups for private purposes; and large-scale human rights violations, such as violence perpetrated by states or politically organized groups (Kaldor, 2012).
The revolution in military affairs is marked by the continuous development of strategies and technologies, until the moment when the focus to achieve the ultimate goal shifts from conventional military force to the use of a complex of other, modern measures and means.
The beginning of the 21st century only confirmed the validity of Clausewitz’s principle that “War is nothing more than the continuation of politics by other means” (Sabev, 2016). Conflicts have begun to arise more and more often as intra-state, and less often as inter-state, the resolution of which is expected to be primarily by alliances or coalitions, with hard-to-achieve consensus and compromise between them. The world community has accepted the conclusion that the basis of threats to international security is precisely the growing gap between developed and underdeveloped countries. The key security risks and threats have been established by international terrorism, crime and the proliferation of weapons of mass destruction—chemical, nuclear, biological, etc.
Societies in modern countries are faced with challenges that are becoming more and more important these days. These challenges bring to the fore the idea of states protecting and defending themselves from the destructive impact of external interference in the political and economic life of the target state.
3. Security Environment
Security environment in the world today is characterized by a continuing deepening and building-up of crises of different types. Threats have been observed of wars and regional conflicts, hybrid and cyber-attacks, terrorism, ecological and climate changes, migration, ever growing authoritarianism, deterioration in democratic processes in the world. The reasons come as a result of years of breaching of international law giving rise to processes of collapse, insecurity and tension. As a result of this, the armament race has grown thus relying on military power and not on diplomacy. The world order transformation has provoked ambitions, long-standing feuds, worries of the future and hectic efforts to ensure natural resources and technological edge as well as possibly better head start in a new world.
In the last decade, the world has started to become multipolar again. Evidence of this is the return to the world stage of contenders like Russia and China. The new geopolitical battle is being waged on the one hand to maintain dominance in the collapsing neoliberal and monopolistic world, and on the other hand, there is the aspiration of world powers to redistribute the main roles to establish a new world order.
Events of the recent past (2013) shook the international political scene with a massive wave of protests and military conflicts as well as those at the end of 2019 and the beginning of 2020. Here we could mention some of them in a fragmentary way: Euromaidan in Ukraine in 2013-2014, accompanied by a wave of demonstrations and civil disobedience, the military invasion in Crimea in 2014, the violent political turmoil in Latin America, which was accompanied by social struggles, demonstrations and political confrontation in 2019 and early 2020 (Venezuela, Ecuador, Bolivia). In Venezuela, an opposition leader proclaimed himself interim president of the country and received widespread international recognition and support. In Ecuador, the rise in fuel prices sparked massive anti-government protests that almost led to a coup d’état. In Bolivia, following the disputed results of a presidential election, we saw the classic pattern of colour revolutions”. These along with the war (special military operation) in Ukraine of 2022 have provoked some analysts to conclude that the security environment has been going through some major changes since the era of the Cold War. From a unipolar model, the world is moving to a new situation, with renewed competition between the great powers to impose a new international order. To achieve their goals, the parties concerned use all their available conventional and non-conventional resources, including various methods of warfare. These methods can be a combination of weapons, terrorism and criminal behavior, unregulated tactics—from the oldest known to humanity, to the latest technologies of warfare.
Military strategists view new warfare technologies and their threats as the most confounding features of the international security environment, as countering and dealing with them requires flexible, adaptable, and large-scale military forces. The undisputed advantage of unconventional methods over conventional ones is that one military opponent, regardless of their superiority over the other, has the opportunity to confront their stronger opponent for an indefinite period of time, generating the desired effects (Tsvetkov, 2008).
The methods used to wage this kind of war ignore all moral norms, using lies, libel, substitution of facts, falsification of history and so on (Pavlova, 2016). This war is a construct of intricately coordinated combined actions, bypassing the familiar boundaries of traditional threat characteristics and the use of organized violence (Denchev & Yordanova, 2020).
In order to hinder a possible prediction and future countermeasures of attacks, unconventional warfare initiators use various means of synchronizing means with a wide range of tools and techniques. It is for this reason that such a war may not be “seen” for a long time until its final phase is underway.
4. Saltation Diffusion Penetration (SDP)
In the scientific and expert literature examining the various aspects of military, political and economic operations, there is an extraordinary variety of definitions and terms for describing and naming such operations. The concepts of hybrid wars, colour revolutions, post-colour revolutions, soft power, intelligent power, etc., have played their role in the processes related to the explanation of non-typical situations of changing political regimes from certain political-economic and military environments (individual states, economic, political and military unions and alliances) in the so-called target states. Despite this terminological diversity, in the last few years there has been a need to fill the “gap” in understanding them.
The definitions so far have given the major lines of preparation, development and results of a possible change in political regimes in particular countries or other regional (political-economic or military) alliances. Each of these definitions has its specialized field of applicability, topologically complementing every other, overseeing and neglecting the cumulative activity of their actual realization. It should be noted that the definitions of non-conventional technologies, techniques and approaches for changing political regimes in certain countries have played their positive role not only in explaining the current economic and political-military relations in the world, but also they have laid the basis for searching and finding new, intelligent methods and technological solutions for total influence on any political-economic subjects, in the period of modern civilizational development of society (Crocker et al., 2007).
Unfortunately, however, each and every definitions from above, as well as their formally unified combination have ceased to be the “tool” in the hands of experts in the field of “intelligent” unconventional operations, researchers included—theoreticians in the field cannot adequately take into consideration the contemporary stratification of the forces capable of conducting experiments and making irreversible changes both in single countries and in separate regional (political-economic or military) structures.
The need for a new, meaningful definition of the above-mentioned specific, political-economic and technological solutions has emerged. The main dominant characteristic of this definition is that, on the one hand, it should contain both separate elements of the previous definitive explanations of the technologies for non-violent change of political regimes, and on the other hand, realize their synergistic shell, directed not specifically to the content of the individual technological solutions, but to the cumulative component of the objective functions of each previous content of the resulting socio-economic invention.
In this regard, we will take the liberty to give a new interpretation of these conflicts, which on the one hand will allow the effective analyses and forecasts of a military-political situation, and on the other hand will help in making strategic decisions.
This new measurement of specific political-economic and military relations both between countries and alliances we shall call Striking Diffuse Penetration (SDP) (Поразяващо Дифузно Проникване (ПДП)—in bulgarian language) or Diffusive Social Entropy (DSE) (Дифузна Обществена Ентропия (ДОЕ)—in bulgarian language). According to the in-depth analysis and our understanding of the essence of the definitions just given, this terminological construction does not have an unambiguous translation in English, therefore we propose that the focus of its mass use in English should be directed to the following linguistic construction—“Saltation Diffusion Penetration” (SDP). With a high degree of influence on the contemporary social, economic and political relations and processes, “Saltation Diffusion Penetration” is a “phenomenon” which is turning into an ever more dangerous tool for imposing and realization of socio-political and economic tension. The actual manifestations of SDP wreak havoc in the unity of a social system, its basic (democratic) state principles becoming a direct threat to a country’s security. Like the pattern of spreading a dangerous viral infection that affects cells in living organisms and causes them to become lifeless, the rapid and diffuse penetration of technologies and mechanisms used in modern political campaigns affects the entire living organism not only in a particular target country, but in modern society as a whole.
From the reflections made so far, the following brief definition can be formulated:
SDP is a conceptual frame, a mixture of smart approaches and technological solutions of pre-planned or incidental political and/or economic operations that cause destructive influence in contemporary social relations and lead to their detrimental degeneration or total destruction.
The SDP model undermines the integrity of a social system and its basic state-establishing principles, its successful implementation being a direct threat to the security of a selected or specified target state or other consolidated socio-political structure.
Undoubtedly, this concept needs not only a definition, but also a classification and typology, as well as the development of a methodological apparatus that would allow studying this phenomenon in the environment of its existence.
This conceptual framework implies the definition of its structural and functional characteristics by specifying the object, subject, purpose and tasks of its real application in current social practice.
5. Conclusion
As a result of the conducted research, a conclusion can be made that contemporary social systems naturally synthesize difference in complexity and range mechanisms and technologies for counteracting the attempts for their violently imposed change. In addition, with social systems, processes of global interaction are observed. Undoubtedly, the increase of the role of information in social processes, the global distribution of information infrastructures, the growth of information exchange and the global communication integration have connected humanity in a unified network. This space-time information integration has created many new opportunities for progress and prosperity (Nye, 2011). It encompasses all aspects of social activity—political, economic, social, cultural, military and ecological information, into a unified world information space becoming a system-forming factor for development (Denchev, 2019).
In the conditions of a changing security environment, a result of globalization and the rapid development of communication technologies, facilitating the implementation of new forms and methods of destabilizing the political regimes of target states, understanding this security environment is a matter of political responsibility. In this regard, every democratic state is in the obligatory position of seeking approaches and building strategies to counter the risks and threats to its stability and security.
To prevent all aspects of threats from interfering in the political life of a country, it is necessary to build a strategic security framework that defines national interests and policies for their realization in the conditions of a changing security environment. This framework should encompass a system of indicators, and its main objective should be to guarantee the freedom of national choice, not to impose authority.
As a summary of what has been said so far, we can make the reasonable conclusion that the threats and risks of overthrowing political regimes, which are of ever-changing intensity and nature, also require a constant search for ways to disclose and neutralize them.
Therefore, counteracting models for non-violent change of political regimes should be seen as an invariable part of the national security policy of each individual country. At the state level, the attitude to this problem should be realized, with a purposeful search for effective means to counteract the models for non-violent change of political regimes.
Naturally, dismantling political regimes is nothing new in the history of humanity (Manoylo, 2015). It was the ancient Greek philosopher Aristotle (Aristotel, 1995) who studied a similar analysis of existing states, their shortcomings and the reasons for coups d'état. But the relevance of this problem is still on the agenda nowadays. In the recent past, the well-known traditional tools combined different techniques for changing political regimes. On the other hand, international pressure, which formally does not allow the use of violence, as well as the 21st century irreversible technological advance, has allowed contemporary technologies to replace armed coups d’état with a new, more intelligent set of tools for achieving the designated political, economic and social goals.
The natural limitations in this research are related to the nature of modern military conflicts. The article does not set out to reveal all aspects of modern warfare. It limits itself solely to the etymological interpretation of concepts related to the search for and finding of the best means of expression that most accurately and adequately fit current social practice.
Acknowledgements
This work was supported by the NSP DS program, which has received funding from the Ministry of Education and Science of the Republic of Bulgaria under the grant agreement no. Д01-74/19.05.2022.