PUTIN’S RESET

CONCLUSION
Moscow’s strength in waging international information war has less to do with
its own unique capabilities, and more with the West’s learned helplessness to innovate
new ways to prevent, deter, or retaliate. The Kremlin has modernized Soviet methods
with mainly American communications technologies and channels to create a nimble,
entertaining, interesting, and frustratingly persistent fire hose of falsehood designed
to undermine, divide, and demoralize its Western targets. Russia’s information war
easily exploits gaps in U.S. and allied worldview and messaging doctrine. For all the
domestic demographic, economic, industrial, territorial, and other problems Putin
faces, the Russian leader has freed the Kremlin from its Cold War-era bureaucratic
and legalistic inefficiency and slowness. The West has not done the same for itself.
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