Information Wars In The Baltic States

This edited volume, featuring accomplished scholars, is about the information wars in the Baltic states, a battle that pits Russia against the West with Estonia, Latvia and Lithuania as sites of contention for great power politics. Chapters address responses from titular populations, local Russian speakers, national governments, activists, journalists, and NATO, as well as the impact of Russian foreign policy on media.

Immediately following the end of World War I, amid the collapse of the German, Austro-Hungarian and Russian Empires, bitter fighting broke out in the Baltic region as Poland, Finland, Estonia, Latvia and Lithuania struggled for their independence, and Red and White Russian armies began their civil war. There were also German forces still active in what had been the northern end of Germany's Eastern Front. This book offers a concise but detailed introduction to this whole theatre of war, focusing on the Estonian, Latvian, Lithuanian and relevant German and Russian forces, plus Finnish, Danish and Swedish contingents. For each region there is a detailed map as well as meticulous orders-of-battle and insignia charts. Detailed for the first time in the English language, this fascinating book concisely tells the story of the birth of these Baltic nation states.

A “well-told” insider account of the State Department’s twenty-first-century struggle to defend America against malicious propaganda and disinformation (The Washington Post). Disinformation is nothing new. When Satan told Eve nothing would happen if she bit the apple, that was disinformation. But today, social media has made disinformation even more pervasive and pernicious. In a disturbing turn of events, authoritarian governments are increasingly using it to create their own false narratives, and democracies are proving not to be very good at fighting it. During the final three years of the Obama administration, Richard Stengel, former editor of Time, was an Under Secretary of State on the front lines of this new global information war—tasked with unpacking, disproving, and combating both ISIS’s messaging and Russian disinformation. Then, during the 2016 election, Stengel watched as Donald Trump used disinformation himself. In fact, Stengel quickly came to see how all three had used the same playbook: ISIS sought to make Islam great again; Putin tried to make Russia great again; and we know the rest. In Information Wars, Stengel moves through Russia and Ukraine, Saudi Arabia and Iraq, and introduces characters from Putin to Hillary Clinton, John Kerry, and Mohamed bin Salman, to show how disinformation is impacting our global society. He illustrates how ISIS terrorized the world using social media, and how the Russians launched a tsunami of disinformation around the annexation of Crimea—a scheme that would became a model for future endeavors. An urgent book for our times, now with a new preface from the author, Information Wars challenges us to combat this ever-growing threat to democracy. “[A] refreshingly frank account . . . revealing.” —Kirkus Reviews “This sobering book is indeed needed to help individuals better understand how information can be massaged to produce any sort of message desired.” —Library Journal

The book is about how information and media including news agencies, TV, cyber space etc. are used as tools of war. It describes how many powerful countries have used/misused information to destabilise and spread negative reports about some hostile nations and leaders. This is the most modern concept of war when conventional wars have taken a back seat in geopolitics.

Reviews of the First Edition: "The book raises important points and makes a strong case for more coordinated government and private sector efforts to address the information war problem effectively. Recommended"--Choice "A strong addition to current events and international issues collections, recommended"--Midwest Book Review "Extensive factual research...provides ample references in this detailed research...an eye opening expose that details the working of the Chinese government...fascinating"--Slashdot China's information war against the United States is clever technically, broadly applied and successful. The intelligence community in the U.S. has publicly stated this is a kind of war we do not know how to fight--yet it is the U.S. military that developed and expanded the doctrine of information war. In fact, the U.S. military is at a disadvantage because it is part of a democratic, decentralized system of government that separates the state from commercial business. China's political systems are more easily adapted to this form of warfare, as their recent land seizures in the South China Sea demonstrate. We call this annexation, when it is a new form of conquest.

A military historian and naval warfare expert delivers a revealing history of the Baltic Sea Campaigns and their significance throughout WWII. From the Battle of Westerplatte on the Polish coast in 1939 to the thousands of German refugees lost at sea in 1945, the Baltic witnessed continuous fighting throughout the Second World War. This chronicle of naval warfare in the region merges such major events as the Siege of Leningrad, the Soviet campaign against Sweden, the three wars in Finland, the Soviet liberation of the Baltic states, the German evacuation of two million people from the East, and the Soviet race westwards in 1945. Naval historian Poul Grooss explains the political and military backgrounds of the war in this theatre while also detailing the ships, radar, artillery, mines and aircraft employed there. He also offers fascinating insights into Swedish cooperation with Nazi Germany, the Germans’ use of the Baltic as a training ground for the Battle of the Atlantic, the secret weapons trials in the remote area of Peenemunde, and the Royal Air Force mining campaign that reduced the threat of German submarine technology. A major contribution to the naval history of this era, Naval War in the Baltic demonstrates the extent to which the Baltic Sea Campaigns shaped the Second World War

The Baltic Security Strategy Report provides an indepth security review of the Baltic countries of Estonia, Latvia and Lithuania. As highlighted in this important work, the Baltic States' various national and collective strategies to address recurring regional threats since achieving statehood over a hundred years ago present notable case studies useful to contemporary policymakers and defense planners. Scholars Olevs Nikers and Otto Tabuns based this report on a series of discussions and workshops involving key European and American experts and stakeholders engaged in Baltic regional security matters. The participating experts assessed current challenges pertaining to defense and deterrence, societal security, economic security and cyber security. In addition to exploring the security considerations of each of the three Baltic States, the workshop discussions and resulting papers collected in this report specifically examine avenues of subregional cooperation that may prove more potent than individual national effort in certain fields. Consequently, the authors provide a detailed list of recommendations on how to proceed with a more coherent, goaloriented, and efficient regional cooperation strategy that serves to buttress the security of each of the Baltic States and the Transatlantic community more broadly. The report is a rich guide to issues and opportunities of Baltic intraregional security, and a valuable resource for policymakers, advisors, scholars and defensesector professionals on both sides of the Atlantic.