Modern war is primarily psychological and subversive

It is important here to mark the history of subversion in the war, it is noted that, until the Second World War, subversion was used as auxiliary conventional warfare, the which unfolds and concludes on the ground and by arms.

A radical change seems to have taken place over the last twenty years: a new conception of foreign war is slowly blurring the traditional conception, and in this new form of war, subversion has become the main weapon.

Indeed, the strategy of today's total war excludes the use of foreign armed intervention: instead of engaging troops on the borders of the nation to conquer, it will arouse, within this state and by the action of trained subversive agents, a process of decay of authority while small groups of partisans, presented as " emanating from the people themselves" and constituted "spontaneously", will initiate a new type of struggle on the spot with the declared intention to begin a "revolutionary liberation war" and with, in fact, the intention to accelerate the process of decay of the state in the targeted country, and then to seize power.

The classical conception made subversion and psychological warfare one of the war machines of the others during the time of hostilities, and they came to an end. States today, stuck with this archaic distinction, have failed to understand that psychological warfare shatters the classic distinction between war and peace.

It is an unconventional war, foreign to the norms of international law and known laws of war, it is a total war that disconcerts the jurists and pursues its objectives safe from their code.

As Mégret says: " The classic distinction between peace and war will, therefore, be defeated by psychological warfare (...), free from the barriers of time, place and convention, an immaterial force and, as a result, , elusive, susceptible of all incarnations and all metamorphoses. "
The aim of the war remains the same: territorial expansion and occupation of another country or installation in this country of an allied or submissive government ... but the means have changed.

Heir of von Clausewitz and Hitler, developed by Mao Tse-tung, modern war is psychological first, and the relationship with conventional weapons is reversed.

Today, it is the combat on the ground (the guerilla) which became the auxiliary of the subversion.

Roger Muchielli - Subversion (1976)


Source [emphasis in the original -translated by Google]