Class 13. Reflexive Control

The Russian art of getting adversaries to reach the decisions they want...without them even realizing it.

Last week I wrote about Trump’s uncanny ability to get the media running in circles. How does he do it? Well, for all his flaws and shortcomings, Trump is a media savant — he understands how to hijack news coverage, influence, narratives, and basically suck all of the air(time) out of the room. Trump’s talent in this regard is a great example of a Russian information warfare tactic called reflexive control. Now, I suspect that Trump has never heard of reflexive control, and has no idea that he’s modeling it, but his ability to get exactly the reaction he wants from the media illustrates some of the basic tenets of the principle (which I will illustrate below). Putin would be proud.

So what is reflexive control and how does it work? Reflexive control is basically game theory, with a Russian twist. It originated in the 1960s with mathematician Dr. Vladimir Lefebvre, who was studying military actions. Lefebvre believed that by creating a model of the enemy’s decision making process, the controlling entity could drop disinformation at a strategic point into the decision tree, leading the recipient to arrive at a desired outcome, all on their own. The Handbook of Russian Information Warfare, by the NATO Defense Institute, describes it as follows:

Control of an opponent’s decision is achieved by means of providing him with the grounds by which he is able logically to derive his own decision, but one that is predetermined by the other side.

The term “reflex” refers to the degree of awareness of how your opponent operates. (I was surprised in learning this, because for some reason in my mind I thought it referred to the “reflex,” or reaction, of the opponent.) This article from the Journal of Slavic Military Studies, which goes into the theory in a lot of detail, notes that reflex increases by degrees, depending on how well one side is able to “imitate the other side’s thoughts or predict its behavior”:

If two sides in a serious conflict—A and B—have opposing goals, one will seek to destroy the other’s goals. Accordingly, if side A acts independently of the behavior of side B, then his degree of reflex relative to side B is equal to zero (0). On the other hand, if side A makes assumptions about side B’s behavior (that is, he models side B) based on the thesis that side B is not taking side A’s behavior into account, then side A’s degree of reflex is one (1). If side B also has a first degree reflex, and side A takes this fact into account, then side A’s reflex is two (2), and so on.

If you aren’t a math dork and your eyes glazed over reading that paragraph (or looking at the diagram), a more simplified and less confusing way to understand reflexive control is that it’s essentially reverse-engineering how an adversary might arrive at a decision:

1. Begin with the desired outcome

2. Determine necessary decisions opponents must take to reach the outcome

3. Supply the assumptions your opponent needs to reach those decisions

4. Let them believe it’s their own idea

Let’s see how this works in practice, with a few examples:

Russia’s Hack and Dump of Podesta Emails in 2016

October 7, 2016. A little over one month from Election Day. Three major things happened that day, one of which could have tanked Trump’s campaign…until Russia came through for him.

First, at 3:30 p.m., the Department of Homeland Security and the Director of National Intelligence issued a press release officially attributing the hack of the Democratic National Committee server to Russia. Seems like big news, right?

4:00 p.m. Washington Post reporter David Fahrenthold reports that Trump was captured on a hot mic during while doing an interview with Access Hollywood.

4:30 p.m. Wikileaks — which the Senate Intelligence Committee later found was working in concert with Russian intelligence — begins releasing emails hacked from John Podesta’s email account, revealing internal conflict at the DNC.

Russia understood a key feature of the American psyche. We love political drama. It also knew that the media’s rush to “break” stories and provide 24/7 rolling coverage meant that it wouldn’t be able to resist poring through the Podesta emails and focusing on the internal dissension between the Bernie and Hillary camps. As Vanity Fair put it:

The Podesta email dump on October 7, 2016, didn’t quite erase the Access Hollywood story; even after Trump dismissed the misogynistic remarks as ‘locker room talk’ in a scripted apology, his sexism remained a major theme in the final weeks of the race. But the release of the emails also helped reinforce the race’s competing narrative, the one pushed by Trumpworld, that Clinton was corrupt and untrustworthy—a message that would help boost Trump to an unlikely victory a month later.

The fact that the emails were real only made the operation more effective — and since the Podesta hack had not yet been attributed to Russia, the media offered no framing for the story. Military journalist Jack Murphy notes that “[t]he information leaked was true and accurate, the best type of propaganda, but the actor behind the leaks remained obscured. The leaking of stolen documents to Americans, knowing the public would be outraged with the Democratic party, is how the Russians achieved reflexive control over a portion of America’s cognitive process.”

The Britney Griner Exchange

Another thing Russia understands about American politics is that partisan loyalties outweigh unity on foreign policy issues, particularly when “culture war” issues are triggered. It’s no surprise then, that when looking at two of its political prisoners, Britney Griner and Paul Whelan, it knew it had an opportunity. Both are American and Griner is a two-time basketball Olympian and WNBA star. But from Russia’s vantage point, Griner is black, female, lesbian, and was arrested for possessing marijuana. Whalen is white, male, a Marine, and accused of being a spy. These were exploitable characteristics, given the partisan reactivity along each of these differences.

Giving President Biden a choice of releasing only Griner, and not Whelan, was an example of reflexive control. Why? For one thing, Putin understood that Biden would not forgo the opportunity to bring home one American over bringing home zero, which was the choice he was given. He also understood that in doing so, Republicans would automatically and falsely frame this as a deliberate choice by Biden to overlook Whelan — because how could they resist accusing Biden of being “woke” in a prisoner exchange. Russian Media Monitor Julia Davis showcased the clip where Russia planted this narrative which, coincidentally, was quickly echoed by right-wing media:

Right on cue, the decision generated division along partisan lines, and Republicans framed Biden’s willingness to negotiate Griner’s release as a deliberate choice to overlook Whelan. I mean, it was too easy.

If It’s So Easy, Why Don’t We Do It?

This seems like something that the U.S. could be good at too, right? Yeah not really. Well, I take that back: We’re getting better (more below), but this is not really our mode of either thinking or operating, for a number of reasons.

First, give our comparative advantage technologically, economically, and militarily, we value methods that can deliver quick, visible results over invisible reactions. Economic sanctions, diplomatic sanctions, military actions…these are all in our comfort zone. As Murphy observes, “Americans prefer high technology shock-and-awe strategies” and its “attempts at information operations and unconventional operations is quite infantile and underdeveloped.” In other words, we prefer hard power checkers to psychological chess.

Second, reflexive control takes a lot of time. The key to both of the examples above is a keen understanding of the psychological and behavioral makeup of the adversary. In particular, it requires deconstructing your adversary’s system of logical reasoning, and factoring in socio-cultural factors. America has traditionally been very bad at this type of nuanced understanding of other societies: Yale Law School Professor Amy Chua’s book, Political Tribes, offers several examples of how our foreign policy went awry because we were not attuned to these precise factors in countries like Vietnam, Venezuela, and Iraq.

Finally, to the extent we do use similar techniques, they are usually limited to the military context. The concept of MILDEC (military deception), has an approach that closely resembles reflexive control. The difference is that in this context deception is used as a tactic to achieve a larger military objective, rather than a whole-of-government strategy that spans foreign policy, economic, and military objectives. Outside of the military, the closest analog we have to reflexive control is the concept of perception management (which was the term used in the Bureau for propaganda and disinformation operations generally) — but as Murphy points out, reflexive control isn’t just about perception, it’s about reactions.

Having said all of that, we are getting slightly better, at least when it comes to being proactive in identifying and countering reflexive control efforts. Consider, for example, the actions underlying the “Twitter files.” Republicans are upset that Twitter practiced a tabletop exercise with the FBI using a hypothetical involving Hunter Biden to prepare for possible foreign interference in the 2020 election, and that Twitter conferred with the Bureau when the New York Post story about “Hunter Biden’s laptop” surfaced. Their accusation is that Twitter and the FBI were colluding to suppress damaging information that would have affected Joe Biden. However, as I wrote in my Substack post breaking down the so-called “scandal”:

This overarching narrative ignores three key factors. First, the backdrop of the FBI’s communications with social media platforms in 2020 was to avoid a repeat of Russia’s successful hack and dump of DNC emails in 2016 — an operation involving emails that, while authentic, were released by a foreign adversary in an effort to hijack the news cycle and distract from damaging information about Donald Trump. Second, the source of the laptop’s contents to the New York Post, Rudy Giuliani, was under an active counterintelligence investigation as a potential target of Russian intelligence at the time. Finally, it was reported in early 2020 that Burisma emails had been hacked by Russia, making a repeat of 2016 using hacked emails involving Hunter Biden a predictable hypothetical to use for the tabletop exercise.

Further, Republicans’ continued refrain that the Hunter Biden Laptop emails are “real,” and therefore any skepticism about them was unwarranted, is a red herring. That doesn’t negate the potential for them to be used as an instrument of reflexive control; on the contrary, it could make such an operation more effective. After all, the Podesta emails were “real,” too. Murphy’s piece quotes the originator of reflexive control observing this fact:

‘In order to predetermine an adversary’s decision (or that of an ally), sometimes it is necessary to send him true information,’ wrote Dr. Vladimir Lefebvre in a 1984 monograph. ‘Thus, reflexive control means conveying to a partner or an opponent specially prepared information to incline him to voluntarily make the predetermined decision.’

Basically, there was an effort made by social media platforms and the intelligence community in advance of the 2020 election to try and reduce Russia’s degree of reflex by anticipating how it might try to exploit our information space. After the story broke, Twitter was attempting to slow down media reactivity by putting brakes on amplification of the Post story until it could verify that this wasn’t another attempt by Russia to hijack the news cycle in order to help their favorite candidate. In other words, they were trying to change a key assumption that Russia might make about how our media operates, and lower its reflexive control over our election narratives.

Of course, an overlooked factor is that this time around we had domestic actors who were also counting on that media reactivity. In the Hunter Biden Laptop “scandal,” the predetermined decision was for the news cycle to cover the substance of Hunter Biden’s newly-revealed emails, i.e., Hunter’s escapades and business dealings. Instead, the story became about the emails’ provenance. Republicans were frustrated that the story didn’t have the impact they hoped it would — which is why I concluded that the “Twitter files” is really a temper tantrum about the fact that media didn’t react to and frame the story as they had hoped it would.

---

Which brings us back to Trump, and how and why he is a master of reflexive control with the media. Consider the media circus a couple of weeks ago when Trump posted on his social media platform that his arrest was imminent. When the indictment did not come down as Trump had claimed, anchors and commentators framed the story as Manhattan D.A. Alvin Bragg getting “cold feet” or to surmise that something had gone wrong with the grand jury. We now know that wasn’t the case, but the story dominated the news cycle for days, and still colors how the indictment is viewed now. It gives Trump a bit of a leg up in the court of public opinion, if not the court of law. How did he do it?

Let’s follow the four step technique:

1. Desired outcome: 24/7 coverage of his desired narrative (undermine Bragg)

2. Decisions that need be made by media: Decide that something is newsworthy and will increase ratings

3. Assumptions needed to make these decisions: Anything Trump says is newsworthy, and drives ratings

4. Will the media reach this decision voluntarily: Yes

Voila! Using the media’s decision tree and operating assumptions, Trump can strategically drop his chosen narrative at moments which are most advantageous for him (such as times when there is information asymmetry) and get disproportionate coverage. In short, Trump will always get the outcome he desires in the information space until we increase our own degree of reflex relative to him.

Audio Here:

Discussion Questions:

1. The concept of reflexive control has been around for a long time…and yet it is still a relatively unfamiliar concept in the U.S., including in government policy. Why do you think that is?

2. How have reflexive control techniques been adopted by domestic actors to achieve predetermined outcomes in our own political sphere?

3. What is the best way to counter reflexive control, particularly in the information space?