Looking for Putin’s “Little Green Men” Amidst the Forest
Book review by Joshua C. Huminski, NSI Visiting Fellow
Book Details:
Putin’s Playbook: Russia’s Secret Plan to Defeat America
Rebekah Koffler
Regnery Gateway
July 2021
Understanding one’s adversary and understanding how they perceive the world is critical to making smart policy. Looking at the world from an American perspective alone is insufficient, but also dangerous, subject to all of the logical fallacies inherent to human nature. How we see the world is not how anyone else sees the world — this is true of the English-speaking world, let alone Russia. Too often commentators fall into lazy tropes and clichés about Russia: President Vladimir Putin is a Dr. Evil-like spymaster; the Russian soul is predisposed to hardship and suffering; Russia is a monolithic authoritarian state ruled by Tsar Putin, et cetera.
Thankfully, though, there have been innumerable books that have dismantled these false notions, illuminating what is to most Americans an opaque and impenetrable country and regime. For example, Mark Galeotti’s “We Need to Talk About Putin”, Timothy Frye’s “Weak Strongman”, Catherine Belton’s “Putin’s People”, Fiona Hill’s “Mr. Putin”, Angela Stent’s “Putin’s World”, and so on and so forth.
What there has yet to be, however, is a single volume that looks at the totality of the Russia challenge — an accessible book that looks at the past and future of Russia’s military, security, and intelligence efforts against the United States. Rebekah Koffler’s “Putin’s Playbook” is, sadly, not that book, either.
Koffler seems well placed, at first glance, to be a great guide to this threat. A Soviet-born citizen herself, she changed careers later in life joining the Defense Intelligence Agency offering not only language skills, but also cultural insights that are invaluable to the Intelligence Community.
At the outset, she is right to say that America’s fixation on Russia’s involvement in the 2016 election and the subsequent investigation President Donald Trump requested did distract from the broader Russia threat in the public’s perception. If all Americans saw was the politics of the Mueller investigation, they could be forgiven for not understanding the totality of the strategic challenge Moscow presents.
She is also right to note that the United States, by and large, has a poor understanding of Russian interests from Moscow’s point of view. This leads to misguided efforts to “reset” the relationship and believe that the relationship can be governed by anything more than the raw politics of power and interests. Is there room for cooperation? Yes, to be sure, however limited it may be, and a healthy dose of realism is absolutely necessary.
Koffler does offer the seeds of a potentially informative book. Five of the chapters explore Russia’s space, cyber, military, intelligence, and active measures efforts — a novel structure for arguably the most pressing and immediate threats. Unfortunately for Koffler, but fortunately for readers, there are other experts that provide much deeper insights into the challenges she references — Thomas Rid’s “Active Measures” and Gordon Corera’s “Russians Among Us” to name just two, to say nothing of Michael Kofman’s extensive analysis of Russia’s military at CNA.
Further, Koffler’s personal biases and axes to grind overpower these sections and are so interwoven into the fabric of the book that it is hard to dissemble the valuable wheat from the chaff. She writes early on that her book has no “political agenda” yet there are lengthy sections warning against the creeping threat of socialism and its insidious influence in the United States. The most useful and interesting chapters come after polemical defenses of President Trump and General Michael Flynn, excoriations of the Intelligence Community for the alleged treatment of some of her colleagues, and the strange case of her own dismissal.
The argument that there is some “master plan” from which Putin is operating, orchestrating the entirety of the Russian state from his lair in the Kremlin is also misguided. As others have written, he’s as much as constrained by the Russian political system as he is its head. Russia has careerist bureaucrats like any country, all of whom are seeking to preserve their territory and budget, competing with other agencies and ministries, and wanting to please the boss in the process.
Is Russia running cyber operations against the United States? Of course. Is it waging an intelligence campaign, too? Absolutely. Is it preparing for limited and nuclear war with Washington? Certainly. Are these things about which we should be worried and prepare accordingly? Definitely. However, these are all things states do in the course of normal business, and less indicative of some master plan in a three-ring binder on a shelf behind Putin’s desk.
There is shelf space at one’s local bookshop for that accessible one-volume, non-partisan, book the explains and explores Russia’s strategic competition with the United States. Sadly, the foundation of Koffler’s book is undermined from the start, leaving that space still unfilled.
Joshua C. Huminski is Director of the Mike Rogers Center for Intelligence & Global Affairs at the Center for the Study of the Presidency & Congress, and he is a George Mason University National Security Institute Fellow. He can be found on Twitter @joshuachuminski.
