The Ratchet: How Non-Linear Warfare Turns Trauma Into Infrastructure

Cycles of shock, adaptation, and exploitation rewrite our tolerance.

Photo by Tim Mossholder on Unsplash

A War That Never Quite Starts or Ends

On March 12, 2014, as unmarked Russian soldiers tightened their grip on Crimea, Vladislav Surkov published a short story in the glossy Russian magazine Russky Pioneer. Writing under his pseudonym Natan Dubovitsky, the longtime Kremlin political operator imagined a future conflict he called “the first non-linear war,” where “four coalitions collided” and “it wasn’t two against two, or three against one. It was all against all.” Entire towns and generations changed sides mid-battle; alliances were fluid, motives opaque.

The story appeared on March 12, two weeks after Russian forces seized Crimean airports and surrounded Ukrainian bases, and as soldiers without insignia were replacing local television channels with Russian programming across the peninsula. No war was ever declared. Surkov’s narrator calls the fighting “part of a process,” but not necessarily its most important part.

Moscow thinks about conflict in much the same way.

Since then, journalists and filmmakers (myself included) have treated “non-linear war” as a skeleton key to contemporary Russian strategy. Peter Pomerantsev read Surkov’s fiction alongside his real-world media work, describing a system in which “nothing is true and everything is possible.” Adam Curtis went further in his 2016 BBC film HyperNormalisation, arguing that Surkov’s approach focuses less on battlefield victory than on producing “a constant state of destabilized perception” in which people can be managed because they can no longer tell what is real.

Not every Russia specialist accepts the story as a literal doctrinal blueprint; Surkov was also playing with avant-garde literary and artistic traditions. As a description of how power can operate, though, the story is brutally clear.

Non-linear war breaks things and redraws borders; it does something else, too. It reshapes what entire societies come to regard as ordinary. Shock follows shock. Information floods every channel. People adapt because they have no choice, and their adaptation becomes raw material for the next round of operations. That cycle functions like a ratchet. Each turn makes the next one easier.

Once the ratchet clicks forward, it becomes difficult to push back.

Phase One: Blurred Thresholds

Well before Surkov put the phrase “non-linear war” into print, Russian officers were questioning the old boundary between war and peace. In a 2013 article in the journal Military-Industrial Courier, General Valery Gerasimov, Russia’s chief of the general staff, wrote that “the very ‘rules of war’ have changed” and that non-military means of achieving political and strategic goals had in many cases “exceeded the power of force of weapons” in their impact. He pointed to social media, information campaigns, covert support to opposition forces, and economic pressure as tools that could soften a target state long before tanks crossed any border. An English translation of the article was later published in Military Review.

Western commentators soon labeled this apparent synthesis the “Gerasimov Doctrine.” Mark Galeotti, the analyst who coined that phrase in 2014, has since written in Foreign Policy for what he says he launched “incautiously and unintentionally,” arguing there is no single doctrine so much as a set of evolving practices and improvisations. The name stuck anyway because it partly captured a change that extended beyond Russia: the rise of conflict fought through a dense mix of military, informational, economic, and legal tools that rarely triggers formal declarations of war.

No clean line separates war from peace in this environment.

Disinformation campaigns muddy public debate. Cyber operations shut down services. Economic pressure spikes prices or wipes out savings. Sporadic kinetic attacks kill and injure far from any defined front. Christopher Paul and Miriam Matthews, in a 2016 RAND Corporation report, called the Russian approach a “firehose of falsehood.” The output is high-volume, multichannel, repetitive, and unconcerned with internal consistency. The goal isn’t to get anyone to believe a particular story. Flood the zone with enough contradictory versions and people stop trying to sort them out.

NATO’s Allied Command Transformation has formalized part of this shift under the label “cognitive warfare.” In its working definition, cognitive warfare consists of activities coordinated with other “instruments of power” in order to influence, protect, or disrupt cognition at the level of individuals, groups, or entire populations. The focus lies less on particular opinions than on the processes people use to form them. A 2024 analysis of the NATO concept published in Frontiers in Political Science notes that cognitive attacks are conceptualized to “hinder decision-making processes, erode national or institutional unity, sow societal division, exploit identities and narratives, and undermine the resolve to engage in conflict.”

When those cognitive processes are overloaded, manipulated, or numbed, the rest of the playbook becomes easier to run.

Phase Two: Layered Shock and Cognitive Overload

Once that blurred threshold is in place, the next move is to subject the population to a mixture of physical and psychological shocks, often far from any traditional front. Those shocks travel through media, markets, and digital infrastructure as readily as artillery barrages.

Photo by Marek Studzinski on Unsplash

Ukraine, now entering its fourth year under full-scale Russian attack, offers an unusually well-documented example. A WHO-supported health needs assessment conducted in October 2024 estimated that 68 percent of Ukrainians report a decline in overall health compared to the pre-war period. Mental health concerns are the most prevalent issue, affecting 46 percent of the population, followed by mental health disorders at 41 percent and neurological conditions at 39 percent. Among combat-exposed soldiers in clinical settings, one recent study reported PTSD in 45.9 percent of patients and Complex PTSD in 21.5 percent.

The war’s physical toll runs alongside this psychological damage. CARE International has documented how civilian casualties rose sharply again in 2025 after a brief plateau, with 2,514 people killed and 12,142 injured in that year alone, a 31 percent increase in deaths compared to 2024. Many of those harmed were struck far from any trench or fortified line, as cruise missiles and drones hit apartment blocks, electricity infrastructure, and medical facilities.

At the same time, Russian and pro-Russian information operations batter domestic and international publics with competing narratives about who is responsible for particular atrocities, whether Ukraine is a “Nazi” state, and whether Western support is prolonging the fighting. Research on the firehose model notes that audiences exposed to such campaigns are more likely to remember the messages and less likely to engage in fact-checking, even when warned about disinformation in advance.

A 2025 report by the British Institute for Security Innovation on AI-driven information warfare describes the end state of this process as “epistemic learned helplessness”: a condition in which people stop trying to evaluate claims because the cognitive cost of constant vigilance has become intolerable. Missile strikes, blackouts, deepfake videos, currency shocks: each of those on its own is destabilizing.

Taken together, and repeated over time, they create a background of crisis.

Phase Three: Defensive Normalization

As an Iraq veteran, I am intimately aware with the messy fact that human beings cannot live indefinitely at full alert. When faced with chronic emergency, they will find ways to normalize it as a type of coping mechanism.

War speeds this up and makes it uglier.

Alexei Yurchak called this “hypernormalization.” In his 2005 book Everything Was Forever, Until It Was No More, he described how late-Soviet citizens knew the official story was a lie, but collectively maintained it because nothing else seemed workable. Daily life carried on inside a shared fiction that nobody believed and nobody could replace. Curtis took Yurchak’s framework and ran with it in his 2016 documentary. His argument was that Western publics had arrived at their own version of the same problem. People could see that politics and media were stage-managed. They kept participating anyway, because no alternative script was on offer.

Ukrainians near the front describe sleeping in their clothes so they can grab their children and run to shelters at any hour. Workers plan commutes around likely missile timings. People say they have gotten used to the sound of drones overhead and streets without lights. CARE found that over 70 percent of adults in frontline regions experience depression or severe anxiety, but many frame their condition as just “being tired” or “living normally in war.”

The research on media consumption and collective trauma tells a related story. A three-year longitudinal study published in Science Advances by Thompson, Jones, Holman, and Silver found that people who consumed heavy media coverage of the Boston Marathon bombings experienced more distress and consumed more media after the Pulse nightclub massacre, feeding a cycle that compounded with each new event. Susan Moeller documented the same pattern at a broader scale in her 1999 book Compassion Fatigue: once a conflict becomes a permanent fixture of the news cycle, audiences stop absorbing its daily horrors, even as the killing continues. Over time, the outrage fades into background noise.

From a non-linear operator’s perspective, that shift from alarm to numbness isn’t a side effect or collateral damage, it’s usable ground.

A win, if you will.

Phase Four: Memory, Narrative, and the New Normal

Normalization isn’t a phenomenon limited to individual minds. It is structured by institutions, stories, and the law.

Dr. Edna Lomsky-Feder interviewed Israeli soldiers from different wars about how they remembered combat. What she found was that societies actively rework traumatic memories through official ceremonies, films, school curricula, and family stories, gradually redefining what counts as “normal” in wartime. She calls this the “normalization of war.” Heroic, critical, and resilience narratives compete with one another, but the net effect is domestication: intense war experiences get folded into personal biography as expected, even routine.

A similar logic runs through Russian political life. A study of collective trauma and populism in Russia and Georgia, presented by Jana Javakhishvili and published by the Vilnius Institute for Policy Analysis, argues that unprocessed historical trauma, from Stalinist terror to the collapse of the Soviet Union, has been repurposed by elites into a sense of permanent grievance and siege. The Putin system, in this account, built its legitimacy on a “substitutive trauma”: the loss of empire. That loss is continually rehearsed in media and politics, producing a public encouraged to experience present events as proof that enemies are everywhere and that only a strong leader can keep chaos at bay.

On the receiving end of non-linear campaigns, something different but related unfolds. Therapists and researchers who have written about the “weaponization of collective trauma” described patients who experienced political news as a form of re-traumatization. Constant exposure to outrages and scandals, amplified by algorithmic feeds, keeps the amygdala on high alert. Those affected report difficulty distinguishing real from perceived threats, a collapse of nuance into black-and-white thinking, and “trauma-bonding” within political tribes that makes cross-cutting conversation nearly impossible.

Pomerantsev’s account of Russia in Nothing Is True and Everything Is Possible feels like an extreme version of this condition: a country where reality TV, state propaganda, and organized crime blur into one spectacle, and “surreal” events are the daily rule and not exceptions. Under non-linear pressure, target societies can drift toward a similar terrain without consciously copying that model because the mechanisms producing it— namely, constant crisis, unresolved trauma, and saturated media— are highly familiar.

Phase Five: Institutions Adapt, Then Entrench

Once crisis becomes routine, institutions change shape to cope with it. Those changes can easily harden into a new status quo.

On the humanitarian and medical side, Ukraine now has a rapidly expanding mental health and rehabilitation sector. The World Health Organization and national partners warn that demand for trauma care, psychosocial support, and physical rehabilitation is rising faster than services can be built out, and that those needs will persist for decades after the fighting stops. Physicians for Human Rights and its partners have documented at least 2,591 attacks on Ukraine’s health care system since the start of the full-scale invasion, with 359 health workers killed and 379 injured.

In parallel, Ukraine’s Ministry of Veterans Affairs and civil society organizations are racing to design long-term programs for reintegration, employment, and family support for hundreds of thousands of current and former combatants.

Photo by Žilvinas Ka on Unsplash

Security institutions have their own transformation under way.

States targeted by non-linear campaigns are now pouring resources into counter-disinformation units, cyber defense agencies, and strategic communications teams. NATO’s cognitive warfare concept papers read partly as a warning and partly as a bureaucratic blueprint: they call for education programs to build “cognitive resilience,” technical systems to detect and flag manipulative content, and coordination mechanisms that treat the information space as a theater of operations in its own right. A senior NATO official confirmed in October 2025 that “hybrid warfare has begun” and that the alliance was investing heavily in preparing for it.

These adaptations are essential for survival in the short and medium term. They also risk baking the emergency into law and policy. Exceptional powers become permanent fixtures. Surveillance measures introduced to counter one wave of disinformation or terror attacks stay in place for the next. Budget lines and career paths depend on the persistence of threat. Once a state apparatus has reorganized itself around managing non-linear conflict, officials have strong incentives to see that conflict everywhere.

Russian doctrine of reflexive control sits upstream of this institutional picture. The basic idea, developed by Soviet mathematician Vladimir Lefebvre in the 1960s and refined since, is to influence an adversary’s choices by shaping its perception of reality so that it “voluntarily” selects the option most favorable to Moscow. Rather than telling an enemy what to do, the operator feeds it information that leads its own decision-making processes to the desired conclusion. Finnish analyst Antti Vasara describes multi-channel campaigns that aim at the public as well as the command-and-control systems of target states in a bid to force them to misread situations and misallocate resources.

A population and a bureaucracy already conditioned to see permanent crisis are easier to steer with these techniques. When everything looks like an attack, officials can be nudged toward overreaction or paralysis with relatively small pushes.

Phase Six: The Ratchet Turns

Once blurred thresholds, layered shocks, defensive normalization, social reconstruction, and institutional adaptation are in place, the environment itself becomes a weapon. Each new operation lands on a society that has already been pushed closer to the edge.

The Thompson et al. study in Science Advances found that people who consumed more media coverage of one collective trauma experienced more stress and fear about the next, creating a feedback loop of anxiety and information-seeking that compounded with each event. King’s College London’s multi-country Impact of Trauma Survey, part of the XCEPT research programme, is probing a related dynamic in Iraq, Lebanon, and South Sudan: in some settings, those who experience severe conflict trauma are more likely to engage in violence themselves, contributing to a “cycle of violence” that spans generations.

In non-linear conflict, each new missile barrage, cyber intrusion, or disinformation wave is calibrated against the current baseline. It doesn’t need to exceed the last one in magnitude. It simply has to differ enough to break through whatever people have managed to normalize. A strike on pediatric wards after months of nighttime attacks on power stations; a deepfake of a leader “surrendering” after months of more conventional propaganda; a banking panic after a year of physical bombardment.

Each re-teaches the lesson that nothing is stable.

Gerasimov’s 2013 article is often quoted for a line about how a “perfectly thriving state” can, in a matter of days or months, be turned into “an arena of fierce armed conflict” and “sink into a web of chaos, humanitarian catastrophe, and civil war.” Read narrowly, that sentence describes rapid regime change. Read in light of a decade of Russian practice, it reads more like a statement of long-term intent to keep adversary societies hovering on the edge of breakdown.

Never quite collapsing, and never quite recovering.

In Ukraine, that edge is visible in both statistics and daily life. Civilian casualties rose by roughly a third in 2025 despite improved air defenses. According to the WHO, attacks on healthcare facilities increased by nearly 20 percent that year, further straining an already overloaded system. Among respondents in frontline areas, 59 percent reported their health as poor or very poor in a December 2025 assessment. Clinicians warn that untreated PTSD and depression will shape politics, crime, and social cohesion for years after any ceasefire.

This is what it looks like when trauma functions as infrastructure.

Strategic Implications

Policy responses tend to focus on the most visible elements of non-linear war: sanctions, arms deliveries, cyber defense, high-profile fact-checking of viral lies. Those are necessary, but they address only pieces of the cycle.

The deeper problem is, as I’ve alluded, both epistemic and psychological.

Once a population has been pushed toward learned helplessness and people feel it no longer matters what is true, traditional tools of democratic politics lose much of their force. A press conference correcting a false claim lands differently on an audience that has essentially given up on verification. A human rights report documenting atrocities carries far less impact if readers have spent years cycling between outrage and numbness.

That RAND study on the firehose of falsehood concludes that after-the-fact debunking is rarely effective. It recommends preemptive inoculation through warning audiences about manipulative techniques before they encounter them, saturating the same channels with accurate information, and, where possible, working to curb the reach of the most aggressive propagandists— defensive maneuvers they work hard to convince populations are a threat to everyone’s free speech. NATO concept papers on cognitive warfare argue for building “cognitive resilience” through education, media literacy, and institutional reforms that improve transparency and trust.

Those moves are sound as far as they go, but still tend to treat trauma and normalization as side effects rather than engineered outcomes. A strategy that takes the ratchet seriously needs to work on several fronts at once:

• Shorten exposure by hardening infrastructure and improving defenses so populations spend less time under active attack.

• Expand care by treating mental health and social repair as central elements of security policy (not afterthoughts!)

• Constrain emergency powers with clear sunsets and oversight to prevent a crisis mindset from hardening into permanent law.

• Support alternative narratives that acknowledge trauma without turning it into a tool of mobilization or denial.

This isn’t about “winning the information war” in some narrow sense; it’s more a question of whether democracies can sustain the conditions (e.g. trust, shared reality, a sense of future) that make politics something other than an exercise in managing a frightened and exhausted public.

In Surkov’s story “Without Sky,” the narrator suffers a brain injury that leaves him unable to perceive depth. He can see only two dimensions, only “yes” and “no,” only black and white. The loss of dimensionality is his private tragedy which doubles as metaphor for something larger. Non-linear warfare aims at flattening a society’s perception in just this way, until people lose the ability to imagine that life could be structured on any terms other than permanent crisis.

Once that perception takes hold, the ratchet doesn’t unwind itself.

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