One Move Ahead — Diagnosing and Countering Russian Reflexive Control

ABSTRACT Russia’s dramatic return as a malign actor in geopolitics has generated a renewed focus on Russian ‘Reflexive Control Theory’, an information warfare technique in which one actor successfully causes another to voluntarily make decisions to its own detriment by providing carefully selected information. Reflexive control theory has its roots in Soviet-era game theory and is based to a large degree on the remnants of Marxist-Leninist dialectal approaches to cognition and decision-making. A ‘theory of moves’ decision-making model illustrates how Russia practices both ‘constructive’ and ‘destructive’ reflexive control in tandem to induce catastrophic decision-making by its targets. While reflexive control is a dangerous tool under the right conditions, it can be diagnosed and countered once its predicates and characteristics are fully understood.