The very “rules of war” have changed. The role of non-military means of achieving political and strategic goals has grown, and, in many cases, they have exceeded the power of force of weapons in their effectiveness.
All this is supplemented by military means of a concealed character, including carrying out actions of informational conflict and the actions of special operations forces.
Collective intelligence, dynamics of the crowd in participatory systems such as social media, have immense power to support a collective action – such as foment a political change.
For two years ending in 2013, the FBI had a court-approved warrant to eavesdrop on a sophisticated Russian organized crime money-laundering network that operated out of unit 63A in Trump Tower in New York. The FBI investigation led to a federal grand jury indictment of more than 30 people, including one of the world’s most notorious Russian mafia bosses, Alimzhan Tokhtakhounov. He was the only target to slip away, and he remains a fugitive from American justice.
Interpol issued a red notice for Tokhtakhounov, he appeared near Donald Trump in the VIP section of the Miss Universe pageant in Moscow. Trump had sold the Russian rights for Miss Universe to a billionaire Russian shopping mall developer.
In 2014 the Russian Mafia organized a rash of thefts of credit card data from big-name retail chains like Home Depot and Target. Estimates of revenue enjoyed by the identity theft and data hostage taking by the group are near 10 billion dollars.
In 2015 Vladimir Putin began to both arrest and obtain the help of Russian hackers, who are granted a degree of impunity in return for their willingness from time to time to target the Kremlin’s foes. In 1994, Russian President Boris Yeltsin warned that his country was becoming “a superpower of crime.” Today, Vladimir Putin appears to be courting that very same status, but in a profoundly different way, regarding Russian-based organized crime abroad not as a threat or an embarrassment but a potential opportunity.
Donald Trump's business partners and associates earlier met with Russian crime bosses who benefited from the fall of the the Soviet Union and had billions to invest.
New York City real estate broker Dolly Lenz told USA TODAY she sold about 65 condos in Trump World at 845 U.N. Plaza in Manhattan to Russian investors, many of whom sought personal meetings with Trump for his business expertise.
“I had contacts in Moscow looking to invest in the United States,” Lenz said. “They all wanted to meet Donald. They became very friendly.” Many of those meetings happened in Trump's office at Trump Tower or at sales events, Lenz said.
In the beginning of 2016 Putin had welcomed the mafia and their cyber expertise in breaking into secure systems and, especially, social media manipulation of people's hearts and minds to influence the political status of various countries. So much so that the North Atlantic Treaty Organization investigated the use of so-called "fake news" to undermine government stability in European countries. Russian military was starting to take notice and began to incorporate the same tactics. In effect, the Russian Mafia became a part of the Federal Security Service of the Russian Federation (the former KGB).
Putin's hatred of Hillary Clinton is well known and his desire to stop her influence on American foreign policy was tantamount. In the summer of 2016 both the hacking of the DNC email servers and robotic multiplication of social media accounts as well as automatic spreading of fake news increased in earnest.
These facts are known and documented. It is now up to the United States Intelligence Services to determine whether the Donald Trump campaign worked with the Russians to facilitate any direct affect on the elections. Putin could have done it all on his own.