The Weaponisation of Everything

A Field Guide to the New Way of War

By: Mark Galeotti

Narrated by: Mark Galeotti

Length: 6 hrs and 48 mins

Publisher's summary

An engaging guide to the various ways in which war is now waged - and how to adapt to this new reality.

Hybrid war, grey-zone warfare, unrestricted war: Today, traditional conflict - fought with guns, bombs, and drones - has become too expensive to wage, too unpopular at home, and too difficult to manage. In an age when America threatens Europe with sanctions, and when China spends billions buying influence abroad, the world is heading for a new era of permanent low-level conflict, often unnoticed, undeclared, and unending.

Transnational crime expert Mark Galeotti provides a comprehensive and groundbreaking survey of the new way of war. Ranging across the globe, Galeotti shows how today’s conflicts are fought with everything from disinformation and espionage to crime and subversion, leading to instability within countries and a legitimacy crisis across the globe. But rather than suggest that we hope for a return to a bygone era of “stable” warfare, Galeotti details ways of surviving, adapting, and taking advantage of the opportunities presented by this new reality.

©2022 Mark Galeotti (P)2022 Audible, Inc.

The book you need to read right now

Mark Galeotti's knowledge of the topic in general and his specific expertise on modern Russian history makes this the book you need to truly grasp the export controls and sanctions-focused actions in today's headlines. It's an important, easily accessible, and entertaining listen.

important insight

This book is packed with important insights about trends in government, politics, and war. Many things going on in the world are scary and I appreciated the tone of realism but also optimism in some areas. I hope Prof Galeotti will consider the issue of development banking for his next work. What do they say they are doing? What are they actually doing?

Clear, concise, and thought provoking

Mark Galiotti’s ‘The Weaponisation of Everything’ clearly show that while new and shiny war technology may make our current times seem more dangerous than ever before, behind the drama and the hype it is truly just business (as usual) and there is nothing new under the sun.

War, be it kinetic (physical) or non-kinetic (psychological, economic, cyber-anything, espionage, culture) has been with us forever.

This book details how the binary world of right or left, right or wrong, red or blue, black hats or white hats, the just or the unjust, friend or foe, is a world that we believe in because it makes things easier for us to understand and deal with, but is a world that does not really exist in such simple terms.

The author is a perfect narrator of his own work, adding humor, pauses, and emphasis in all the right places.

This work is so packed with details, and suggestions for further reading, that it will require multiple visits. Fresh from a first listen, I am immediately starting again. Highly recommended.

A brief but excellent primer

Galeotti, an expert on Russia, has become one of my favorite writers on history and geopolitics. His books are short, clearly written, and quickly bring the reader up to speed on otherwise complex topics…and in this work he ends each chapter with recommendations for further reading along with brief reviews of the books.

Are his works primers? Yes…but very good ones that respect the Intelligence of the reader.

Globalism 101

There are men out there who have fought on foreign soil, who have come to terms with the disparity and disconnect between them and their leaders - and the sheepish, spoiled, holier than thou population on who’s behalf they are said to have fought - who now work with their hands, straining their muscles to build on all they have learned in combat, and who sit around campfires, laughing about the good times and wondering if they were worth it in the end.

Sometimes these men affirm all they’ve done and seen. After all, glory and honor are very hard to come by these days. Other times, though, they are forced to wonder if their plaudits came at too great a cost - not the deaths of their brothers per se, but the benefit of those deaths to men unworthy of the price paid.

Mark Galeotti’s The Weaponization of Everything will confirm each and every one of these men’s worst fears and basest assumptions. For it is a globalist’s wet dream of a world rapidly coming to fruition in which the weak, cowardly, morally superior consumerist has the world remade in her/their image by lawyers, bureaucrats, and social media influencers - all of whom get to flatter themselves by being warriors in a permanent, bloodless war fought with proxies, drones, and mercenaries - if there is anyone on Earth archaic enough to resist the globalists’ urban, technological utopia - but more likely, if all goes according to plan, by lawyers wielding lawsuits and insurance policy cancellations, bureaucrats imposing sanctions, and the aforementioned cultural scions in Hollywood, Silicon Valley, and wherever social media posts can be made browbeating each and all into moralistic submission.

In the end the book is super informative and astoundingly arrogant; and quite frankly, the best justification I’ve seen for the prevailing attitude amongst recent veterans, that to serve this regime and this agenda is tantamount to treason.

Galeotti’s one failure, hell, I hate to even mention it aloud, is a total blindness to intra-state resistance to the globalist world - in his mind we are all either interconnected, morally-impeccable, liberal world citizens; right-wing Russian puppets duped into thinking regional or bodily autonomy has value; or Islamic terrorists.

Unlike Peter Zeihan, Galeotti is a globalist true believer, and his book has a properly hopeful tone. For his sake, but mostly for ours, one prays that the Starbucks laptop brigade to which he panders will indeed inherit the mantle of the new surrogate warfare. After all, it took weakness to create the first State, and boy howdy is the person-of-state bloodless warfighter the apotheosis of weakness. The analogy of State to bloodless, surrogate, permanent warring - calibrated coercion he calls it! - is so perfectly outlined herein, that not only has Galeotti given us an air tight justification to end all working class military service, but also the best explanation I have seen of Deleuze and Guattari’s insistence that the State is an anti-war machine that can only go to war by capturing a war machine (young virile masculine bodies) and deploying it - always!! - at a distance far enough away that it can walk away from any battle that becomes too costly to continue (I doubt even Galeotti saw the ignoble Afghanistan surrender coming).

The new and improved bloodless war is, thus, perfectly suited to the pathetic, too well-educated to fight on its own behalf statist. After listening to The Weaponization of Everything, one can envision the next step in the expression of weakness’s will-to-power, and the thriving of the most useless creature our universe has yet seen; but, more importantly, inshallah, one also envisions a day soon to come on which no honorable man would consider fighting on behalf of the globalist State and it’s model consumer-cum-bloodless warfighter.

An enlightening tour of today's world

This book reminds me of my university experience: I am vaulted to a higher level of awareness, and fed many fresh viewpoints of things I thought I knew. Water wars, resource wars, financial conflict, gangsterism (including, the digital type), shenanigans by all sides of conflicts: the book brims over in every sentence with useful and enlightening info.

Need to Know book.

many will be eager to understand what is actually happening?
Mark Galeotti has proven-info that makes a difference in sorting out facts. He called my attention in the recent years.
Enough to help each persons assesments.