Defining Hybrid Threats

By John G.L.J. Jacobs, Director Atlantic Forum

This article was originally published by the Youth Section of the Euro-Atlantic Council of Slovenia (YATA Slovenia) in April 2017. The article was written as part of a larger research on the development of Hybrid Warfare conducted at the Netherlands Defence Academy between March 2017 and September 2017.

Defining Hybrid Threats

Despite the renewed interest as the latest buzzword in Washington (in all fairness this is the third time it renews as a buzzword), hybrid warfare is not new. Renowned military strategist Colin Gray convincingly argues that future, and by extension modern, warfare is essentially more of the same.1 While hybrid threats “blend the lethality of state conflict with the fanatical and protracted fervor of irregular warfare”,2 it does not change the nature of war, but rather how we conduct war, yet however it is conducted, war remains simply that: war. Nevertheless, it is useful to compare the contemporary definitions with the historical examples to help us gain a better idea of the term we are discussing. Retired Lieutenant Colonel Frank G. Hoffman is one of the main authors on the subject, having added much to the debate in the past decade. He originally defined hybrid wars in the modern usage as:

“Hybrid wars incorporate a range of different modes of warfare, including conventional capabilities, irregular tactics and formations, terrorist acts including indiscriminate violence and coercion, and criminal disorder.”3

And seven years later a more refined definition:

“Hybrid threats are any adversary that simultaneously employs a tailored mix of conventional weapons, irregular tactics, terrorism, and criminal behavior in the same time and battlespace to obtain their political objectives.”4

Murray and Mansoor describe hybrid warfare in a similar way: “Hybrid Warfare is conflict involving a combination of conventional military forces and irregulars (guerrillas, insurgents, and terrorists), which could include both state and nonstate actors, aimed at achieving a common political purpose.”

Indeed hybrid warfare or elements thereof have been part of warfare throughout the ages.5 These cases are examples of asymmetric and irregular warfare, more so than the hybrid warfare we experience today, and in general the concept of asymmetric or irregular warfare is hardly new or revolutionary — recall the battle of David and Goliath: history is full of many examples of the weak defeating the strong.6 Nevertheless, the case of the Peninsular War (1807-1804) is an interesting one as the word ‘Guerrilla’ is derived from this conflict.7 This perhaps is the first time a new label was used to describe this type of warfare. While technically both guerrilla warfare and asymmetrical warfare are part of the overarching irregular warfare I will, for simplicities sake, continue with the moniker ‘Irregular Warfare’ to refer to both. While the creation of a new term to define an old concept may not prove very valuable, it may help us gain insight into our thinking, and that is the spirit of this writing: to get a better understanding of our thinking about hybrid warfare.

Irregular Warfare and Hybrid Warfare

One historical example that returns quite often in the literature is the case of the Arab Revolt (1916-1918), if the cases before the 20th century are historical illustrations of irregular warfare, then perhaps the actions of ‘Lawrence of Arabia’, are to be an example of modern irregular warfare.8 The flexibility employed by Captain Lawrence greatly contributed to the study of irregular warfare, and his writings are to be considered the first coherent theory of guerrilla warfare.9

Some scholars, Hoffman included, made a division between ‘compound wars’ and ‘hybrid wars’,10 while I will not sustain this differentiation it is noteworthy to mention Hoffman’s view. Compound were those major wars that had significant regular and irregular components fighting simultaneously under unified direction.11 The case of T.E. Lawrence is a classic example of compound warfare. However, because it is based on operationally separate forces, the compound concept does not capture the merger or blurring modes of war identified in the case study of Hezbollah in the second Lebanon war of 2006, on which I will touch upon later. For the sake of simplicity, I will follow Murray and Mansoor in using hybrid warfare to describe both of these two examples.

Real developments in the thinking of hybrid warfare have the origin in the east, rather than the west. Mao Tse-tung, more than his predecessor Sun-Tzu, is perhaps China’s most influential military theorist, whose theory and tactics were responsible for the 1949 victory over the Kuomintang (KMT) in the Chinese Civil War (1925-1949). I see this as a potential turning point in history, where states also use hybrid tactics (whereas previously this was limited to the insurgent forces or the irregular forces in a compound structure). However, this was not limited to only the Pacific theatre of the second world war. At the end of the second world war, Russia had employed guerrillas, and Nazi Germany also employed so-called SS-Werwolf units, building forward on lessons learned from fighting the Russian guerrilla.12 While the Nazis only adopted these tactics as a last resort, the British had set up a new organization in 1940, the Special Operations Executive (SOE), with the mandate to “set Europe ablaze”,13 while the unit was dissolved in 1946 its operations continue to be employed by the United Kingdom Special Forces (UKSF).

Political, Economic and the many forms of Unrestricted Warfare

At the eve of the cold war, George Kennan introduced the term Political Warfare in 1948.14 “Warfare” has been used by military scholars to address the physical conduct of war or the fighting and violent aspects of war. But there is no violence or lethal force in the kinds of political activity Kennan listed. His definition included:

“political alliances, economic measures (such as ERP—the Marshall Plan), and “white” propaganda to such covert operations as clandestine support of “friendly” foreign elements, “black” psychological warfare and even encouragement of underground resistance in hostile states.”

There is no warfare as we know it in these political and economic activities, which is why the term is an oxymoron.15 Political Warfare and Economic Warfare thus fit the description of hybrid warfare I put forward earlier. Indeed Kennan himself describes these activities as “the employment of all the means at a nation’s command, short of war, to achieve its national objectives.”16

Two Chinese colonels, Laing and Xiangsui, coined the term 'Unrestricted Warfare' (URW) to describe many forms of unconventional warfare to carefully explore strategies that militarily and politically disadvantaged nations might take to successfully attack a geopolitical stronger adversary (such as the United States). Here one of the changes in our understanding of hybrid warfare is revealed, as previously these forms of warfare were limited to rebel insurgencies.17

Laing and Xiangsui identify the following forms: Financial warfare, Smuggling warfare, Cultural warfare, Drug warfare, media and fabrication warfare, Technological warfare, Resources Warfare, Psychological warfare, Network Warfare, International law warfare, Environmental Warfare and Economic aid warfare Note that all of these do not include the kinetic element normally associated with warfare.18 The auctor intellectualis of URW believe that in total war, many or all of these forms can be deployed in combination, and they devote an entire chapter to the art of combining elements of these various forms of warfare.19 In western literature, the term full spectrum (superiority) is used instead.

Hybrid Warfare today

The first use of Hybrid Warfare in its modern sense can be traced back to Robert G. Walker,20 though it was now Secretary of Defense James N. Mattis who put the term in the lime-light in 200521 when the US faced hybrid and insurgent tactics it’s collective memory had muffled away as part of the Vietnam syndrome. The technological seniority it had enjoyed in the past decades, with the Gulf War showing the apex of air power, did not work in Iraq. From this point onward the term Hybrid has been used as a buzzword and has resurged at least three times in the past decade. Less than a year later, the second Lebanon War (2006) provided with the opportunity for Hezbollah to demonstrate modern hybrid warfare in practice when the Israeli Defense Forces (IDF) invaded Lebanon to put an end to the Shi’a militia’s attacks on Northern Israel. Despite superiority in both numbers and technology, the IDF ran into an opponent who surprised them on a number of levels leading to a failure of the invasion in the political sense. The Israelis were quick to learn and applied the lessons learned to a successful counter hybrid warfare strategy during the Gaza war two years later.

It was these developments that spurred NATO to focus on Hybrid Warfare, and leading to a bulk of literature in the second half of this century’s first decade. Here the apex was the Tallinn Summit in 2011. After the conference ideas about hybrid warfare again died a slow dead within six months. Much to the dismay of the working groups that had worked on hybrid warfare, their documents disappeared in a file cabinet.

Han Bouwmeester, a Dutch Colonel who was part of one of the working groups, told me that when the annexation of Crimea happened in 2014, NATO was in an uproar trying to make heads and tails of what was going on. The answer came when someone pulled the drawer including the hybrid documents, very quickly member states were approached to set up national think groups on hybrid warfare. Colonel Bouwmeester, by then having traded in his post at NATO in favor of the Netherlands Defence Academy, was approached to be part of the Dutch group and was told a preparatory document was already circulating. A document Bouwmeester was all too familiar with, as he was one of the authors working on it before Tallinn.22

The Russian perspective

Aside from Western definitions of hybrid warfare, recent Russian strategy doctrines, including the 2015 military doctrine23 and national security strategy24 emphasize the use of combinations of different tactics, irregular warfare, and political subversion. This emphasis draws from a long history of Russian military thought on the use of irregular forces, influence operations, and deception (maskirovka).25 As Jānis Bērziņš writes, “The Russians have placed the idea of influence at the very center of their operational planning and used all possible levers to achieve this: the skillful internal communications; deception operations; psychological operations and well-constructed external communications.”26

Others use the term to describe the ‘New Generation Warfare’ (NGW) doctrine articulated by the senior leadership in the Russian General Staff27 which Western analysts had coined the Gerasimov doctrine,28 named after the Russian Chief of the General Staff. This however is a misconception, as rather than describing Russian NGW, Gerasimov describing hybrid warfare employed by the West linked to the so called ‘Color Revolutions’. Russian military leaders view the color revolutions as a "new US and European approach to warfare that focuses on creating destabilizing revolutions in other states as a means of serving their security interests at low cost and with minimal casualties."29 Aside of NGW, within the Russian lens, hybrid warfare may also be referred to as Non-Linear War.30

Conclusion

It is not so much warfare that has changed, but rather our thinking about warfare – and in particular, our thinking about hybrid warfare. The historical examples have shown that there is not much new about warfare, war is still war, and it will be tomorrow and the day after and so on. What is changing, however, is the way we perceive war. Matters of war and peace are no longer binary, though we often fail to properly talk about the grey zone that lies in between. As the above introductions display, all major powers have engaged in what we now define as hybrid warfare in the past fifty years. Thus when talking about hybrid warfare, it is useful to include perspectives from major powers; Russia, China but also the US and to the larger extent NATO. Hybrid Warfare and irregular tactics never were limited to rebels and insurgents and states appear to have embraced these tactics, not to replace conventional warfare, but rather to enhance it.

[1] Colin Gray, Another Bloody Century: Future Warfare (London: Weidenfeld and Nicolson, 2005).

[2] Frank G. Hoffman, Conflict in the 21 St Century: The Rise of Hybrid Wars (Arlington: Potomac Institute for Policy Studies, 2007), 28.

[3] Frank G. Hoffman, Conflict in the 21 St Century: The Rise of Hybrid Wars.

[4] Frank G. Hoffman, “On Not-So-New Warfare: Political Warfare Vs Hybrid Threats,” War on the Rocks, July 28, 2014.

[5] Williamson Murray and Peter R. Mansoor, Hybrid Warfare: Fighting Complex Opponents from the Ancient World to the Present (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2012).

[6] Barry Wolf, “When the Weak Attack the Strong Failures of Deterrence” (Santa Monica, 1991); Andrew Mack, “Why Big Nations Lose Small Wars: The Politics of Asymmetric Conflict,” in Power, Strategy, and Security, ed. Klaus Knorr (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1983).See also Ivan Arreguin-Toft, How the Weak Win Wars: A Theory of Asymmetric Conflict (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2005).Toft points out that besides his own work and that of Mack few scholars have advanced explanations focused specifically on the subject of asymmetric conflict.

[7] Hart Sinnreich, “That Accursed Spanish War: The Peninsular War, 1807-1814.”

[8] Thomas Edward Lawrence, Seven Pillars of Wisdom, Wordsworth (Ware: Wordsworth Editions Ltd, 1926).For a more recent historic account of Captain Lawrence’s exploits see Scott Anderson, Lawrence in Arabia: War, Deceit, Imperial Folly and the Making of the Modern Middle East (New York: Anchor, 2014).

[9] Martin Van Crevald, The Art of War: War and Military Thought (London: Cassell, 2002), 204–5.

[10] Frank G. Hoffman, “Hybrid vs. Compound War - The Janus Choice: Defining Today’s Multifaceted Conflict,” Armed Forces Journal, 2009.See also Mansoor, “Introduction: Hybrid Warfare in History.”

[11] Thomas M. Huber, Compound Warfare, That Fatal Knot (Leavenworth: U.S. Army Command and General Staff College Press, 2002).

[12] Perry Biddiscombe, Werewolf! The History of the National Socialist Guerrilla Movement (Toronto: Toronto University Press, 1997); Perry Biddiscombe, The Last Nazis (Charleston: Tempus Publishing, 2000); Charles Whiting, Hitler’s Werewolves (New York: Playboy Press, 1972).

[13] Gerhard L. Weinberg, A World at Arms: A Global History of World War II (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1994), 150.

[14] George Kennan, “Policy Planning Staff Memorandum 269” (Wash, May 4, 1948).

[15] Hoffman, “On Not-So-New Warfare: Political Warfare Vs Hybrid Threats.”

[16] Kennan, “Policy Planning Staff Memorandum 269.”

[17] See for example Scott James C. Scott, Weapons of the Weak: Everyday Forms of Peasant Resistance (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1987).

[18] Qiao Laing and Wang Xiangsui, Unrestricted Warfare, trans. Foreign Broadcast Information Service (Central Intelligence Agency (CIA), 1999).

[19] See Ibid.Chapter 7, "Ten Thousand Methods Combined as One: Combinations That Transcend Boundaries" pp.153-174

[20] Robert G. Walker, “SPEC FI: The United States Marine Corps and Special Operations” (Naval Post Graduate School, 1998).

[21] James N. Mattis and Frank G. Hoffman, “United States Naval Institute. Proceedings” (Annapolis, 2005).

[22] Interview with the author, 5 April 2017

[23] Olga Oliker, “Russia’ S New Military Doctrine,” Washington Post (Monkey Cage), January 15, 2015.

[24] Russian Federation, “On the Russian Federation’s National Security Strategy” (Moscow, 2015).

[25] Kenneth C. Keating, “Maskirovka: The Soviet System of Camouflage” (New York, 1981).see also Vasiliĭ Gerasimovich Reznichenko, Taktika (Moscow: Voyennoye Izdatel’stvo ministerstva Oborony, 1966).

[26] Jānis Bērziņš, “Russian New Generation Warfare : Implications for Europe,” European Leadership Network, October 14, 2014, 6.

[27] Peter Pindják, “Deterring Hybrid Warfare : A Chance for NATO and the EU to Work Together ?,” NATO Review, 2014.

[28] Gerasimov writes: “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. . . . The focus of applied methods of conflict has altered in the direction of the broad use of political, economic, informational, humanitarian, and other non-military measures—applied in coordination with the protest potential of the population”, quoted in Coalson Robert Coalson, “Top Russian General Lays Bare Putin’s Plan for Ukraine,” The World Post, September 2, 2014.

[29] Anthony H. Cordesman, “Russia and the ‘Color Revolution’ A Russian Military View of a World Destabilized by the US and the West” (Washington D.C., May 28, 2014).. Russian analysts have used this term since the “Rose Revolution” in Georgia in 2012, in discussing the “Orange Revolution” in Ukraine in 2004, and the “Tulip Revolution” that took place in Kyrgyzstan in 2005.

[30] Mark Galeotti, “The ‘ Gerasimov Doctrine ’ and Russian Non- Linear War,” In Moscow’s Shadows, July 6, 2014.