Military and Strategic Journal
Issued by the Directorate of Morale Guidance at the General Command of the Armed Forces
United Arab Emirates
Founded in August 1971

2022-03-01

Hybrid Warfare Complex Threat that Poses Long-term Challenge

With States continuing to be embroiled in zero-sum military and economic competitions, armed conflicts seem inevitable. What is glaring, though, is that the nature of the battlefield has grossly changed. 
Conflicts are now fought in new, innovative and radically different ways. With the advent of modern hybrid warfare, they are less and less about lethal or kinetic force. 
 
While the concept of hybrid warfare might not be entirely new and many  practitioners even contend that it is as old as war itself, it has gained much relevance in recent years as states employ non-state actors and information technology to subdue their adversaries during or — more importantly — in the absence of a direct armed conflict.
 
In 2005, two U.S. military officials wrote about the “rise of hybrid wars” and emphasised the combination of conventional and unconventional strategies, methods, and tactics in contemporary warfare as well as the psychological or information-related aspects of modern conflicts. 
 
Hybrid warfare remains a contested concept and there is no universally agreed definition of it. It has been subjected to a lot of criticism for lacking conceptual clarity, being merely a buzzword, and not bringing anything distinctly new to policy debates. Nevertheless, the concept furnishes us with key insights into contemporary and future security and defence challenges.
 
Ambiguity and Attribution
Hybrid warfare entails a fusion of conventional as well as unconventional instruments of power and tools of subversion. These instruments are blended in a synchronised manner to exploit the vulnerabilities of an antagonist and achieve synergistic effects.
 
The objective of conflating kinetic tools and non-kinetic tactics is to inflict damage on a belligerent state in an optimal manner. There are two distinct characteristics of hybrid warfare. First, the line between war and peace time is rendered obscure. This means that it is hard to identify or discern the war threshold. War becomes elusive as it becomes difficult to operationalise it.
 
Hybrid warfare below the threshold of war or direct overt violence pays dividends despite being easier, cheaper, and less risky than kinetic operations. It is more feasible to sponsor and fan disinformation in collaboration with non-state actors than it is to roll tanks into another country’s territory or scramble fighter jets into its airspace. The costs and risks are markedly less, but the damage is real. 
 
Can there be a war without any direct combat or physical confrontation taking place? With hybrid warfare permeating inter-state conflicts, it is possible to answer in the affirmative. This remains linked to the philosophy of war as well. The supreme art of war is to subdue the enemy without fighting, as the ancient military strategist, Sun Tzu, suggested.
 
The second characteristic of hybrid warfare relates to ambiguity and attribution. Hybrid attacks are marked by a lot of vagueness. Such obscurity is created and enlarged by the hybrid actors in order to complicate attribution as well as response. The country that is targeted is either not able to detect a hybrid attack or unable to attribute it to a state that might be sponsoring it. By exploiting the thresholds of detection and attribution, the hybrid actor makes it difficult for the targeted state to develop policy and strategic responses.
 
Murky Dynamics
Recent studies on wars in Afghanistan and Iraq demonstrate how costly all-out wars can be in terms of human, economic, as well as social and political losses. Owing to rapid technological advancements and the rise of asymmetric warfare, all-out wars can be ineffective even vis-à-vis powers that have relatively less resources and clout. 
 
With the cost of war ratcheting up and newer tools being at the disposal of states, the will to fight all-out wars might be diminishing. This does not herald the waning of conflicts, but changes the dynamics of war. States are increasingly resorting to hybrid warfare below the threshold of an armed conflict in pursuance of their security goals. 
 
Hybrid warfare makes conflict dynamics murky not only because it offers a large and expanding toolkit to undermine an adversary but also because it allows its security to be undercut on two fronts. On the capability front, the vulnerabilities of the targeted state in the political, military, economic, social, information, and infrastructure (PMESII) realms are exploited insofar as it is tangibly and functionally weakened.
 
A second front on which a state’s security is undermined remains ideational in nature and relates to the legitimacy of the state. 
 
Fortifying Trust
A range of policy and strategic responses have been propounded by experts. Some of these revolve around measures for detecting, deterring, countering, and responding to hybrid threats in a meticulous manner. Any set of solutions sans confidence-and trust-building will fall short of effective antidotes.
 
What takes the centre stage is the role of civilians: how they think and act in relation to the state. Contemporary digital and social media platforms allow hybrid actors to influence this to the detriment of the adversary state with considerable ease. 
 
Digital and social media platforms allow hybrid actors to influence the role of civilians: how they think and act in relation to the state.  
 
The state is broken without the people. It draws legitimacy and, by the same token, power from its people. This applies especially to policies that are democratically structured. By driving a wedge between the state and its people, one can create conditions for its implosion. This is precisely what a hybrid actor aims at doing below the war threshold.
 
Hybrid threats are tailored to the vulnerabilities of the target state or inter-state political communities. The purpose is to exploit them insofar as they are deepened to create and exacerbate polarisation both at the national and international levels. This translates into perilous erosion of the core values of coexistence, harmony, and pluralism in and amongst democratic societies as well as the decision-making capability of the political leaders. Ultimately, what hybrid threats undercut is trust.
 
Building trust must be deemed the key bulwark against hybrid threats. Nothing will work or produce the desired results in the absence of trust.
 
Trust is needed on several levels and multiple domains. People must have confidence in the state organs for governments to ensure compliance with their decisions. In a lot of Western countries as evidence suggests - state institutions are losing their credibility owing to diminishing public trust. In the United States, public trust has declined from 73 per cent in the 1950s to 24 per cent in 2021. In Western Europe, trust levels have been steadily declining since the 1970s.
 
Building, re-building, and fortifying trust remains critical to creating durable resilience in the face of hybrid threats. This requires sustained efforts at the structural and policy levels to develop strong links between the state and the people underpinned by transparency, ownership, and inclusiveness.
 
NATO’s Response
Threats to stability and security are increasingly taking place in the “grey zone”, where state and non-state actors employ hybrid tactics, such as disinformation or cyber attack. How is North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO) responding to these challenges?
 
Since adopting an Alliance strategy on countering hybrid warfare in 2015, Allies have consistently broadened NATO’s toolbox to respond to these threats.
 
The Joint Intelligence and Security Division, which NATO established in 2017, includes a unit dealing specifically with monitoring and analysing hybrid threats and marked a major step in providing Allies with a better capability to “connect the dots”. 
 
By injecting more hybrid elements into NATO’s exercises, political and military decision-makers are confronted with the challenge of managing possible tensions between hybrid attacks on individual Allies, the desire to respond collectively, and to do so in environments where information is ambiguous and incomplete.
 
These exercises, some of them conducted in in coordination with the European Union, highlight the difficulties of an essentially “kinetic” (or military) alliance in responding to non-kinetic attacks. NATO has agreed on an ambitious exercise regime, including shorter exercises that will include top-level civilian decision-makers. 
 
Enhancing Resilience
At the 2016 Warsaw Summit, Allies committed to enhancing their resilience “against the full spectrum of threats, including hybrid threats, from any direction.”
 
Acknowledging that enhancing resilience is largely a national responsibility, NATO focuses on advising Allies. It has identified seven “baseline requirements” in strategic sectors to serve as yardsticks for national self-assessments. These baseline requirements are continuously updated over time in light of new challenges, such as the 5G communications standard and, recently, the response to the coronavirus pandemic.
 
Digital weapons will remain an attractive option for years to come: they can be operated by states as well as proxies and private organisations, without geographic constraints. Attribution may take time and responses need to be calibrated to manage escalation.
 
NATO has declared cyber as a new operational domain, and produced a guide for strategic response options to significant malicious cyber activities, which catalogues the broad range of tools – political, military, diplomatic and economic – at the Alliance’s disposal to respond to cyber activities.
 
Advisory Teams
Modelled on already existing advisory teams for resilience or critical infrastructure protection, a Counter Hybrid Support Team (CHST) could be deployed on short notice to an Ally requesting NATO support, either in a crisis or to assist in building national counter-hybrid capacities. Such teams consist of civilian experts drawn from a pool of NATO experts as well as specialists nominated by Allies.
 
One way NATO is enhancing its hybrid deterrence toolbox is by developing a set of comprehensive preventive and response options that bring together military and non-military instruments. By examining a large spectrum of potential hybrid actions, and by relating the most appropriate combinations of civil and military response tools to each of them, packages of measures will be created that should allow for faster decision-making and more tailored responses.
 
New technologies, such as “Artificial Intelligence” and “big data” analysis, can be beneficial for NATO to quickly detect and counter fake news campaigns on the Internet. However, they can also offer a potential aggressor effective means for disruption or diversion as part of a hybrid campaign.
 
Accordingly, NATO has adjusted the structure of its International Staff by standing up new units dedicated to innovation and to data policy. 
 
 One-Stop Shop
Spreading disinformation is among the most frequently used tools in the hybrid toolboxes of many state and non-state actors. Since the party that launches a disinformation campaign will always have the advantage of the initiative, NATO must aim to detect disinformation campaigns early and dispel them quickly and resolutely.
 
A NATO website called “Setting the Record Straight” serves as a “one-stop shop” for myth-busting factsheets, speeches, interviews, rebuttal statements, videos, and imagery, and is published in several languages. 
NATO also engages media continuously and asks to correct false stories. Such measures cannot stop hostile propaganda, yet such propaganda will be exposed. 
 
Responding to hybrid threats demands a whole-of-government approach. In May 2019, an informal meeting of the North Atlantic Council brought together, for the first time, national security advisers and senior national leads for hybrid threats. The meeting underscored the value of convening expertise on both civil and military threats, and exchanging national experience on handling hostile hybrid campaigns. 
NATO does not and cannot counter hybrid threats alone, which is why cooperation with a broad range of partners is essential. 
 
The organisation is engaging with partners in the Asia Pacific, which have extensive experience and best practice to share on national approaches to countering hybrid activity.
 
Building close ties with like-minded nations across the globe is in itself a deterrent to would-be hybrid aggressors.
 
Focused Approach
Countering hybrid threats is a long-term strategic challenge. It requires a dynamic approach where continuously updated situational awareness drives political discussion, option development, decision-making, and political control. 
 
NATO is looking at each hybrid actor as a unique entity with a unique strategic motivation. A focused approach improves NATO’s ability to contain hybrid campaigns by influencing the cost-benefit analysis of potential hybrid aggressors and to better contest the “grey zone” in what has become the modern theatre of operations.
 
Credit Text: www.nato.int
 

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