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2023-09-05

Hybrid Warfare: The Continuation of Ambiguity by Other Means

By: Andrew Mumford1, Pascal Carlucci2

This article presents the study of ambiguity as the essence of hybrid warfare to reconcile it with the international political context. It addresses the gaps in the literature in an effort to elucidate the essence of hybrid warfare not as a separate concept, but rather as the symptom of a changing political environment. The analysis of the literature is reinforced by two case studies: the war in eastern Ukraine of 2014 and the South China Sea dispute. Both these case studies express ambiguity in the combination of kinetic and non-kinetic means used to achieve political objectives.

1. School of Politics and International Relations, University of Nottingham, Nottingham, United Kingdom

2. Rabdan Academy, Abu Dhabi, United Arab Emirates

The article rests on three pillars that constitute the architecture of the central argument. The first pillar will address the gap in the current literature on hybrid warfare and how the current debate is too concerned with conflict dynamics rather than its political nature. The second pillar will delineate the essence, characteristics, and value of ambiguity in hybrid warfare. The third pillar will address the practice of hybrid warfare as the conduct of war by great powers.

The events that unfolded during the start of the Ukranian war in 2014 displayed a careful operational design by the Russian Federation, which combined kinetic and non-kinetic elements in a temporal sequence and in pivotal spaces aimed at inhibiting defences and deactivating threshold countermeasures. This article was largely written before the Russian invasion of Ukraine in February 2022 and focuses on events before this conflict, although our findings remain pertinent to understanding ways in which great power competition since that invasion has played out.

At the same time, China has used a similar operational design to gain territorial advances in the South China Sea without facing the politico-military challenge of forcing a threshold. These two approaches have led us to study the nature of this operational design and why it has been employed in that historical context.

This article presents the study of ambiguity as the essence of hybrid warfare as a result of the current international system. We have conducted an extensive study of the academic debate on hybrid warfare, grey zone warfare, and other forms of irregular warfare. We begin our study by proposing a history of hybrid warfare theory that pre-dates its drastic increase since 2014.

By building on the history of the term we delineate the characteristics recognised by fellow scholars in the field and we propose the concept of ambiguity in hybrid warfare. We then apply the concept to the conflicts in Ukraine since 2007 and in the South China Sea since 2012.

Ambiguity defines hybrid warfare, without which it would not exist. What makes this type of warfare unique, and likely to endure is its adaptability to changing circumstances, technological advancement, and social change. Declaring hybrid warfare as a doctrinal definition of irregular warfare is a mistake. Ambiguity makes hybrid warfare particularly resilient to the strategies adopted to counter it.

Hybrid warfare is defined by the simultaneous use of kinetic and non-kinetic means to achieve an ultimate political objective. So far, academia has concentrated its attention on the characteristics of its conduct rather than its essence and why it is fought. This article has argued that by investigating an essential trait of hybrid warfare (ambiguity) the reasons why it is fought become visible and clear. Within the scope of this article, ambiguity is a political connotation that requires coherence from the strategic to the tactical level in order to be effective. This requires strategic clarity, a full spectrum of flexible means, and the savvy use of military and non-military dimension of war.

In Ukraine, the ambiguity of hybrid warfare has allowed Russia to seize the initiative and secure a political and military result that would have been ineffective and costly otherwise. A proxy war would have been lengthy, and it would have degraded Russia’s foreign and security policy.

An outright intervention would have led to a counterinsurgency campaign to stabilise areas under its control. Tactical Battalion Groups have been the decisive element that enabled a clear military victory in a short amount of time. This approach showed also a three-dimensional approach to hybrid warfare that never divorced politics, strategy, and tactics. The Western reaction to Russia’s warfare in Ukraine, imposing economic sanctions on an already weak Russian economy, may scale back the political result achieved in 2014 but only to a limited extent.

China’s approach towards the South China Sea has been determined by the dual policy objectives of expanding its economic reach while at the same time asserting its power in its proximity. Promoting itself as an alternative leader in the global economy while reaffirming its national interests (often in opposition to U.S. interests) has been a contradictory proposition, which needed ambiguity in order to be enacted.

It has done so with a savvy use of international maritime law loopholes and a full spectrum of statecraft, military, police, and civilian means. The strategic balance of the whole region is capable of being shifted by China’s application of hybrid strategies, both in terms of the ambiguous use of maritime force in the South and East China Seas and through non-kinetic forms of economic, diplomatic, or information manipulation.

Finally, as stated above, ambiguity in hybrid warfare is the ability to strike the enemy with multiple synchronised elements forcing it into a state of cognitive impasse regarding its political, strategic, and tactical intentions. Both Russia and China have proven to have mastered this warfighting ability to their advantage. The West has to understand how ambiguity works in hybrid warfare precisely because great power competition breeds hybrid warfare .

Full article published in: European Journal of International Security | Volume 8 Issue 2 | pp. 192-206

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