I'm recently back from a NATO conference/experiment on "countering hybrid threats." In military-security terms I remain rather doubtful about the term, which I think both exaggerates the newness of "hybridity" (is that a word?) in conflict, and is a little too enemy- and intent-centric for the sorts of issues that it is supposed to address.

On the other hand, I did come away with a sense that it works rather well at a terminological level to get NATO thinking about "all that messy stuff other than conventional force-on-force" war. Certainly the discussions were very rich. With apologies with the long cut-and-paste, my major take-aways from the week were:
  1. I’m not convinced that “hybrid threats” works very well as a military concept—it focuses too much on the idea of a clear and identifiable foe who is trying to hurt you, and not enough on contextual conditions, or harm done as a byproduct (rather than an intended effect) of local conflicts, which I think is often the case. I also agree that, historically, a great many threats have been hybrid, so this isn’t necessarily new.
  2. Despite my comments in #1, it may not matter if CHT meets the abstract standard of theoretical conceptual rigour. It seems to work fine as a shorthand for “all that messy, non-conventional war stuff NATO might do.” I’m not sure the alliance could agree on anything that would work any better.
  3. Ideas matter. Normative concerns matter (and indeed played important roles in driving the alliance into military operations in Bosnia, Kosovo, and now Libya.) The political and media environment in NATO countries matter. This is the unspoken “walrus in the room” in any discussion of NATO’s future, and we need to spend more time thinking about it. Goodness knows that NATO’s political masters do.
  4. I have a sneaking feeling that many national politicians have a more inclusive and integrated sense of national and security interests than do some senior military personnel. Politics is not a bad word, even if it does mess up advance planning.
  5. Unity of command is impossible to achieve in complex peace and stabilization operations. Indeed, efforts to achieve it likely alienate important partners, and can be the very antithesis of partnership. Instead, one needs to strive for a modus vivendi that works, even if imperfectly.
  6. The “next” NATO operation is unknowable. No one would have predicted NATO’s involvement in Bosnia or Kosovo in 1987. No one would have predicted NATO’s operations in Afghanistan in 2000. Certainly no one—and I mean literally no one, of the 7 billion people on the planet—would have predicted NATO operations in Libya in November 2010. NATO has never in its history entered into a conflict as a matter of measured advanced planning. Rather it has fallen into them sideward, driven by unstable conditions and shifting politics. Much as it might want to be the “George C. Scott-as-Patton” of international alliances, its actual path to military engagement rather more resembles a Jim Carey comedy. There’s no point bemoaning this, moreover—it is probably unavoidable.
  7. Consequently, NATO needs to prepare against a very broad spectrum of things, rather than a particular thing. The flexibility of the CHT concept might actually be quite useful here, regardless of whatever quibbles one can raise about it.
  8. Afghanistan, Libya, and the Balkans can inform reflections, but they shouldn’t drive them. How likely is it that NATO would be doing industrial-strength COIN (Afghanistan-style) any time soon?
  9. The broader COINdinsita vs COINtra debate was largely absent from the Tallinn meeting. It shouldn’t have been, since not everyone is convinced that the primary contemporary COIN emphasis on non-kinetic elements is appropriate. Heretics and iconoclasts can be useful people to have in a room.
  10. Because of #6, NATO also needs to think more about changing the way it works and develops relationships rather than focussing on material capabilities. It needs to have established, rich, and enduring interactions with a range of actors so that when a crisis occurs it has both a network of contacts and a degree of pre-established trust and understanding. It needs to strategize how it develops and sustains relationships. I think the experiment made major contributions in this respect.
  11. One needs to be careful of the top-down/command-and-control/campaign plan style of problem-solving. Some of the discussions in Tallinn seemed to imply that peacebuilding is like making a cake, with the cook or cooks deciding on the appropriate mix of steps and ingredients to “counter the cake problem.” This in turn led to a lot of discussion of how many cooks there should be, how they should decide on a CHT recipe, who brings the eggs, and so forth. However, in the real world of stabilization operations these are self-mixing cakes with minds of their own. Some of the ingredients hate some of the others. Some change as you stir. Sometimes stirring makes things worse if you aren’t careful. Indeed, occasionally the cake batter tries to kill you. We need to be appropriately humble about how much true understanding and leverage we have.
  12. On the subject of self-mixing cakes, never underestimate the ability of the locals to manipulate the outsiders. Increasingly from 1993 onwards, NATO became a military adjunct to Bosnia’s efforts to secure independence. In 1999, NATO found itself acting as the air force of the Kosovo Liberation Army (admitted largely due to Serbian miscalculations). In 2011, NATO is providing air cover for the Transitional National Council’s regime change efforts in Libya. I supported all three operations, so this isn’t a critique—rather, it underlines once again that the locals get a vote too.
  13. Lots of people have been doing (or trying to do) conflict prevention and stabilization a very long time, and usually doing it without any NATO presence. Don’t reinvent the wheel, but rather think partnership. In many cases NATO could be a very junior partner.
  14. Things can be made better, but the perfect can be the enemy of the good. A sort of cynical optimism is therefore important. Hubris is fatal (sometimes literally so). Be aware of the law of diminishing returns, and know when something is a “good enough” solution and we should move on to the next problem.
  15. Perhaps because they’re locked together in small steel cylinders for long periods of time. submariners can really tell jokes wickedly well.
  16. Think about emerging and hybrid opportunities too, not just the threats—the “Arab Spring” being a case in point. (This was a comment actually made by Jaime Shea in his excellent speech, but I thought it was worth repeating. He said a lot of very sensible things—it was a shame he didn’t open the conference.)
There's more at PAXsims, but most of that discussion is about the scenario-driven experiment methodology used for the meeting.

On a side note, Tallinn was a great place to hold the conference.