Hybrid Warfare (merged thread)

[UrsaMaior]

Of couse I am not suggesting that infantry should walk ALL the times, also not suggesting that you should sell rather than argue. As long as the weapons stay the same there is not major leap forward in infantry tactics. Please treat each other as reasonable (is this the correct word?) people.

As a classical mechanised maneuver would cost too much even for the winner (imagine Georgia 2008 on a bigger scale, and please don't tell me it is not relevant. It is the closest to relevant.) there are other ways a state must pursue in reaching its goals. You know it much better than I do, that there is a certain level in wars when there are political decisions with military effects. And these are usually not covered in mil hist books. We are talking about grand strategy where the military is only one if many aspects. Since the normal modus operandi of the armed forces is seriously restricted other means must step forward. Media and global trade can have the same or better results than outright violence with much less hassle. Just like the carrier replaced the battleship. You keep asking me why I think media is that important. Because it is THE weapon in the clash of wills. While the US is not affected by an embargo say of muslim fashion designers it would hard hit by a media-led stoppage of weapons import. In the present time of cheap (and small!!) videocameras/mobile phones capable of recording (see that girl shot dead by a basiji in Iran) and filesharing sites you cannot leave the media (public opinion) out of quotation. That one single video of no more than 5 minutes caused more harm to Ahmedinejad than his mumblings. Or see the quoted case of Fallujah.
As of global markets you don't need anymore to destroy your opponent's armies and occupy some important turf as someone said to bring it its knees. One small secret maneuver with its currency and it is begging for mercy. Russia has bought off half Austria controlling more of it than it had between 1945-1955. Thanks to global markets it does not matter that it does not have a single soldier on austrian soil. It continously denies even the existence of the "energy weapon" yet it uses to strangle a west orientated Ukraine, to influence EU decisions etc. And believe me they are doing it in according to a complex master plan, where politics, economy, culture and military all play their part. That's the least you can expect from a nation whose national sport is chess.

Sad or not war is getting out of fashion just as major epidemies have vanished. Yet interests remain. What is the solution? I don't exactly know. I only can guess that age old, in the west long forgotten methods will be combined with new technolgies and concepts. And if we don't continously strive to be ahead of the competition we can loose our advatage (real or not but since the others also believe that it exists we can accept its existence). I am sorry Wilf but clinging to the notion that there is no significant change on the way IMHO is more damaging than examining such wild theories as 5GW, nanoterrorists and stuff.

[Fuchs]

That energy weapon is in fact still holstered.

The Ukrainians failed to pay bills at less than half the price per unit that Western Europeans pay for the same good.
So they basically get their terribly inefficient energy sector subsidized by Russia, are in no way cooperative about legitimate Russian interests in regard to Russian majority regions in Ukraine and generally didn't behave as we would want states to behave in the EU, for example.

I don't want to think about what the Bush government would have done to the Ukraine if it had been in Putin's position.

Cutting off the supply as a gas company does to your household if you don't pay their bills was no use of a weapon in my opinion.

[William F. Owen]

Of couse I am not suggesting that infantry should walk ALL the times, also not suggesting that you should sell rather than argue. As long as the weapons stay the same there is not major leap forward in infantry tactics. Please treat each other as reasonable (is this the correct word?) people.

Concur. Apology if I seemed unreasonable - not my intent.

In the present time of cheap (and small!!) videocameras/mobile phones capable of recording (see that girl shot dead by a basiji in Iran) and filesharing sites you cannot leave the media (public opinion) out of quotation. That one single video of no more than 5 minutes caused more harm to Ahmedinejad than his mumblings.

a.) Who is still in Power?
b.) Was it that she was killed, or that the killing was filmed?
c.) There is virtually none/if any live footage of any atrocity in Darfur. Any less relevant for the lack of footage?

As of global markets you don't need anymore to destroy your opponent's armies and occupy some important turf as someone said to bring it its knees. One small secret maneuver with its currency and it is begging for mercy. Russia has bought off half Austria controlling more of it than it had between 1945-1955.

Maybe so. That is not a military problem. It is entirely diplomatic/political. Lack of funds is only relevant if it prevents a military acquiring resources. Resources - fuel, ammunition, weapons and manpower are still useable even if the economy has been wiped out. Men with guns will always predate men with bank accounts, and no guns.

Sad or not war is getting out of fashion just as major epidemies have vanished.

Really? Where is the evidence? Going out of Fashion for who, when and where?

I am sorry Wilf but clinging to the notion that there is no significant change on the way IMHO is more damaging than examining such wild theories as 5GW, nanoterrorists and stuff.

I'm not clinging to it. Where is the evidence? More over you cannot predict that change.
Noble said Dynamite would end warfare. Historically the vast majority of predicted RMAs have failed. I can cite you many many examples and they far outnumber the RMAs that were actually predicted and actually came to pass. War
Show me a major Military development in the last 15 years, that has caused seismic shifts in military affairs?
All we have seen is strategic developments. The applications of force which worked in 1994 still work today.
Any point in looking more than 15 years into the future?

[UrsaMaior]

Concur. Apology if I seemed unreasonable - not my intent.

No problem. Me no native speaker

a.) Who is still in Power?
b.) Was it that she was killed, or that the killing was filmed?
c.) There is virtually none/if any live footage of any atrocity in Darfur. Any less relevant for the lack of footage?

You are right I should have written Iran instead of Am'jad. The fact it was shown all around the world which counts. And yes the reason why Darfur continues is that there are no videocameras not to mention mobilphones around. The are rumours of a NATO mission there for more than TWO years!! yet for lack of media coverage it is still not launched.

Maybe so. That is not a military problem. It is entirely diplomatic/political. Lack of funds is only relevant if it prevents a military acquiring resources. Resources - fuel, ammunition, weapons and manpower are still useable even if the economy has been wiped out. Men with guns will always predate men with bank accounts, and no guns.

I believe there are less and less solely military problems. Men with guns are a tactical problem not strategic so to say. Just like Taiko you seem think that force (pphysical or muilitary) has a solution to any problem. I am not so sure about it. You cannot bomb a stock exchange or trade center for acquiring a company of your no matter how sneaky methods they used.

Really? Where is the evidence? Going out of Fashion for who, when and where?

C'mon Wilf fashion is what you see everyday on the streets. War in our countries -even in Israel thank God- is less and less commonplace.

Noble said Dynamite would end warfare. Historically the vast majority of predicted RMAs have failed. I can cite you many many examples and they far outnumber the RMAs that were actually predicted and actually came to pass. War Show me a major Military development in the last 15 years, that has caused seismic shifts in military affairs?
All we have seen is strategic developments. The applications of force which worked in 1994 still work today.

Concur, yet what I am talking about is not a military phenomenom. It is in the system supporting, underlying it. Society, economy, politics.

Any point in looking more than 15 years into the future?

No. Still have not found my crytsal ball yet.

[UrsaMaior]

That energy weapon is in fact still holstered.

The Ukrainians failed to pay bills at less than half the price per unit that Western Europeans pay for the same good.
So they basically get their terribly inefficient energy sector subsidized by Russia, are in no way cooperative about legitimate Russian interests in regard to Russian majority regions in Ukraine and generally didn't behave as we would want states to behave in the EU, for example.

I don't want to think about what the Bush government would have done to the Ukraine if it had been in Putin's position.

Cutting off the supply as a gas company does to your household if you don't pay their bills was no use of a weapon in my opinion.

Well yes that's the surface. In the meantime they have bought off Austrian oil and natural gas companies incl the ex-state company OMV. They were trying to do the same with the hungarian one too. At the same time they succesfully hindering Nabucco etc. This is way more than a simple resource. It is about who controls Europe and the EU is disunited and losing.

[William F. Owen]

You are right I should have written Iran instead of Am'jad. The fact it was shown all around the world which counts. And yes the reason why Darfur continues is that there are no videocameras not to mention mobilphones around. The are rumours of a NATO mission there for more than TWO years!! yet for lack of media coverage it is still not launched.

So what you are saying is that the media creates the political will to act. It did that in Victorian times.
Politically relevant. Not militarily effective.

I believe there are less and less solely military problems. Men with guns are a tactical problem not strategic so to say. Just like Taiko you seem think that force (pphysical or muilitary) has a solution to any problem. I am not so sure about it. You cannot bomb a stock exchange or trade center for acquiring a company of your no matter how sneaky methods they used.

There have never been any solely military problems. Taiko and I both read Clausewitz. We see the solution to force as being force, not force being the solution to every problem.
Acquiring a company is not military activity.

C'mon Wilf fashion is what you see everyday on the streets. War in our countries -even in Israel thank God- is less and less commonplace.

Fashion comes and goes. Currently there is a lull. So what?

[UrsaMaior]

The next conflict be it another 9/11 or another Georgia will decide our discussion.

[JMA]

Colonel (ret) Doug Macgregor sent to me via personal email his thoughts on this discussion on the "hybrid war" concept and gave me permission to post them on the SWJ blog.

[snip]

In addition, the IDF embraced the use of armor, artillery and fuel air explosive in the conduct of urban operations with the object of minimizing the exposure of dismounted IDF troops to enemy fire. While the Hamas enemy may qualify as one of Frank Hoffman's hybrids, the IDF wasted no time in fighting for hearts and minds because the IDF knows there are none to win in the Islamic World.

[snip]

That Israel knows where their are "hearts and minds" to win and where not is relevant to Afghanistan where a careful analysis of what is possible and what is not in this regard and where.

[Rex Brynen]

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.

[SWJ Blog]

Irregular Adversaries and Hybrid Threats

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Irregular Adversaries and Hybrid Threats - 2011 unclassified handbook by US Joint Forces Command's Joint Irregular Warfare Center and posted at Public Intelligence.



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[SWJ Blog]

Hybrid Warfare and Transnational Threats

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[SWJ Blog]

Review Essay: Fighting and Learning Against Hybrid Threats

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[SWJ Blog]

Review Essay: History and Hybrid Warfare

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[SWJ Blog]

The Network vs the BCT: Organizational Overmatch in Hybrid Strategies

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[SWJ Blog]

"Suicide Bombers and T72s": Using Mission Orders to Defeat the Hybrid Threat

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[SWJ Blog]

The Islamic State is a Hybrid Threat: Why Does That Matter?

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[davidbfpo]

What was behind the now famous 'Little Green Men' in the Crimea? Maskiroka, the old Russian practice of military deception and the Crimea was a textbook example. Based on five principles:

• Surprise
• Kamufliazh - camouflage
• Demonstrativnye manevry - manoeuvres intended to deceive
• Skrytie - concealment
• Imitatsia - the use of decoys and military dummies
• Dezinformatsia - disinformation, a knowing attempt to deceive

I know this subject, let alone the 'men' have appeared in threads on the Ukraine, but to my surprise the word Maskiroka rarely appears.

The BBC has a 20 minute radio programme and an accompanying article:http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/magazine-31020283

Although to date the intervention and now invasion of the Ukraine has reportedly seen those 'Men' in a more conventional mode, losing considerable numbers.

[SWJ Blog]

Hybrid War: Old Concept, New Techniques

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[SWJ Blog]

NATO Commander Breedlove Discusses Implications of Hybrid War

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[SWJ Blog]

The Problem with Hybrid Warfare

This SWJ Blog discussion has today (March 11th) over fifty comments.

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