Do Biddle & Friedman mischaracterize Hoffman?
I do not want to put words in Hoffman's mouth but strongly concur that Biddle does not capture correctly Hoffmans def'n or his idea of the spectrum. FH decidely is not arguing that warfare will converge solely and only to a 'middle ground' - his general argument conforms with this, that is there is a convdergence or overlap, but he allows for 'hybrid warfare to shift very significantly along the spectrum to either end.
To add, FH is trying to point out that a military force - ie, the US military, and maybe particularly the USMC - in aiming to train, equip and educate to fight 'hybrid' wars, will have the capability and capacity to scale up and scale down the spectrum to deal with any threat. Elsewhere on these boards, various people argue for the US military being able to fight 'full spectrum' - same thing, pretty much, except 'full spectrum' used to mean something different than being able to engage successfully (or usefully) from nation building through COIN to full out conventional, tank division vs tank division warfare (and I do not mean to exclude the Navy or AF).
One final point - while the Biddle argument is not inconsistent with FH's hybrid warfare, and indeed may be the same, SB is working from a large research grant and needs to generate, as he has in the past, an original piece of work (ie book).
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