War is War, Not the Latest Concept: A Rejoinder to ‘Future Threats and Strategic Thinking’ (original) (raw)
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Secretary of Defense Robert Gates directly challenged the Pentagon's strategists and military chiefs in an important speech at the National Defense University in September 2008. The speech was a critical assessment of the prevailing U.S. military culture and the prism through which our Armed Forces see themselves. This prism clarifies what is important about the future and how we posture our forces for the future. Secretary Gates questioned that mindset and its hold on the Services and the Department of Defense's capitalization practices. Secretary Gates also declared that "the defining principle of the Pentagon's new National Defense Strategy is balance," 1 a principle that will also be key in the upcoming Quadrennial Defense Review (QDR). This principle will force the critical examination of assumptions about the future, our understanding of threats, and their relative priorities. Gates emphasizes achieving a balance between our current conflicts and the Pentagon's penchant to plan toward more canonical, conventional scenarios. The Secretary believes that the Pentagon is devoted to postulated longer term challenges that have little to do with current conflicts and more likely threats. He used the term Next-War-itis to describe a prism that distorts the Services' ability to see military affairs clearly and objectively. 2 The concept of balance is central to today's security debate, but it is a complex problem rather than a simple equation. To America's ongoing battles in Afghanistan and Iraq have highlighted limitations in our understanding of the complexity of modern warfare. Furthermore, our cultural prism has retarded the institutionalization of capabilities needed to prevail in stabilization and counterinsurgency missions. An ongoing debate about future threats is often framed as a dichotomous choice between counterinsurgency and conventional war. This oversimplifies defense planning and resource allocation decisions. Instead of fundamentally different approaches, we should expect competitors who will employ all forms of war, perhaps simultaneously. Such multimodal threats are often called hybrid threats. Hybrid adversaries employ combinations of capabilities to gain an asymmetric advantage. Thus, the choice is not simply one of preparing for long-term stability operations or high-intensity conflict. We must be able to do both simultaneously against enemies far more ruthless than today's. This essay widens the aperture of the current debate to account for this threat. It compares and contrasts four competing perspectives and evaluates them for readiness and risk implications. This risk assessment argues that the hybrid threat presents the most operational risk in the near-to midterm. Accordingly, it concludes that hybrid threats are a better focal point for considering alternative joint force postures.
Hybrid warfare and hybrid threats today and tomorrow: towards an analytical framework
Journal on Baltic Security, 2019
This article first traces the origin of hybrid warfare and the label game surrounding the concept, asking whether it is merely old wine in a new bottle, and if so, whether it is still a useful concept. It is found that while being old wine in new bottles, it is still a good wine well worth drinking. While there is not much new in the concept itself, it is a useful tool to think about past wars, today's wars and the wars of the future. Thereafter, this paper analyses how hybrid warfare and hybrid threats are to be understood in the context of peace, conflict and war. It is shown how hybrid warfare and threats fit into our traditional understanding of conflict dynamics.
Hybrid Warfare Through the lens of Strategic Theory
Defense & Security Analysis, 2019
Hybrid warfare is the latest of the terms/concepts that have been used within the defense community in the last three decades to label contemporary warfare. It has been officially adopted in the core strategic documents of NATO, EU, and national governments and has already inspired many articles, policy papers and books; however, this paper is unique in the sense that it approaches hybrid warfare from the perspective of strategic theory, which assumes that all wars throughout history have shared certain common characteristics. Analyzing hybrid warfare concept through the lens of strategic theory, this paper argues that hybrid warfare does not merit the adoption as a doctrinal concept. Strategic theory instead, which lies at the nexus of all dimensions of warfare, provides a better viewpoint to approach contemporary warfare. It concludes that efforts should be directed towards exploring warfare under the light of eternal principles instead of proving the emergence of new types of warfare.
Hybrid Warfare, Wars, and Threats: A Conceptual Analysis
This thesis strives to raise and answer three questions about the concept of hybrid warfare: What concepts of hybrid warfare exist so far? How similar or different are they? How useful are they from conceptual standpoint? The questions are answered by a conceptual analysis consisting of survey of existing concepts, their comparison and detailed evaluation of two of them on the basis of criteria of conceptualization. The answers revealed several important issues of the concept. Firstly, there are too many different concepts of hybrid warfare, often formulated with insufficient care for previous debates and already established concepts. Secondly, the formulated concepts of hybrid warfare are often different to a degree, which calls into question the claim, that all of them are trying to capture the same phenomenon. Lastly, even the better elaborated of the hybrid warfare concepts seem to be rather poorly conceptualized and not very useful. These three answers together cast shadow of doubt on the currently popular concept of hybrid warfare. The results of this work call for more careful thinking on whether and how the use of this concept is helping or hurting both our understanding of contemporary conflicts and our defence efforts against contemporary threats.
Old Wine, New Bottles: A Theoretical Analysis of Hybrid Warfare
E-International Relations, 2021
Throughout the abounding new literature on hybrid warfare, there has been no rigorous analysis of its place within the broader pantheon of strategic theory – while such an approach can help military practitioners and analysts understand the strategic significance and theoretical pedigree of modern hybrid warfare. Taking paradigms from classical strategic theory and contrasting them with modern-day practices in so-called hybrid warfare allows analysts to identify whether these methods are truly new and where such practices fit into the broader field of strategic studies. In doing so, it is shown that hybrid warfare is far from new - nor is it fit to serve as a useful doctrinal concept.
Hybrid Warfare - On the Redesign of National Security
There is a need to improve and to develop politico-military skills dealing effectively with hybrid threats in a broad and comprehensive format. Civilian and military leadership needs to be better prepared for comprehensive interagency actions.
The Evolution of Hybrid Warfare: Implications for Strategy and the Military Profession
Parameters, 2021
The concept of hybrid war has evolved from operational-level use of military means and methods in war toward strategic-level use of nonmilitary means in a gray zone below the threshold of war. This article considers this evolution and its implications for strategy and the military profession by contrasting past and current use of the hybrid war concept and raising critical questions for policy and military practitioners.
Hybrid warfare: minding the conceptual GAP
2018
This article addresses a series of difficulties raised by the concept of hybrid warfare. The central tenet is to demonstrate that hybrid warfare as an expression has less academic than political validity. In other words, it is more often used as a normative denunciation for Russian actions than as a term grasping the relevant experience of contemporary warfare. The article sets out to demonstrate that hybrid warfare as set out by Russia should rather be understood as a tool of integral statecraft. The article outlines the main determinants of Russian security policy and puts hybrid warfare into perspective with the main technological disruptors affect the nature of contemporary warfare. The article finally advocates for a clearer division of work between NATO and the EU in countering hybrid threats.