November 23, 2014
Conflict in Ukraine, Iraq and Syria during 2014 has put renewed focus on so-called ‘hybrid warfare’, in which combatants employ a mix of military and non-military tactics to achieve their objectives. While this is not a new concept, its appearance in the year’s two most pressing strategic crises has captured the attention of Western governments. The NATO Summit in September produced a commitment to ensure that the Alliance ‘is able to effectively address the specific challenges posed by hybrid warfare threats’.
The mix of tactics used on the one hand by Russia in Ukraine, and on the other by the Islamic State of Iraq and al-Sham (ISIS) in Iraq and Syria, has left Western governments uncertain as to how best to respond. While the methods used in the two theatres are by no means the same, both involve the simultaneous use of military and civil instruments, covert operations, information warfare and modern media. They might be viewed as two different models of the same phenomenon.
NATO leaders, seeing the need to act rapidly and flexibly in the face of such threats, took steps at the Wales Summit to improve military readiness. The crises have presented them with familiar questions: whether to impose sanctions, and if so upon whom; whether to engage in military action, and if so what kind; and how to support friends and allies. But the use of mixed tactics has added to the challenge by requiring greater speed and agility in decision making.
What does hybrid mean?
The fact that governments find it difficult to attach a definition to the problem that they are facing underlines why it is challenging to formulate policies to address it.
The use of the word ‘hybrid’ in this context gained currency from analysis by the US Marine Corps of operational experiences in Iraq and Afghanistan. In 2005, General James Mattis, who later served as commander of US Central Command, wrote in the US Naval Institute’s Proceedings magazine with Frank Hoffman, a retired Marine officer, about the rise of ‘irregular’ methods such as terrorism, insurgency and narco-crime. ‘Irregular challengers seek to exploit tactical advantages at a time and place of their own choosing, rather than playing by our rules. They seek to accumulate a series of small tactical effects, magnify them through the media and by information warfare, to weaken US resolve.’ The two men saw a ‘merger of different modes and means of war. This unprecedented synthesis is what we call Hybrid Warfare.’
Increasingly, the West’s adversaries sensed the advantages of mixing up tactics and gaining asymmetric advantages. The Iraq War saw the rapid rise of the use of improvised explosive devices against military targets. Insurgents engaged in urban warfare and took advantage of the close proximity of civilians in order to mount and evade attacks. In addition, the chaos was a fertile breeding ground for al-Qaeda in Iraq, the jihadist group from which ISIS later derived.
These developments shocked parts of the US military establishment into new thinking about how to address mixed threats.
In a 2007 paper for the Potomac Institute for Policy Studies, Hoffman wrote that hybrid wars ‘blend the lethality of state conflict with the fanatical and protracted fervor of irregular warfare’. According to his definition, hybrid wars ‘incorporate a range of different modes of warfare including conventional capabilities, irregular tactics and formations, terrorist acts including indiscriminate violence and coercion, and criminal disorder’. An example cited by many experts was the 2006 war between Israel and Hizbullah, in which the Israel Defense Forces found it hard to cope both in military and intelligence terms with the non-state group’s mixture of urban guerrilla warfare, hard-to-locate cells of fighters, and use of military technology including missiles and rockets.
However, the identification of hybrid threats is not without controversy. The word ‘hybrid’ simply denotes a mixture of different elements. These elements – conventional military approaches, irregular warfare, insurgency, terrorism, criminality, information operations – are not at all new. Another word that appears in this context, ‘asymmetric’, has long denoted the attempt to gain an advantage by seeking out an opponent’s weaknesses rather than simply tackling him on his own terms. Even the utility of Hizbullah as a template for hybrid operations could be questioned because of its unique nature as a non-state guerrilla movement that is also a full participant in Lebanon’s complex political system.
Nevertheless, the flexible fusion of tactics that has been seen in several theatres unsettled Western militaries that had come to believe that their superior technologies and established doctrines would give them a telling advantage against any possible enemy. What had traditionally been thought of as separate aspects of conflict were being integrated into what could be viewed as, in effect, a new mode of warfare. The introduction of hybrid warfare as a concept, albeit a vague one, was therefore useful in nudging military strategists – as well as officials and academics – to consider more flexible and effective responses. In 2014, two particular situations have highlighted the need for this: in Ukraine, and in Iraq and Syria. In each case, the fusion of tactics has compounded the difficulties for those facing them.
Ukraine
‘Russia is resorting to a hybrid war, with snap exercises, secret commandos and smuggled missiles.’ So wrote NATO’s then-secretary-general Anders Fogh Rasmussen and Supreme Allied Commander General Philip Breedlove in The Wall Street Journal. And in the Wales Summit Declaration, NATO leaders said: ‘We see a concerted campaign of violence by Russia and Russian-backed separatists aimed at destabilizing Ukraine as a sovereign state.’
The elements of Russian activity related to Ukraine have included:
•Use of Russian special forces (spetsnaz) and other Russian personnel in uniforms without insignia, to carry out various military roles, first in Crimea before its annexation by Russia, and then in other parts of eastern Ukraine. The presence of Russian military forces in Ukraine was denied by Moscow, but Western officials estimated there were 4,000–5,000 in Ukraine in August to support separatist militias. Russia sought to maintain the deniability of such operations for as long as possible;
•Russian troops were rapidly mobilized in significant numbers to carry out exercises inside Russia, close to the Ukrainian border. The forces’ stance repeatedly changed as Moscow sought to vary the pressure on Ukraine and the West;
•An extensive intelligence operation was mounted to support separatist groups;
•There was evidence of the supply of weapons and equipment from Russia to separatist forces;
•There was evidence of cyber attacks on Ukrainian systems, including the reported insertion of an espionage tool called ‘Snake’ within computers;
•A multimedia propaganda campaign in which Ukraine was relentlessly portrayed as the victim of a fascist coup, taken over by a Western puppet regime. The lives and rights of ethnic Russians were said to be under threat. Ukraine – especially Crimea – was painted as an integral part of the Russian world. The propaganda campaign extended to Western countries, where ‘troll armies’ deluged social media and news media with comments;
•Russia sought to coerce Ukraine economically by taking steps on gas exports and against businesses supporting the new government.
Assessing this combination of methods used by Moscow, experts have pointed to a January 2013 speech by General Valery Gerasimov, Russia’s chief of the general staff, in which he analyzed the Arab Spring and noted that ‘a perfectly thriving state can, in a matter of months and even days, be transformed into an arena of fierce armed conflict, become a victim of foreign intervention, and sink into a web of chaos, humanitarian catastrophe, and civil war.’
Gerasimov said (translation by Robert Coalson for the Huffington Post): ‘The very “rules of war” have changed. The role of non-military means of achieving political and strategic goals has grown, and, in many cases, they have exceeded the power of force of weapons in their effectiveness. The focus of applied methods of conflict has altered in the direction of the broad use of political, economic, informational, humanitarian, and other non-military measures – applied in coordination with the protest potential of the population. All this is supplemented by military means of a concealed character, including carrying out actions of informational conflict and the actions of special operations forces … Asymmetrical actions have come into widespread use, enabling the nullification of an enemy’s advantages in armed conflict. Among such actions are the use of special operations forces and internal opposition to create a permanently operating front through the entire territory of the enemy state.’
Experts have been quick to conclude that in Ukraine, the Russian defense and intelligence establishment was working from the very playbook that Gerasimov had identified. In a November 2014 paper published by the NATO Defense College, Heidi Reisinger and Aleksandr Golts highlighted the sophistication of Russia’s actions. Moscow created a ‘façade of legality’, for example through formal authorization of the use of armed force and the rushed referendum in Crimea. ‘The Russian hybrid model outflanked NATO’s reaction patterns,’ they wrote.
ISIS in Iraq and Syria
In its campaign in Syria and Iraq, the jihadist group ISIS is also using an effective combination of tactics to achieve multiple ends:
•It is engaging in a military campaign, massing forces to capture and hold territory;
•ISIS is pursuing political goals: declaring a caliphate, imposing its version of sharia law on the territories it captures, and taking advantage of government repression of Sunnis in Iraq, as well as the fluid civil war in Syria;
•In addition to executing many local soldiers and citizens, it is carrying out a campaign of hostage-taking and murder of Western journalists and aid workers. It is causing shock and fear both among the forces facing them and in Western countries;
•ISIS is engaging in an extensive propaganda operation, making sophisticated videos and distributing these via YouTube, social media and smartphone apps;
•By attracting Western recruits, it is posing a threat in those recruits’ home countries.
A mixture of elements has also been seen in other conflicts in developing countries. In Mali, a largely secular Tuareg uprising was in effect taken over by jihadist groups that were funded by trafficking in narcotics, cigarettes and weapons. In Nigeria, the Islamist group Boko Haram has carried out multiple types of attack, developing from an insurgency into a group equipped with military weapons and vehicles, while also engaging in terrorism and kidnapping – including the capture of hundreds of schoolgirls. Mixed tactics have also been seen in Latin America, in the ‘narco-terrorism’ of drug cartels and insurgent groups.
Responses to hybrid threats
Governments have taken the lesson that greater agility is required to address fluid and previously unseen combinations of tactics. However, they are also employing the advantages that they have, such as superior military and technological capabilities, economic clout and governmental legitimacy. It is precisely because they have these advantages that opponents seek to circumvent them asymmetrically. Hence, responses have included a mix of military steps, increased intelligence and surveillance, and economic moves such as sanctions.
In Ukraine, Western governments had no desire to intervene militarily, but wished to signal to Moscow that NATO solidarity remained strong, and that the Alliance would be ready militarily to fulfill mutual-defenee commitments should an ally be disrupted in a similar fashion. This was the message of the actions taken by NATO members to increase military presence and patrols in eastern European member countries. NATO leaders agreed a Readiness Action Plan, including a continuous air, land and sea presence in eastern member countries, and the creation of a spearhead Very High Readiness Joint Task Force.
Meanwhile, as ISIS swept into northwestern Iraq and attacked new targets in Syria, a US-led coalition was formed to oppose it. Responses again included military elements: the dispatch of growing numbers of military advisers to Iraqi and Kurdish forces, and air strikes against ISIS targets in both countries. However, the leaders who authorized these steps were well aware that they were not sufficient. In a purely military context, no campaign could succeed in the end without a ground presence, but the dispatch of combat forces to a new theatre was not on the agenda. The strategy was to help local forces develop and use their capabilities, though in Syria this remained very problematic. More broadly it was clear that this type of conventional response would not be adequate to deal with ‘hybrid’ threats. It would be important to fight back in the battle of the narrative, countering powerful propaganda messages. But this was challenging for democratic governments, posing particular issues regarding the use of modern media. NATO and its member governments were, therefore, putting new emphasis on ‘strategic communications’. Meanwhile, intelligence agencies were playing an important role.
Overall, countering hybrid threats will require new, adjustable, cross-government, cross-Alliance responses. But this will pose difficult questions: how to fashion whole-of-government responses, and coordinate these across NATO, as well as other actors, institutions and coalitions? How to introduce sufficient speed into detection and assessment of a hybrid campaign, and into deciding and executing responses? How to counter opponents’ propaganda and innovative use of media while staying within democratic principles and the law? For militaries, there are also questions: how to obtain the most agile military capabilities without sacrificing important present strengths, while staying within budgets that in many countries are being reduced? While governments craft policies on these questions, it is open to adversaries to again adjust tactics so as to stay ahead of them.
Volume 20, Comment 40 – November 2014
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