NATO and Countering Hybrid Warfa

Daniel Byman

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This series—featuring scholars from the Futures Lab, the International Security Program, and across CSIS—explores emerging challenges and opportunities that NATO is likely to confront after its 75th anniversary.

In the future, NATO countries must step up their efforts to protect against Russian-backed extremists as well as Russian hybrid warfare.

Countries in NATO have long-battled against terrorist and other violent extremist organizations. Ethnic terrorism plagued Northern Ireland and Spain for many years, and left-right violence troubled many European states. State-sponsored groups, Hezbollah, and various Palestinian organizations targeted Europe in the 1970s and 1980s. Well before 9/11, France saw a series of jihadist terrorist attacks that emerged out of the Algerian civil war in the 1990s. In the post-9/11 era, Al Qaeda prioritized attacks on Europe, launching devastating strikes in London, Madrid, and other areas, and after 2014 the Islamic State followed suit with strikes throughout much of Europe. Europe also sees regular anti-immigrant and other white supremacist violence.

NATO itself, however, has played only a limited role in fighting terrorism in Europe. Much of the struggle has involved intelligence cooperation, and that has usually been done bilaterally. In addition, domestic intelligence services have often played the leading role, and these are not integrated with NATO. The alliance did play important roles in fighting jihadist-linked violence in out-of-area operations, however. Wars in Afghanistan against Al Qaeda and in Syria against the Islamic State involved NATO forces.

Jihadist and right-wing violence will remain concerning, and intelligence agencies should rightly focus on these dangers. NATO similarly has an important role to play in combating the emerging threat of Russian hybrid warfare. Hybrid warfare involves a mix of conventional and unconventional security instruments, ranging from traditional conventional warfare to information warfare and support for terrorism. Before Moscow’s outright invasion of Ukraine in 2024, it was already employing a mix of methods—including assassinations, disinformation, subversion, and support for insurgents—to undermine its adversaries.