Dr. Tarik Solmaz
Since Russia’s ambiguous intervention in Ukraine in 2014, the concept of hybrid warfare has gained attention in Western academic, defense policy, military practitioner, and media circles. Despite its rising popularity, the concept hybrid warfare is analytically problematic. One of the reasons for this is that the existing conceptualization of hybrid warfare is too broad for theoretical analysis and defense policymaking. Hybrid warfare is commonly described as a way of attaining strategic goals by using a mixture of kinetic and non-kinetic instruments while remaining below conventional armed conflict. With this understanding, the hybrid mode of warfare may take a wide variety of shapes and be practiced in different ways.
The examples of case studies that have been labeled as hybrid warfare span from Russia’s operations in Crimea and the Donbas region, to China’s intimidatory activities against Taiwan, to Iran’s destabilizing behavior around the Middle East, to North Korea’s hostile and provocative actions towards South Korea. Apart from perhaps being categorized under the single term hybrid warfare, there is little evidence to suggest a strong connection between them.
Given that hybrid warfare is an umbrella term encompassing a broad range of activities, creating a taxonomy to facilitate a more nuanced understanding of its diverse manifestations would be helpful. In this sense, this paper proposes applying David Kilcullen’s famous taxonomy, originally used in counterinsurgency, to differentiate between population-centric and enemy-centric approaches to the hybrid warfare model. Before that, however, let us briefly explain what Kilcullen means by population-centric and enemy-centric approaches within the context of counterinsurgency.
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