Unconventional war

Hybrid warfare is an emerging, but ill-defined notion. It refers to the use of unconventional methods as part of a multi-domain warfighting approach. These methods aim to disrupt and disable an opponent’s actions without engaging in open hostilities.

To put it simply, hybrid warfare entails an interplay or fusion of conventional as well as unconventional instruments of power and tools of subversion. These instruments or tools are blended in a synchronized manner to exploit the vulnerabilities of an antagonist and achieve synergistic effects.

As stated by NATO, hybrid warfare can include a variety of tactics such as terrorism, migration, piracy, corruption and ethnic conflict. It can occur across the political, economic and civil spheres, with options for pursuing strategic ends just below the threshold of traditional armed conflict – what some experts also call grey-zone tactics. Such warfare conducted in the “grey zone” of conflict might be due to the ambiguity of international law, ambiguity of actions and attribution, or because the impact of the activities does not justify a response. Advances in technology have allowed hybrid strategies to be executed in new ways, such as cyber attacks and information warfare.

There are two distinct characteristics of hybrid warfare. First, the line between war and peace time is rendered obscure. This means that it is hard to identify or discern the war threshold. War becomes elusive as it becomes difficult to operationalize it. Hybrid warfare below the threshold of war or direct overt violence pays dividends despite being easier, cheaper and less risky than kinetic operations. It is much more feasible to, let’s say, sponsor and fan disinformation in collaboration with non-state actors than it is to roll tanks into another country’s territory or scramble fighter jets into its airspace. The costs and risks are markedly less, but the damage is real.

The second defining characteristic of hybrid warfare relates to ambiguity and attribution. Hybrid attacks are generally marked by a lot of vagueness. Such obscurity is wittingly created and enlarged by the hybrid actors in order to complicate attribution as well as response. In other words, the country that is targeted is either not able to detect a hybrid attack or not able to attribute it to a state that might be perpetrating or sponsoring it. By exploiting the thresholds of detection and attribution, the hybrid actor makes it difficult for the targeted state to develop policy and strategic responses.

Traditionally, war was conducted on a battlefield, between two states in a defined territory. This is no longer the case. As technology has become more advanced, and the enemy more sophisticated, states have moved further away from this traditional warfare style. Now warfare is conducted across multiple battle domains: air, land, sea, space and through cyberspace, and often simultaneously.

The term hybrid warfare originally referred to irregular non-state actors with advanced military capabilities. For example, in the 2006 Israel-Lebanon War, Hezbollah employed a host of different tactics against Israel. They included guerilla warfare, innovative use of technology and effective information campaigning.  Following that war, in 2007, American defence researcher Frank Hoffman expanded on the terms “hybrid threat” and “hybrid warfare” to describe employing multiple, diverse tactics simultaneously against an opponent.

The U.S.-led NATO military cartel has tested novel modes of hybrid warfare against its self-declared adversaries, including economic warfare, cyber warfare, information warfare, psychological warfare and cognitive warfare.

Russia’s approach to Ukraine in 2023 has involved a combination of activities, including disinformation, economic manipulation, use of proxies and insurgencies, diplomatic pressure and military actions. The sabotage of the Nord Stream gas pipelines in the Baltic Sea by unknown agency highlight how the energy sector and critical infrastructure can be strategically targeted as an unconventional warfare method.

The Israel Defense Forces (IDF) used an artificial intelligence (AI) system called Habsora (Hebrew for “The Gospel”) to select targets in the war on Hamas in Gaza in 2023. The system has reportedly been used to find more targets for bombing, to link locations to Hamas operatives, and to estimate likely numbers of civilian deaths in advance.