[Murat Çalışkan]
Since Russia started its large-scale military operation against Ukraine, there has not been a sound discussion about Russia’s hybrid warfare which has been promoted as an “example for hybrid warfare” by NATO and the EU particularly after Russia’s annexation of Crimea in March 2014. A few months after the invasion of Crimea, in July 2014, NATO Secretary General Anders Fogh Rasmussen stated that “we call it hybrid warfare: a combination of traditional methods and more sophisticated covert military operations combined with sophisticated information and disinformation operations” during his speech to the Atlantic Council.
NATO’s Adoption of Hybrid Warfare
Starting from the Wales Summit in 2014, NATO reaffirmed its commitment to the fight against “hybrid threats” in every summit meeting, which provides a strategic direction for Alliance activities. Although the academic debate in defense discussions has recently reached a consensus that the notion of “hybrid war/warfare” is flawed and it has to be approached cautiously, there has been numerous publications, news, official announcements referring to Russia’s operation as an example of hybrid warfare, claiming that Russia operationalized a new form of warfare which cannot be characterized as a classic military campaign and presenting hybrid conflicts as the most likely form of future of warfare. One scholar among many others, for instance, opined in 2015: “While traditional combat still remains a possibility, it will no longer be the primary means to victory on the battlefield of the 21st century. Hybrid challenges have become reality. The “Russian” model of hybrid war will be a defining feature of the future security environment.”
Is Ukraine War Hybrid?
However, Russia’s current war in Ukraine appears to be purely conventional. The present war analysis revolve around logistics, combined arms operations, air superiority, geography, terrain characteristics, morale and will of soldiers, military intelligence, whether Russia’s use of force is in tune with its policy goals or whether Russia planned a feasible operational end-state etc., all of which can be considered as the basic tenets of a conventional war and strategy, very much akin to the Second World War.
Any analyst looking wars through the lens of hybrid warfare mindset must have been perplexed. Based on the main characteristics of hybrid warfare promoted so far in defense discussions, one would have expected to see that Russia, as a hybrid actor, had shaped both physical and psychological battlefield before the operation started, manipulated Ukrainians’ thought, made Ukrainians lose their will of power, used irregular forces decisively alongside its regular forces, carried out a ferocious disinformation campaign to the degree that it affects the direction of war. None of them exists. Moreover, it is even possible to say that Ukraine executed an information warfare more successfully than Russia during the initial phases of the war. Information warfare and the use of irregular forces, main characteristics of hybrid warfare, are still included in the current war analysis, but as part of the whole operation, as it must be, rather than the main determiners of the war.
Hybrid Warfare: A Hype?
I think it is now fair to ask what all the hybrid warfare hype was about? Among other reasons, I would like to discuss “presentism,” which means, according to Colin S. Gray, “the tendency to perceive the current problems as unique and a failure to observe historical continuities” or as Paul Barnes describes “privileging the observed present over the experience of the past.” In a similar manner, Christ Tuck points to the common fallacy of generalizing from the specifics. According to Tuck, hybrid warfare seems to be redefined in relation to the characteristics of each new conflict. First, “Frank Hoffman—pioneer of hybrid warfare— generalised about hybrid war from the specifics of the armed conflict between Israel and Hezbollah in Lebanon in 2006; McCuen generalised from the specific state-building conflicts of Iraq and Afghanistan; and more recently, hybrid war has been generalised as a phenomenon from the specifics of Russian activities in Crimea and the Donbas.” Furthermore, since the end of the Cold War, there has been a long list of new theories created to conceptualize contemporary warfare, most of which was presented as the wars of 21st century; new wars, fourth generation warfare, Revolutions in Military Affairs, asymmetric wars etc.
Antulio Echevarria argues that labelling contemporary warfare became a habit rather than a conscious reflection. Indeed, following the Russian invasion of Crimea in 2014, Russian warfare had first been labelled as “hybrid warfare,” then as “grey-zone warfare” and “political warfare;” sometimes in order to highlight the simultaneous use of military and non-military means, sometimes to indicate the effective use of solely informational or non-military means, or sometimes to describe a combination of various tactical means encompassed by the armed conflict. Until recently, the last three concepts mentioned above have been in use in defense discussions while the previously popularized concepts have almost faded away. Most probably, the term hybrid warfare will be used much less after Russia’s current war in Ukraine.
Presentism and Theories of War
I do not claim that the new theories of war are totally useless. Each has provided valuable analysis of modern warfighting. However, they did more harm than good to the degree they are infected with presentism and disconnected with historical continuities, as in the case of hybrid warfare which postulates a convergence in the modes of warfare. It is true that there has been a trend of blurring in the modes, means and organizations of warfare due to the technological advancement, increased connectivity and globalisation. It is also true that this trend has enabled state actors with new unconventional capabilities while enabling non-state actors with conventional capabilities.
However, moulding this trend of blurring into a specific warfare definition, which is the combination of regular and irregular warfare, causes to lose flexibility and adaptability which is necessary for identifying the character of each war. Hybrid warfare becomes easily another category with its own capital letters. Looking at the Russia-Ukraine War, while the connectivity allows Ukrainian President Zelensky to address the US Parliament members on live during the war, or it enables Ukrainian Army to hit Russian logistics convoy in the deep rear of operational area and to watch the impact simultaneously via the cameras of unmanned aerial vehicles (drones), it does not necessarily lead to a convergence of regular and irregular war. It is basically a conventional war.
Fundamentals of War and Strategy
Presentism—and the flawed concepts sprang from presentism— usually stems from the lack of knowledge on history, war and strategy. Therefore, the best solution to the presentism, as suggested by Donald Stoker and Craig Whiteside, is to stick to the fundamentals of war and strategy in order to have an ability to place the present in the context of history. Any new concept should be consistent with the nature of war and strategy, which represents the fundamental principles that do not change through time and circumstances. In other words, appreciation for the changing character of war should be nested within the nature of war. They provide us with a “basis of valuation” for any new concept that attempts to conceptualize warfare.
War is always an interactively complex business, it is “a function of interconnected variables” such as politics, adversary, military, intelligence, economy, human, culture, technology, geography, logistics and doctrine, whose weights differs by the context and circumstances. At the strategic level of war, strategists aim to articulate the best combination of these factors in order to achieve policy goals through designated ways. Technological change mainly impacts operational and tactical levels of war while the activities at the political and strategic levels hardly differs from one war to another. Both Napoleon and Hitler made the same strategic mistake by attacking Russia although their weapon systems were quite different. However, even at the operational level of war, there are some principles applicable to all wars, called “principles of war.” (You can find a short assessment of Russia’s current war in Ukraine here from the perspective of principles of war).
Nuances of Russian Strategies in Crimea, Eastern Ukraine and Syria?
For those who are familiar with strategic studies, it is not surprising to see that Russia does not employ hybrid warfare in its current war against Ukraine because it has never done so. Russia has been relatively good in making strategy up until this war. Under the broader policy goal of being a great power again, Russia wanted to create a new order in Crimea whereas its aim was to create controlled chaos and to force Kiev to acknowledge Moscow’s regional hegemony in Eastern Ukraine. The purpose in Syria was to dilute the Western influence in the Middle East.
It has chosen three different sets of “ways and means” in its three-consequential engagements. In 2014, with the help of enablers unique to Crimea, such as pre-deployed military bases on the peninsula and the presence of a pro-Russian civil population, Russia could achieve a swift invasion by using special forces. In Eastern Ukraine, denying its direct link, it used proxy forces even though it had to provide routine fire support at a certain phase. In Syria, Russia assisted the regime’s forces mainly through air power, air defence systems, and military consultation. Had Russia employed hybrid warfare, we would expect it to have used a combination of military and non-military tools in each case. While the non-military means in Crimea were quite notable, the tools used in Syria were rather conventional. In each case, Russia has used different instruments tailored for circumstances to achieve its policy goals. Its authoritarian regime provided Russia with a relative advantage of quick decision-making, effective statecraft and high integration at all levels.
While concepts and categories are helpful in terms of understanding the main characteristics of particular wars, i.e., state-to-state, state-to-non-state, and provide models for defence planning, they are intellectual constructs of our choice. A war at a particular time might take any form in along a spectrum of conflict or might take more than one form subsequently or simultaneously. Current war in Ukraine, which has been conventional so far might switch to an unconventional one if Russia achieves its objectives and Ukraine continues to resist, or we might witness the simultaneous use of irregular forces in some parts of the operational area, which makes it hybrid warfare if you will, as in all wars. However, focusing too much on the types of war and tactical level activities discounts the role and significance of policy and strategy. Among many other factors, “two main relationships—that between military power and political consequences, and that between interacting adversaries—determines the character of any war” and it is “strategy” that manages these two relationships.
From Concept to Doctrine: Hybrid Failure?
To some extent, presentism is normal and inescapable because all opinions and attitudes are influenced by their temporal context. However, this should not lead the official authorities to adopt unproven concepts like hybrid warfare in their strategic documents, or lead officials, analysts, military practitioners to spend their valuable time and energy for the untested concepts. Ideally, concepts become doctrine— “the institutionalised beliefs about what works in war”— only after they are tested through a painful process, approved and promulgated by a proper authority. Not all future concepts will become doctrine; many will not survive the testing process. In this respect, the concept of hybrid warfare has never become a doctrine even after NATO developed a capstone concept for countering hybrid threats in 2010.
However, the term has been frequently used in the strategic documents of NATO, the EU and member states even though it has never been tested officially. This, in fact, must have put enormous pressure on the shoulders of formal doctrine writers, who are present in each army, as they are the ones who have to make sense of it all. Perhaps this is why the Air-Land Battle doctrine is the last successful doctrine, and there is an absence of a formal military concept and doctrine in the West, which postulates an applicable theory against contemporary challenges.
Last but not least, presentism not only causes the invention of the flawed theories or concepts but also creates favourable circumstances to abuse them. As Paul Barnes noted, presentism and neophilia—the belief that what is observed and experienced in the battlespace is entirely novel— might lead to the creation of new theories for the purposes of “budget share or reputation” rather than conceptualization of contemporary warfare. Indeed, there have been studies suggesting that the concept of hybrid warfare was “politicized” in order to be used as a “tool in internal manoeuvring for finance, public opinion and political power”. I also discovered in my studies that “hybrid warfare” has been used as a tool for strategic communication by NATO in order to increase awareness, to catalyse the development of military capabilities and to secure a defence budget rather than an operational concept. However, as Barnes noted, this seriously endangers military thought and practice, and I believe, creates a conceptual confusion that clouds strategic thought.
Defence Budgets and Hybrid Warfare: Convenient?
Some people might argue that the use of concepts as a tool for the purpose of budget share is useful as it provides necessary awareness and funding. Indeed, on the one hand, the concept of hybrid warfare appears to have played a role of catalyst within the Western governments and NATO since 2014, in terms of increasing defence budget and improving the essential qualities such as cohesion, interoperability, resilience, adaptability or capability development. But one the other hand, one should understand that many analysts, officials, and even military practitioners respect the concept of hybrid warfare as a credible operational concept just because NATO, the EU and the Western states have adopted it in their strategic documents, which also means that they legitimized it, and they try to understand current conflicts through the lens of the concept of hybrid warfare/threats. Once understood that this concept is flawed, this significantly carries the risk of losing the trust in these organisations and future operational concepts to be adopted. In general, people have a tendency for the tangible over the abstract. The advantages gained with the use of hybrid warfare as a tool are tangible, such as a notable improvement in the capabilities, however, the damage on the strategic thought is abstract, not imminently observable. I am afraid, one of the occasions that we can directly observe this damage is the battlefield, which means that it might be too late to recover.
Murat Caliskan is a former Turkish military officer. Currently, he works as a cybersecurity analyst and gives lectures at the Université Catholique de Louvain/Belgium. His research interest include Strategic Theory, Grand/Military Strategy, Contemporary Warfare, UN Peacekeeping Operations and Belgium Foreign Policy in the UN Security Council.
