The twenty-first century inaugurated a new era of warfare which has shifted debates on the nature of the means of which war is fought. With great technological advancement, methods of war have changed drastically in just three decades, making it far more complex than any previous point in history. In light of these changes, scholars in the mid-2000s began to attempt to find a word to describe new strategies, and pinpoint the commonalities. US Marine Corps Lieutenant Colonel Frank Hoffman coined the term “hybrid warfare” to describe modern tactics and strategies. Though this term has been adopted by scholars, strategists, and policymakers primarily in the West since, there is no agreed total definition to hybrid warfare. What is generally agreed in the US and Europe is that hybrid warfare is a style of using military and non-military means interchangeably and in conjunction to achieve political aims. What distinguishes it from historical examples of this is that it uses modern technological, political, information, and social systems, and does so secretly to avoid attribution. It is the context of this debate which brought together scholars from the West and Russia in 2019 to King’s College in London. The King’s Centre for Strategic Communications assembled researchers from the United States, Europe, and Russia to conduct a comparative overview of definitions, strategies, and developments in hybrid war.
The book first compares the approaches to hybrid warfare from Western, particularly American lenses, with those presented by Russian counterparts. According to authors David Betz and Ofer Friedman, hybrid warfare from the Western perspective is the result of states and militaries blending military and non-military means to achieve political goals. The use of sabotage, propaganda, or non-military tools is heavily present. While the Western perspective focuses on operational and minor strategic means, Russian analysts offer a separate perspective. Russian strategic thinking sees “hybrid war” as different from “hybrid warfare”. While “warfare” is a method of conducting war, war itself may happen outside of traditional means. Therefore, conducting hybrid warfare is one method of conducting war. In both cases, mirror-imaging results in misunderstandings for how the other side conducts hybrid war.
The “information warfare” component of the book is set apart because of its vast complexity. Authors Mervyn Frost and Nicholas Michelsen assert that information is a critical part of not just war in the modern day, but for state sovereignty itself. International attention from social media and the internet has amplified the need for international ethics, which is the primary purpose of informational warfare. Propaganda and mass communications are needed for a state to appeal to international ethics in order to justify its actions. That is because for a state to engage in international relations, it must adhere to ethics in order to be treated ethically – at least in principle. Therefore, deception is treated as information warfare, which motivates actors to compel states to fall into the “ethical trap”. While the US has struggled to adapt to informational warfare challenges, Russia has controlled informational challenges within its borders and utilized its effectiveness in its active measures operations.
Lastly, these examinations are put into the context of the Islamic State’s operations during the 2010s. IS employed an unprecedented use of hybrid and information warfare during its campaigns as groups such as Al-Qaeda have in the past, but differed in that it acted as a quasi-state actor. The Battle of Mosul, the struggle for the Iraqi government and its allies to regain the city from IS, saw the organization leverage the internet for strategic gain outside of its military defeats. It managed to promote “suicide mysticism”, foot-soldier heroism, and strategic denialism online in order to increase recruitment, even as it lost territory. It is examples like this that make Islamic State, according to Vladimir Sotnikov, an existential strategic challenge to the entire world. Its ideologically-centered structure which relies on strong and adaptable use for informational warfare campaigns can easily be replicated in any region.
IS’ strategies for media engagement even in times of strategic losses may symbolize, therefore, “a new paradigm of hybrid warfare”. Even as academics struggle to find a single definition for hybrid warfare, and offer differing analyses for methods, it is important to recognize the strategies and frequencies which actors will employ in the modern age. For both state and non-state actors, information warfare is now just one of these methods.
The comparative analysis offered by the book is a tool for readers to understand methods in hybrid and information warfare, as well as how approaches differ in the West and Russia. Mirror-imaging has long troubled US-Russia engagement, and is one of the reasons for geopolitical hostility. One segment by Georgy Filiminov echoes Russian military establishment views that “Color Revolutions” are the primary method for American-conducted hybrid warfare. Russian strategic thinking towards hybrid warfare, therefore, is that American execution of it is uniformly similar with active measures taken by Russia. On the other hand, American authors throughout the book highlight Russian hybrid actions as purely beyond the scope of conventional war.
The concepts of hybrid warfare and information warfare are old, as states and non-state actors have historically sought to combine military and non-military means to achieve political goals. The distinction the book makes is putting this in the context of new technology, geopolitical balances, and methods of war. Additionally, the assessments made of the existential nature IS inspiration would pose beyond its projected military defeat proved to be accurate. Since 2019, methods of information warfare have become far more sophisticated as the internet and social media have further democratized.
On the surface, there seems to exist an asymmetry between the Western and Russian narratives in the discourses presented. The arguments for Western understandings of hybrid warfare focuses on operational methods, with the end goals not serving as a critical component to hybrid warfare. The Russian narratives, on the other hand, are not as grounded, and focus far more on the end-goals to a hybrid campaign. Understanding this view is still crucial in order to understand methods of hybrid and information warfare by Russia. To a Western reader, equal consideration between observation of objective strategies employed and geopolitical paranoia may appear to be a false equivalence. Regardless, understanding security concerns is the first step to establishing understanding in times of escalating tensions.