Hybrid warfare

Based on Wikipedia: Hybrid warfare

The War That Isn't Quite a War

In the summer of 2006, roughly three thousand Hezbollah fighters held off thirty thousand Israeli troops using weapons and tactics that military strategists had never seen combined quite this way. The guerrillas communicated through encrypted cell phones, tracked Israeli movements with thermal imaging equipment, shot down helicopters, and destroyed some of the world's most advanced tanks with precision-guided missiles fired from hidden bunkers. They even flew surveillance drones.

This wasn't supposed to happen.

Non-state actors—groups that aren't official governments—weren't supposed to possess nation-state weapons. Guerrilla fighters weren't supposed to understand modern information warfare well enough to dominate the global narrative within hours of each engagement. And irregular forces embedded among civilians weren't supposed to fight a conventional military to a standstill.

Israel didn't lose that war on the battlefield. But they lost it everywhere else. The overwhelming global perception was of Israeli defeat, because Hezbollah understood something that traditional militaries were only beginning to grasp: modern conflict happens on multiple battlefields simultaneously, and the physical one might be the least important.

Welcome to hybrid warfare.

What Makes War "Hybrid"

The term was formally introduced by Frank Hoffman in 2007, though the concept is far older than the name. Hoffman defined it as the simultaneous use of multiple types of warfare by adversaries who understand that success requires blending different approaches to fit different goals at different moments.

Think of it as a spectrum. At one end sits traditional warfare—uniformed armies, clear battle lines, formal declarations, tanks and aircraft carriers. At the other end sits pure terrorism—small cells, civilian targets, psychological impact over territorial gain. Hybrid warfare occupies the vast middle ground, combining elements of both while adding tools that neither typically employs: cyberattacks, disinformation campaigns, economic pressure, diplomatic manipulation, and legal maneuvering (sometimes called "lawfare").

The United States Joint Forces Command put it this way: a hybrid threat is "any adversary that simultaneously and adaptively employs a tailored mix of conventional, irregular, terrorism and criminal means in the operational battle space." The key word is "simultaneously." A hybrid adversary doesn't choose between conventional and unconventional methods—they use all of them at once, shifting emphasis based on what's working.

The North Atlantic Treaty Organization, or NATO, uses a simpler definition: adversaries who can "simultaneously employ conventional and non-conventional means adaptively in pursuit of their objectives." But both definitions gesture at the same uncomfortable truth. The neat categories that military planners use to organize their thinking—conventional versus irregular, state versus non-state, kinetic versus information—are being deliberately scrambled by adversaries who don't respect those boundaries.

The Three Battlefields

Hybrid warfare theorists identify three distinct spaces where these conflicts unfold.

The first is the conventional battlefield—the physical terrain where troops and weapons clash. This remains important, but it's no longer sufficient. Victory here doesn't guarantee victory overall.

The second battlefield is the indigenous population of the conflict zone. Winning hearts and minds isn't just a nice-to-have; it determines whether the local population provides intelligence, shelter, and recruits to one side or the other. When Hezbollah fighters dispersed among Lebanese civilians, they weren't just hiding—they were embedded in a support network that made them extraordinarily difficult to uproot.

The third battlefield is the international community. Global public opinion shapes what interventions are possible, what sanctions get applied, which side receives military aid, and how history remembers the conflict. A military that wins every engagement but loses the narrative war may find its victories hollow.

Traditional militaries are optimized for the first battlefield. Hybrid adversaries understand all three.

Why Conventional Armies Struggle

Picture a chess grandmaster sitting down for what they think will be a chess match, only to discover their opponent is simultaneously playing chess, poker, and basketball—and expects the grandmaster to compete in all three.

This is roughly the situation conventional militaries face against hybrid adversaries. Their doctrine, training, command structures, and equipment are all designed for one type of conflict. When the nature of the conflict shifts—sometimes hour by hour—they struggle to adapt.

Hard power often proves insufficient. Overwhelming force doesn't deter an adversary who operates below the threshold where massive retaliation seems justified. You can't bomb a disinformation campaign. You can't send tanks against economic pressure.

Even identifying the adversary becomes difficult. When Russian soldiers appeared in Crimea in 2014 wearing unmarked uniforms, the international community struggled to even name what was happening. Were these Russian troops? Moscow denied it. Mercenaries? Volunteers? Local separatists who happened to have Russian military equipment? The ambiguity was the point.

This concept—operating in what strategists call the "grey zone" below the threshold of formal state-level aggression—is intimately connected to hybrid warfare. States apply propaganda campaigns, economic pressure, and proxies in ways that don't quite trigger the tripwires that would justify a conventional military response. Each individual action seems minor or deniable. The cumulative effect can be devastating.

An Ancient Art With Modern Tools

Here's the uncomfortable truth that military historians keep pointing out: none of this is actually new.

The American Revolutionary War combined George Washington's Continental Army with irregular militia forces—a hybrid approach that confounded British commanders trained for European-style set-piece battles. Napoleon's forces in Spain faced a similar challenge, as British regulars cooperated with Spanish guerrillas who refused to fight conventionally.

Between 1837 and 1840, a Conservative peasant rebel leader named Rafael Carrera waged a successful campaign in Guatemala against numerically superior, better-armed Liberal forces by combining classical guerrilla tactics with conventional operations. His hybrid approach gave him advantages that raw firepower couldn't overcome.

The Soviet Union pulled off an elegant piece of hybrid warfare in 1944. While the Tuvan Army was away in Europe fighting alongside the Red Army against Nazi Germany, Moscow successfully pressured the Tuvan People's Republic to "ask" for membership in the Soviet Union. No shots fired. No invasion. Just political pressure applied at precisely the right moment.

The Vietnam War saw both sides employing hybrid tactics. The United States used the Central Intelligence Agency to support civil war parties in Laos and Cambodia, as well as ethnic groups inside Vietnam. The Soviet Union backed the Viet Cong militia. Neither superpower relied solely on conventional force.

What has changed isn't the concept but the tools available.

Technology's Force Multiplier

The end of the Cold War created a world with one preponderant military power. American conventional superiority was so overwhelming that direct military confrontation became essentially suicidal for potential adversaries. This didn't end conflict—it redirected it toward methods that leveraged the weaknesses of conventional military structures.

At the same time, advanced weapons became available at bargain prices. Technologies that once required state-level resources are now accessible to anyone with money and connections. Hezbollah fighters in 2006 had precision-guided missiles, cruise missiles capable of damaging naval vessels, and anti-aircraft systems that could threaten helicopters—capabilities that would have been exclusive to major powers a generation earlier.

Commercial technologies proved equally transformative. Cellular networks enable encrypted communication. Off-the-shelf drones provide surveillance capabilities once reserved for military budgets. Digital networks allow propaganda to spread globally in minutes. The Islamic State demonstrated this vividly, adapting its tactics almost immediately when the United States began aerial bombing—reducing the use of checkpoints and large convoys, dispersing among civilian populations, and using footage of civilian casualties from airstrikes as recruiting material.

The sophistication gap between state and non-state actors has narrowed dramatically. More importantly, non-state actors can now persist within the modern system in ways that were previously impossible. They're not just irritants to be swept aside; they're durable participants in international affairs.

Russia's Approach: New Generation Warfare

Russia's involvement in Syria and Ukraine has made it the most-studied practitioner of what the West calls hybrid warfare. Russian forces have combined traditional combat, economic influence, cyber operations, private military contractors, and disinformation campaigns in ways that challenge Western response frameworks.

The Wagner Group—a private military company with close ties to the Russian government—allows Moscow to project force while maintaining plausible deniability. Are those Russian soldiers? Technically, no. They're contractors from a private company. That the company's interests happen to align perfectly with Russian state interests is treated as coincidental.

But some analysts argue that applying the term "hybrid warfare" to Russian strategy fundamentally misunderstands what Moscow is doing. Jānis Bērziņš, director of Latvia's Center for Security and Strategic Research, has written extensively on why the Western framework doesn't capture Russian thinking. The Russians have their own concept: New Generation Warfare. While "hybrid warfare" is essentially an American military concept—focused on the irregular methods that adversaries use against conventionally superior forces—New Generation Warfare includes conventional operations as just one tool among many.

In other words, hybrid warfare might be part of New Generation Warfare, but it doesn't define it. The distinction matters because it affects how you respond. If you think you're facing an irregular threat that might escalate to conventional conflict, you prepare differently than if you understand yourself to be facing a comprehensive strategy that treats every domain—military, economic, informational, diplomatic, cyber—as equally important.

Michael Kofman, a senior research scientist at the Center for Naval Analyses, offered a blunter assessment in 2018. He suggested that the West's fascination with hybrid warfare was essentially "an unintelligible Western reaction, after decades of wars of choice against paltry adversaries, to confrontation with another power that is capable across the full spectrum of conflict."

Ouch.

The Accusation Game

One of the more interesting features of hybrid warfare discourse is that everyone accuses everyone else of practicing it.

General Philip Breedlove testified before the United States Senate in February 2016 that Russia was using refugees to weaken Europe—deliberately directing migration flows to destabilize economies and create social unrest. Finnish officials have expressed similar concerns about potential Russian manipulation of migration across their shared border.

Moscow, for its part, accuses Washington of conducting hybrid warfare against Russia through the "color revolutions"—the series of popular uprisings in former Soviet states that toppled governments aligned with Moscow. Russia sees the 2014 Maidan uprising in Ukraine, which overthrew a Russia-friendly president, as exhibit A.

Russian Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov, speaking at the Valdai Discussion Club in November 2014, turned the term back on its accusers:

It is an interesting term, but I would apply it above all to the United States and its war strategy—it is truly a hybrid war aimed not so much at defeating the enemy militarily as at changing the regimes in the states that pursue a policy Washington does not like. It is using financial and economic pressure, information attacks, using others on the perimeter of a corresponding state as proxies and of course information and ideological pressure through externally financed non-governmental organisations. Is it not a hybrid process and not what we call war?

Iran has entered this discourse as well, with Iranian officials accusing the United States of waging hybrid warfare against their country. Meanwhile, Western analysts describe Iran's regional strategy—supporting Houthi rebels in Yemen, backing various militias throughout the Middle East, conducting cyber operations and information warfare—as a textbook example of hybrid conflict. The British Broadcasting Corporation has described Iran's approach as "a classic war of the weak against the strong," borrowing tactics from "the Russian playbook."

Everyone sees themselves as the victim of hybrid warfare and their adversaries as its practitioners.

The Iraq-Islamic State Conflict

The conflict between Iraq and the Islamic State of Iraq and the Levant (sometimes called ISIS or ISIL) provides a particularly complex example of hybrid warfare, because both sides ended up employing hybrid tactics.

The Islamic State itself is a non-state actor with transnational aspirations—they sought to establish a caliphate spanning multiple countries. Their methods combined irregular guerrilla tactics, structured conventional military formations, and brutal terrorism deployed strategically for psychological and recruiting purposes. They were simultaneously an insurgency, an army, and a terrorist organization.

Iraq's response was equally hybrid. Facing an adversary that its conventional military couldn't handle, Baghdad turned to a coalition of state and non-state actors: the United States providing air power and advisers, Kurdish Peshmerga fighters with their own regional agenda, sectarian Shia militias with ties to Iran, and Syrian opposition groups being trained across the border.

The United States found itself in the unusual position of being a hybrid participant in someone else's war—applying traditional air power in support of a shifting coalition of forces with overlapping but distinct goals, operating against a non-state actor that controlled territory and governed populations like a state.

The conflict illustrated how hybrid warfare can create situations where the traditional categories break down entirely. Who was the state actor? Which side was "regular" and which "irregular"? The questions barely made sense anymore.

Why the Concept Frustrates Analysts

Not everyone finds "hybrid warfare" a useful framework. Academic critics argue that the concept is vague, its constitutive elements are disputed, and its historical basis involves significant distortions.

The vagueness criticism cuts deepest. If hybrid warfare can include conventional military operations, irregular tactics, terrorism, criminal activity, cyberattacks, disinformation, economic pressure, diplomatic manipulation, and essentially any other method an adversary might employ, what exactly is it not? The term risks becoming a catch-all for "anything we find threatening and don't quite know how to categorize."

There's also a debate about whether hybrid warfare represents anything genuinely new or simply irregular methods that weaker actors have always used against conventionally superior forces. Guerrillas have always mixed tactics. States have always used proxies. Propaganda has accompanied conflict since the first war. Calling it "hybrid" might just be putting a new label on an old reality.

The term's military origins create additional problems. It emerged from American military thinking about asymmetric threats—adversaries who couldn't match American conventional power and therefore sought other means. This framework may not translate well to understanding how peer competitors like Russia or China think about conflict, because they don't necessarily see themselves as weaker powers seeking workarounds.

And yet the concept persists, because military planners and policymakers clearly feel they're dealing with something that their existing frameworks don't adequately capture. The 2017 establishment of the European Centre of Excellence for Countering Hybrid Threats, headquartered in Helsinki, suggests that even if the term is imperfect, the underlying concern is real enough to warrant institutional responses.

The Grey Zone Problem

Perhaps the most practically important aspect of hybrid warfare is what happens below the threshold of conventional conflict—in the "grey zone" where actions don't quite justify a military response but still advance an adversary's interests at your expense.

Consider the challenge from a defender's perspective. Your adversary sponsors cyberattacks against your infrastructure, but attribution is uncertain. They fund media outlets that spread disinformation in your country, but that's arguably protected speech. They use economic leverage to pressure your allies, but economic competition is normal. They support political movements that align with their interests, but so does everyone. Each individual action can be explained away or doesn't rise to the level requiring response.

But the cumulative effect is erosion—of your alliances, your information environment, your economic position, your citizens' confidence in their institutions. By the time the threat is clear enough for consensus on responding, significant damage has been done.

Traditional military postures were designed around deterrence: the threat of overwhelming retaliation preventing attacks in the first place. But how do you deter grey zone activities? You can't threaten nuclear retaliation against a disinformation campaign. You can't send carrier groups in response to economic pressure. The threat of overwhelming force becomes almost irrelevant when your adversary is careful never to do anything that would justify using it.

This is the heart of why hybrid warfare, whatever its conceptual limitations, captures something real. Modern adversaries have figured out how to advance their interests while staying below the threshold of responses that Western powers know how to make.

What Comes Next

Former United States Army Chief of Staff George W. Casey Jr. predicted that hybrid conflict would become increasingly common. The logic is straightforward: if you can't win a conventional war against a superior opponent, and if hybrid methods offer advantages that conventional approaches don't, why wouldn't more actors adopt them?

The diffusion of technology continues accelerating. Tools that enable hybrid approaches—encrypted communications, cyber capabilities, commercial drones, global information networks—become more accessible every year. The barrier to entry for sophisticated hybrid operations keeps dropping.

Meanwhile, conventional military superiority becomes less decisive when adversaries refuse to fight conventionally. The enormous investments that major powers make in traditional military capabilities may matter less in conflicts that are primarily fought in the grey zone.

None of this means conventional military power becomes irrelevant. It remains essential for deterring actual invasion, for power projection, for the capability to respond when adversaries miscalculate. But it may increasingly be necessary and insufficient—essential but not enough on its own.

The uncomfortable conclusion is that the neat distinctions previous generations used to think about war and peace may be artifacts of a particular historical moment. The world that Hezbollah fighters revealed in 2006—where the boundaries between state and non-state, conventional and irregular, military and civilian, war and not-quite-war had all grown fuzzy—may simply be the world we live in now.

Learning to operate effectively in that world requires more than better weapons or larger budgets. It requires rethinking categories that military planners have relied on for generations. That's always the hardest kind of adaptation.