Hybrid Warfare

Abstract

Hybrid warfare has been the bandwagon term to describe modern warfare in academic, policy, and journalist accounts. It describes a wide array of warfare techniques that do not correspond with earlier notions of warfare. Yet none of these are really to be called “new” and the military thought associated with them can be traced back as early as Sun Tzu’s The Art of War. Perhaps it was the shock of being faced with unfamiliar tactics, the breach of morality with hybrid tactics disregarding jus in bello principles, or the rigged black/white understanding of the dichotomy of war and peace—but whatever the reason, it has led to a plethora of terms and monikers to describe the phenomena now labeled hybrid warfare. The United States Special Operations Command (USSOCOM), for example, in discussing the “gray zone,” points out that this topic has had many monikers within the US literature. To name a few: low-intensity conflict or low-intensity operations, small wars (this one did lead to an excellent online journal called Small Wars Journal, or SWJ), irregular warfare, asymmetric warfare, and military operations other than war (MOOTW). Hybrid warfare might indeed encompass a low-intensity operations type of conflict. All of these include elements of hybridity and hybrid warfare as this bibliography seeks to demonstrate. In particular, the authors seek to address the perception that hybrid warfare has mainly been conducted by the adversaries of the West. Western governments do use hybrid tactics and hybridity comes to the front in counterinsurgency (COIN) operations. (For more on counterinsurgency see the Oxford Bibliographies in Military History article “Counterinsurgency in the Modern World”). For non-state actors hybrid warfare is mostly linked to the insurgencies, with recent insurgencies using elements of terrorism.