EDITOR’S NOTE: This is the fifth installment in a multi-part series that examines how professional military education should be designed. This and subsequent articles will look through the lens of the competencies required of officers as the global security environment changes once again. The collection of articles can be found in a collection here once they have been published.
Preparing for and countering hybrid warfare requires a significantly different approach to professional military education (PME) than what is currently taught.
The greatest threat to state security and alliances today is not large-scale contingency operations (LSCO) or even nuclear war, but a range of activities short of open warfare that aim to undermine security and offset conventional military capabilities. These activities include information warfare, economic coercion, hostile cyber activities, the use of proxy forces, and “lawfare,” which exploits grey areas in international law and its enforcement. Many of these activities are not detectable. Most of the activities that can be detected are difficult to attribute to an actor or a state.
Overwhelmingly, the target of these activities is a country’s population. The objective is to sow discord within populations and undermine trust and credibility of governments in the eyes of their people. These activities also exploit gaps and seams in governments and alliances, including which agencies should respond to such attacks and under what laws and authorities. Ultimately, these activities distract and weaken governments, undermining the ability of states and alliances to respond to other security threats, including adversarial military activities.
JP 1 Vol. 1 (2023) “Joint Warfighting” refers to these activities as irregular warfare, which it defines as “a form of warfare where states and non-state actors campaign to assure or coerce states or other groups through indirect, non-attributable, or asymmetric activities, either as the primary approach or in concert with conventional warfare.” European allies call these activities hybrid threats. When combined with kinetic operations, this is hybrid warfare.
Preparing for and countering hybrid warfare requires a significantly different approach to professional military education (PME) than what is currently taught. Above all, it requires cultivating a new mindset for military practitioners, including new understandings of what is war and peace; the concept of “campaigning” versus discrete military campaigns and end states; and the subordinate and supporting role of the military in a whole of government, whole of society, and whole of alliance approach to countering hybrid threats.
Core Competencies for Hybrid Warfare
Countering hybrid warfare requires first and foremost instilling new understandings of what is war, what is peace, what falls in between, and the military’s roles within this spectrum.
While the distinction between war and peace has never been binary in practice, the space between these two states is perhaps bigger and filled with more malign activities than ever, due in large part to technology that allows state and non-state actors to directly target and influence key populations. One term for this space between war and peace is the “grey zone.” Another, proposed by David Kilcullen, is “liminal zones.” U.S. Joint Doctrine Note 1-19, published in 2019, describes this space as the “the competition continuum,” in which cooperation, adversarial competition and armed conflict are all occurring at the same time, and often with the same state. It asserts, “Rather than a world either at peace or at war, the competition continuum describes a world of enduring competition conducted through a mixture of cooperation, competition below armed conflict, and armed conflict” (v).
Regardless of the term, we are in a world that allows for war without traditional fighting and peace without populations’ safety or security. War is no longer just about managing violence, but rather a range of effects. How to influence populations, how to shape perceptions, how to control and manage fear are all weapons in hybrid warfare. These threats and how to counter them are a major departure from the traditional military mindset, which tends to focus on mass, maneuverability, joint operations, and controlling key terrain.
Alongside new understandings of war, peace, and warfighting, militaries need to learn a new mindset for strategy, campaign planning, and measuring effects. Devising strategies that can clearly delineate intentions of the adversary; identify vulnerabilities, threats, and risk; and pinpoint a feasible goal for addressing adversarial activities is deeply challenging in a security environment driven by hybrid threats. No planning is possible without first devising both near-term and long-range strategies. With grand strategy, which involves multiple agencies and actors over time, the military needs to think of how it can influence actors and events. Critically, this requires thinking beyond military campaigns to continuous campaigning, how to manage strategic level problems with no foreseeable solution, and how to measure effects. This is another significant shift in the military mindset and PME education.
Within these sea changes in thinking, militaries need to also understand and plan for how their actions can fit into holistic plans for addressing nonstate actors. Clearly NSAs remain important actors for shaping global security, as Hamas and ISIS have shown, and various nonstate actors in Africa and elsewhere continue to demonstrate. The U.S. military and its allies, including NATO forces, invested considerable time, blood and treasure in fighting the “Global War on Terror.” These lessons should not be lost, including the painful lessons learned from the United States’ strategic failures in Iraq and Afghanistan.
While conventional war is the battle for which most forces train and prepare to fight, conventional battles will need to be situated within the wider context of hybrid threats where the adversary will offset conventional capabilities with hybrid tactics and populations will be the battlespace.
Simultaneous to countering nonstate hybrid threats, militaries need to also be prepared to engage in conventional, what the United States calls “traditional,” warfare. While conventional war is the battle for which most forces train and prepare to fight, conventional battles will need to be situated within the wider context of hybrid threats where the adversary will offset conventional capabilities with hybrid tactics and populations will be the battlespace. Finally, within all of this, militaries need to train for the possible use of nuclear weapons, which involves not only how to fight through contaminated spaces, but the wider psychological and environmental implication of any use of nuclear weapons, including both “tactical nukes” and strategic weapons that target cities.
All these competencies, put together, create a daunting task for our militaries. However, PME can provide ways to prepare our forces for such a complex battle space.
How to Educate for HT/HW
Educating our military professionals for the complex hybrid fight requires, above all else, critical thinking skills and the ability to manage complexity. To build these skills, PME should teach causal logic, theory, game theory, mathematical modeling, and system dynamic modeling, to name but a few tools for critical thinking. Alongside these analytical capabilities, cultivating creativity is painfully missing from PME education in the United States. Creativity is necessary for considering a range of adversarial actions as well as what we can and should do. Teaching these skills is not possible without hiring the right professors, especially individuals who have studied and applied these skills to thinking about international relations and security studies. Relying on practitioners who draw solely from personal experience and their previous training will doom us all to lose the current war by refighting the last one.
Alongside these intellectual skills, PME should focus more on a whole-of-government and whole-of-society approaches to thinking about security. Most wars do not end on the battlefield. Hybrid wars neither begin nor, in most cases, end on the battlefield. Given this, and the complexity of hybrid warfare, other government agencies need to be included in strategy, planning, and executing a response to hybrid threats. Countering malign influence, addressing economic coercion, and exploiting loopholes in international law all require government agencies beyond the Department of Defense, at least in the United States.
Additionally, successfully countering hybrid threats requires educating military practitioners in a whole-of-society approach, including public-private partnerships to counter malign activities targeting a range of services; this is especially true with the National Guard in the United States, which carries responsibilities for cyber defense and protecting other critical infrastructure. PME also needs to include more discussions on the importance of building societal resilience to prepare for hybrid warfare, what the military’s role is (which may be very limited depending on a country’s laws and authorities), and how to strengthen society by underscoring what we are fighting for, not just what we are fighting against.
Within most, if not all, of these topics, the military plays a supporting role. Officers need to learn to be strategic advisors, not strategic leaders. Instilling an understanding of playing a supporting versus supported role requires a massive shift in mindset.
Ultimately, educating and preparing our military for the complexity of hybrid warfare will be very difficult, at least in the United States, because it runs headlong into existing military culture and identity. Hybrid warfare throws into question traditional understandings of what it means to be a warrior, to be at war, and how militaries should fight. New symbols and metaphors are needed to explain and inspire the next generation of warriors. By its very nature, hybrid warfare will require alliances to counter these types of threats because they do not stop at physical borders and therefore will almost always require other states, if not alliances, to help counter. Our European allies are ahead of the curve, both in terms of how to understand and to counter hybrid warfare. The United States military and government should look to them for guidance. However, this is also hard for the U.S. military to do because it is so accustomed to leading in every situation. U.S. PME, therefore, in addition to the above, should cultivate a greater sense of humility and recognition of the capabilities and experience that our allies bring to the hybrid fight.
Heather S. Gregg is Professor of Irregular Warfare/Hybrid Threats at the George C. Marshall Center European Center for Security Studies, Garmisch, Germany. She is also a senior fellow at the Foreign Policy Research Institute.
The views expressed in this article are those of the author and do not necessarily reflect those of the U.S. Army War College, the U.S. Army, or the Department of Defense.
Photo Description: A two-man Hamas assault team infiltrating via powered paraglider
Photo Credit: Screen capture from Hamas propaganda video
