Toward a Theory of Hybrid Warfare

An emergent feature of renewed great power competition is the disintegration of last century’s safeguards against escalation, including nuclear deterrence’s collateral effect on disincentivizing large-scale conventional uses of force. In brief historical and national case studies, the authors illustrate how the “gray zone” of unconventional, irregular, proxy, and hybrid forms of warfare flourished in the Cold War’s shadow and metastasized into a suite of political, informational, and cyber weapons that great powers and aspiring great powers are wielding with increasing sophistication and risk. We argue neither this proliferation of terms, nor the heuristic of strategic competition and crisis, have enabled academic, government, or military strategists and practitioners to meet and mitigate hybrid threats. This paper untangles the paradox of how the asymmetric advantages of low cost, novel, and deniable hybrid war tactics invite miscommunication and miscalculation that risk triggering the very escalation they were developed to avoid. It also addresses a second paradox of how the United States, despite being credited with originating the hybrid toolkit of political warfare, seems less able as hegemon to effectively deter or respond to informational, cyber, and other attacks. By exploring Iranian, Russian, and Chinese development of simple, complex, and advanced hybrid war, respectively, we uncover some of the bureaucratic, cognitive, and strategic blocks the U.S. has in defending against, if not exploiting, hybrid elements.