IS HYBRID WARFARE SOMETHING NEW?

Abstract

The Sep 11, 2001 event and the beginning of the 21st Century came up with new concepts regarding the future of warfare, describing the rise of non-state willing and its possibility to be able to change the legitimacy of the state. New theories, like "new wars", "compound wars", "unrestricted warfare", "robotic warfare", "political warfare", have been launched trying to capitalize the changes that occurred in the international security arena and in the diminishing of the international organization's power to manage those situations. The Second Lebanon War of 2006 was the trigger that matched the views of many military analysts who have suggested that future conflicts will be multi-modal or multi-variant, by combining of increasing frequency and lethality. The new construct, known as the "hybrid warfare", was exacerbated by the current crisis situation in Ukraine and the Russian intervention in Crimea and the Eastern Ukraine.

Headnote

The question how the future conflict will look like seems to be the current preoccupation of many, if not of all Western military theoreticians. At the end of 1980's, several military specialists launched the idea of the Forth Generation of Warfare (4GW), meaning the blurring nature of future conflict, especially the blurring of war and peace, as well as between combatants and non-combatants.

The 11th event of 2001 and the beginning of the Twenty-one Century came up with new concepts regarding the future of warfare, describing the rise of non-state willing and its possibility to be able to change the legitimacy of the state. New theories, like "new wars", "compound wars", "unrestricted warfare", "robotic warfare", "political warfare", have been launched trying to capitalize the changes that occurred in the international security arena and in the diminishing of the international organization's power to manage those situations.

The Second Lebanon War of 2006 was the trigger that matched the views of many military analysts who have suggested that future conflicts will be multi-modal or multi-variant, by combining of increasing frequency and lethality. The new construct, known as the "hybrid warfare", was exacerbated by the current crisis situation in Ukraine and the Russian intervention in Crimea and the Eastern Ukraine.

Keywords: hybrid warfare, hybrid threats, hybrid conflict, hybrid challenges, political warfare, compound wars.

Introduction

In the aftermath of the evolution conflicts have known at the beginning of the 21st Century, with the trend of changing their physiognomy, both in sophistication and character, many military analysts are calling for grater attention to more luring and blending of war forms and combinations of increasing frequency and lethality. Known as the hybrid warfare theory, this new form of war embraces a unique combination of hybrid threats (failed states and non-states actors sponsored by states), which will exploit a combination of challenges by employing all forms of war and tactics, more often simultaneously.

There is a large group of military theoreticians, led by Frank Hoffman and dr. Russ Glenn, who consider that hybrid wars are not quite new quite new, but current ones are different and much more complicated by both the compression of the levels of war and a simultaneous convergence of modes.1 They also mention that this reality is more than facing the hybrid threat, because it conceptualizes the future of conflicts as well.2 1 Some military writers, mostly British and Australians have gone even further, doing specific research on civil wars as hybrid conflicts. The result of their research was incorporated in a new definition of the irregular war, by adding some hybrid threats within.

Even so, no American doctrine or official document has incorporated this theory as a new form of future conflicts, up to now. There are still in use terms like "Compound Wars", "Political War", "Unrestricted Warfare" or "Four-Block War", all comprising some elements of the hybrid warfare.

I consider hybrid warfare theory to be a new approach of unconventionality against the high in which states or groups of state could reach their interests and strategic objectives by blending a variety of tactics and technologies in an original way to crash modern Westernized Armed Forces. By blending both the modes and levels of warfare, using hybrid tactics and techniques to obtain strategic effects and achieve political objectives, this theory is considered by specialists an innovative one and a new type of warfare.

The Industrialization Era of the 20th Century's brought symmetrical and proportionate armies confrontations, which was called "traditional/ conventional conflict". The Information Era, characterized by the reduction in that human mass, the huge technological potential of few states, which, in turn, developed technological gap between states, together with a substantial reduction of the military budgets and more restrictive access to resources and information, has changed the nature of the armed conflicts into an irregular (type war of coalition/alliance against an enemy-state) or asymmetric one (international terrorism), being disproportionate not only in terms of economical and technical potential employed, but also in terms of high-tech equipment and well-trained personnel. In order to counter such discrepancies, the adversary (either state or non-state actor) has to mix conventional, irregular and terrorist actions with specific information confrontations.

The emergence of new players in the modern battlefield, like so-called non-state actors (either adversaries: terrorist organizations, organized crime, paramilitaries of "militia" forces, or neutral: local populations, NGOs and international organizations), along with rapid developments in the information technology have led to the increasing influence of media on and military leaders, causing them to take into account, during the decision making process, national and international public opinion's reactions as new hybrid threats. It also highlights the tendency of increasing the degree of complexity of military actions, by adding military on the modern battlefield, which, in turn, transformed pure joint military operations into inter-agencies ones (the so-called Comprehensive Approach - CA).

"At the same time, due to the technological development, the traditional three-dimensional battlespace (land, air and sea) will be transformed into a multidimensional one, adding space and electronic dimensions, which are interconnected and interdependent with the informational one.3"

As a result, more and more military analysts consider that future military conflicts will manifest three trends, particularly depending on the combatants' ability and willingness to face the new demands of the modern battlespace: conventional super-technical, ultra-fast and highly expensive warfare, which can be sustained only by a limited number of countries (most economically and militarily developed); hybrid warfare, in which a mix of new technology and old fashion doctrines will be used, blending different types of tactics and technologies in innovative ways and combining the war forms to increase lethality and frequency; generalization of asymmetric conflicts, where there will be employed conventional and unconventional forces, as well as atypical means (terrorism and organized crimes included).

1. Short History of the Hybrid Warfare Theory

The Americans where the first military analysts who came, after the transformation of Al Qaeda into an international terrorist organization, with the theory of hybrid threats, pointing out Iraqi insurgents, fanatic and faith-based factions within the Middle East (like Hezbollah and Hamas) and jihadist foreign fighters in Afghanistan.

Later, using their experiences of Afghanistan and Iraq, as well as the consequences of the Second Lebanon War of 2006 and Chechnya War of 2008, the US Joint Force Command added failed states into the definition, describing the hybrid threat as "any adversary that simultaneously and adaptively employs a tailored mix of conventional, irregular, terrorism and criminal means or activities in the operational battlespace. Rather than a single entity, a hybrid threat or challenger may be comprised of a combination of state and non-state actors."4 The definition is highlighted in Figure no.1.

The hybrid threat was defined as a problem not as an operating concept that presented a solution. Therefore, some military theorists of the future conflicts linked what they have seen in Iraq and Afghanistan as an accelerated learning cycle by insurgents and terrorists (as hybrid threats) in acquiring and effectively employing tactical techniques or adapt IEDs to the operational environment, which was defined as the hybrid conflict. For them, "conflicts are increasingly characterized by a hybrid blend of traditional and irregular tactics, decentralized planning and execution, and non-state actors, using both simple and sophisticated technologies in innovative ways."5 This definition put together hybrid threats with hybrid challenges (traditional, irregular, terrorist, and disruptive), as well as the physical and conceptual dimensions of conflict - the former, a struggle against an armed enemy and the latter, a wider struggle for control and support of the combat zone's indigenous population, the support of the home fronts of the intervening nations, and the support of the international community.

Expanding those concepts of hybrid threat, hybrid challenge (to express the future security environment as described in Figure no. 2 and hybrid conflict to include non-governmental and inter-governmental agencies, international organizations, relevant commercial enterprises, and other pertinent parties during a campaign and considering that current models for Counterterrorism and Counterinsurgency (COIN) were inadequate for the types of conflict seen in Iraq, Afghanistan and Lebanon, some American scholars went forward with the theory, arguing that there is going to be a further blurring of warfare categories. This blending of capabilities is being hailed as hybrid warfare and defined as "any enemy that uses simultaneous and adaptive employment of a complex combination of conventional weapons, irregular warfare, terrorism and criminal behavior in the battlespace to achieve political objectives. Hybrid wars blend the lethality of state conflict with the fanatical and protracted fervor of irregular warfare."6

Even so, until the end of 2012, the term Hybrid Warfare was not found in any official doctrinal publications, being considered as a non-doctrinal term unaccepted by military planners. It was the recent crisis in Ukraine, when the Russian Federation employed a new concept of warfare, which was considered the practical use of hybrid war theory by NATO military theorists. It expressed, in fact, luring and blending Special Forces to conduct unorthodox and varied techniques with Information Campaigns and the exploration of Ukraine internal weaknesses, which have been dubbed hybrid warfare. Russia waged a hybrid war by importing commandos to liaise with local volunteers in an attempt to play for achieving her political objectives.

"This is a so-called new type of war, a hybrid war, where armies do not always take on the role of direct aggressor. Instead, they serve to intimidate, while imported sabotage groups [do the fighting] together with local extremists and criminal gangs fight on the ground."7

As James N. Mattis and Frank Hoffman mentioned at the US Naval Institute almost a decade ago, hybrid wars are now different, even if they are not new.

What differentiates them from the past is the blurring of forces into the same force, as well as the fact that those forces are applied in the same battlespace. Not being a unique phenomenon during the history, this combination of irregular and conventional capabilities at the operational and tactical levels represents a great challenge.8

2. What makes Hybrid War the Future Conflict?

The future conflicts are characterized by an evolving character, comprising distinct challengers and threats. Even if the traditional conflict is considered to be the most demanding in scale and very dangerous for the civilization, the paradigm of high-technological Armed Forces facing less developed and equipped state and non-state actors force adversaries has forced the latter to blur and blend different methods or modes of warfare in order to mitigate the technological discrepancies.

This represents the most distinctive change in the character of modern wars.

Modern Armed Forces will face a widening number of distinct hybrid challenges provided by hybrid threats, into the future security environment. Figure no. 2 presents how those challenges are converged into hybrid wars.

The hybrid construct is about conceptualizing the post-Iraq and Afghanistan operating environment. It does not match some concepts experienced by Russians during the Ukrainian crisis, like involving irregulars with coordination and support from Moscow or the use of commandoes pretending they are not Russians. Moreover, the new hybrid approach of the Russian Federation for the crisis in Ukraine avails the emerging of new hybrid threats, like energy, cyber, media, or even these strange green human beings.

Hybrid wars lure state conflicts with irregular warfare, by blurring the lethality of one with the fanatic and protracted character of the other. In the Information Era future opponents, like states and non-states actors (either sponsored by states or self-funded), could easily obtain unrestricted access to all types of modern military capabilities. This could include the easy exploitation, by states, of high-tech capabilities, such as encrypted command systems and modern lethal systems (man-portable or deployable), blended with a large variety of protracted insurgent and terrorist tactics, like ambushes, information and cyber warfare, improvised explosive devices (IEDs), or coercive assassinations directed against financial or international targets. Destabilizing, decapitating administrations, creating the space for influence are not new tactics, but they have strategic effects.

Hybrid challenges are not limited to state or non-state actors. This is really true because the crisis in Ukraine goes well beyond its borders. They can include regional or even international actors which lose their neutrality or impartiality. What effectively Putin has repeatedly said is that "the defense of ethnic Russians does not lie in the countries in which they reside or with their laws, government or constitution, but with Russia"9, blowing a hole in what the international law is about. That, in turn, imposed OSCE, NATO and the EU to take adequate measures for sanctioning or mitigating the threat to their member states.

Hybrid wars overlap state-on-state conflicts with irregular tactics undertaken by other armed groups. They incorporate various forms of conflict that put in practice the specificity of hybrid threats, involving, also, numerous international organizations for security. The role and place of the hybrid warfare is shown in Figure no. 3, where it is highlighted how both states and a variety of actors could choose from a wide range of modes of warfare to achieve their goals and objectives. Hybrid threats are blended in a mix of conventional capabilities with irregular tactics and formations, including terrorist acts and cyber attacks.

The hybrid warfare is complex in character, convergent of modes and synergy of effects. The complexity of this new type of warfare is given by the lower level of execution and the synergistic effects obtained in both physical and psychological dimensions of conflict. The simultaneous convergence of modes is achieved by separate units, or even by the same unit, which is small in dimension. Even so, these small units necessitate thorough direction and coordination at operational and tactical levels within the main battlespace, in order to gain effects at all levels of war. This is called the compression of the levels of war. The innovative adaptations of existing systems further complicate the hybrid threats. Its complexity is maximized by the so called Hoffman's convergence of the physical and psychological, of the combatant and noncombatant, of violence and nation-building, of the kinetic and informational approach. He believes that the most significant convergence, however, is within the modes of war and foresees hybrid conflicts during which states and non-state actors simultaneously exploit all modes - conventional, irregular, criminal - to destabilize an existing order.

Even if the idea of blurring a wide variety of techniques and different levels of war is considered to be a new approach of the modern warfare, Russia already did it in the Estonian cyber attack in 2007, as well as during the invasion of Georgia in 2008. These hybrid actions demonstrate that the hybrid warfare theory the Russian military theorists since 2004, as the future conflict concept to counter NATO's expansion to the East and the installation of the US Anti-Missile Shield in Europe. It was either overtly experimented, with obvious moves, or using more subtle moves, with official covered experts to conduct economic warfare and cyber attacks. What the recent crisis in Ukraine shows to the experts is the combination of them as a convergence of tactics that has been innovatively experienced to one degree or another, for the last five or six years.

It is worthwise to note that both the Russian information warfare and Russian media has helped all unconventional tactics and techniques used by Ukrainian separatists, focusing on Russian political myths and ideologised propaganda actions. This is the new crystallized Putin doctrine, described by Jolanta Darczewska from the Centre for Eastern Studies in Warsaw as "geopolitical, Eurasian, anti-liberal and oriented towards rivalry with the West and Russia's dominance in Eurasia.10"

3. What should NATO, EU and Member States do to counter Hybrid Warfare?

The current national strategies, warfighting concepts and force structures are ill-suited for this emerging blend of warfare. It is also valid for NATO's 2010 Strategic Concept, joint doctrines and concepts development and experimentation, as well as for the EU's 2003 Security Strategy and 2009 Treaty. Security organizations, their Member States and military remain intellectually and institutionally unprepared for the changes in war.

A response to a conventional land, sea or air forces' attack is usually clear to be addressed by a strong security organization like NATO or a Member State. Even if an asymmetric attack, either terrorist or insurgent occurs, it is more difficult but also clear how to react. But what happens when it is attacked by a mixture of conventional forces and irregular adversaries? Is there any best response?

"Hybrid forces can effectively incorporate technologically advanced systems into their force structure and strategy, and use these systems in ways that are beyond the intended employment parameters. Operationally, hybrid military forces are superior to Western forces within their limited operational spectrum."11

One should argue that being flexible and adaptive is the best approach of countering both hybrid threats and challenges. Flexibility relies in understanding and efficiently responding to the new threats like energy, cyber, media, or irregular actors. NATO and member states should do that on time, not after something happens. Gen. Philip Breedlove, NATO's top military commander recommends that the best way to counter this is to invite a stronger, not weaker response. "What creates de-escalation is a strong response that causes Russia to think twice about going any further, stabilizes a tense situation and then allows it to de-escalate."12 What happened so far within NATO, the EU and member states is that all have still been very reactive, very slow.

To complicate the situation, the debate over the military contribution to countering hybrid threats overlaps with several other simultaneous debates within NATO, such as the need to develop a Comprehensive Approach (CA) to security problems, as well as identification of emerging security challenges, as described in Figure no. 4. Not all member states fully agree in these two areas either. In the former case, there are differences over what NATO (as opposed to other actors) should do, and whether new capabilities are needed. In the latter case, your sense of threat is rather different if you are large or small, adjacent to Russia, located in the Mediterranean, or far away in North America. Overlaying all of this are the additional complexities of potential synergy and potential competition between NATO and the EU (not to mention the differences among European states towards both institutions).

To confront such hybrid threats with the best effect security organizations and member states must better fuse all elements of power in the campaign plans and strategic actions. The political, social, diplomatic and informational components of power must provide bedrock support for the military organization. The leadership must encourage and resource a CA to deter conflicts through statecraft, while also developing and maintaining a robust military capacity to defend their vital interests. They should employ all elements of power at their disposal to pursue indirect approaches such as building the capacity of partner governments and their security forces to prevent problems before they become crises. This will serve to isolate the threat by attempting to shape, influence, and stabilize the global environment through partnership and engagement.

Looking internally to expand their ability to address the non-military aspects of conflict, governments must improve the interagency planning and integration process by coordinating military efforts with appropriate civilian agencies and by engaging expertise in the private sector, including non-governmental organizations and academia. Beyond diplomatic and military power, governments must build a better and more integrated stabilization and reconstruction capacity by first fully resourcing and then coordinating the efforts between civilian agencies and military services.13

To address the changing character and hybridization of warfare, some military theorists recommend the adaptation of the operational art to face the combination of conventional and irregular warfare, as well as the review and refine of warfighting concepts. This adaptation should express to what the center of gravity might be in such conflicts and it validates the emphasis on CA and lines of operations. Success in hybrid wars also requires small unit leaders with decision-making skills and quick-adaptive equipment that can best exploit advantages and opportunities, faster than tomorrow's adversaries. In order to do so, extensive investments in diverse educational experiences should be addressed, as well as to adapt the organizational knowledge and learning.

The greatest implications will involve force protection, as the proliferation of IEDs suggests. Future adversaries will focus on winning the mobility-countermobility challenge to limit our freedom of action and separate friendly military from close proximity to the civilian population. The ability of hybrid challenges to exploit the range and precision of various types of missiles, mortar rounds, and mines will increase over time and impede our plans. The exploitation of modern information technology will also enhance the learning cycle of potential irregular adversaries, improving their ability to transfer lessons learned and techniques from one theater to another.14

Critical to achieving this crucial objective is preparing the military's highest leaders with a holistic grasp of the profession of arms and its relationship to strategy and policy. In facing the challenge of preparing for conflicts that are uncertain in form, location, level of commitment, contribution of allies, and nature of the enemy, the military planning must be more adaptive and responsive to the strategic context. Planners must engage in more inclusive planning methods that seek to gather a wider range of advice. Therefore, education and training must extend beyond traditional military and government schools to include the study of history, anthropology, economics, geopolitics, culture, law, and strategic communications. Accordingly, NATO and governments should reach out to academia, think-tanks, and advisors to develop this more holistic educational foundation. While expanding their intellectual horizons, leaders must continue to understand the profession of war and the projection of military force, while also improving their ability to think critically and creatively in acquisition and resource allocation.

In conjunction with reviewing and adjusting strategies and warfighting concepts, the defense community must reevaluate the force structure needed for future conflicts and build adequate capabilities. With a wider range of threats that may require the need to employ various capabilities simultaneously, NATO and member states must continue their effort to strive for greater joint operations and possibly inter-dependence. With the EU support, they must transform their industrial-era organizational structures into more agile, information and knowledge-based enterprises, which requires a large investment in ideas, technology and people.

While the Western military will continue to be technologically enhanced, it becomes even more important that it is well manned with trained and ready personnel. Leaders, staffs, and conventional forces must be more capable of performing across the spectrum of military operations. To do so, the force needs a command and control structure that is net-centric with built-in redundancies. There must be a larger investment in intelligence, surveillance and reconnaissance assets, particularly human intelligence capabilities. Also, NATO and member states must be able to collect and fuse information from a wider variety of sources and establish systems to share intelligence across services, allied governments, and with partners. Added to these capabilities, the military, in order to address the wide variety of future threats, must develop a greater precision targeting and engagement capability while ensuring a high level of protection for its forces, supporting civilians, partners and allied citizens.

The force necessary to provide these capabilities must be balanced and versatile, not a single-mission force. The military should accelerate the growth of its special operations forces and the transformation of its general purpose forces to a professional, more agile, "multi-purpose" force with flexibility and credible combat power, able to conduct conventional and irregular and to perform partner security force assistance, reconstruction, stabilization, and peacekeeping simultaneously. This enhanced force must be capable of operating independently at increasingly lower echelons, with or without support from civilian agencies.

In many cases, small company or battalion-sized teams of highly-trained and equipped combat forces, picked for both their combat and specialized civilian skills will look to capacity building in stability operations or providing humanitarian assistance during disaster relief actions. To secure and stabilize the indigenous population, the intervening forces must immediately rebuild or restore security, essential services, local government, self-defense forces and essential elements of the economy. If the environment turns more hostile from any overt source, these same teams are readily capable of shifting ways and means to a more tactically focused use of direct force.

The use of combined arms fire together with tactical maneuver represents one successful way when fighting with irregular opponents. These hybrid threats create a qualitative challenge that demands combined arms fire and maneuver at lower levels, despite their generally small-unit structures. Furthermore, the introduction of sophisticated weapons (e.g.ATGMs, MANPADS) could radically escalate the challenges faced by Allied forces in the hybrid warfare. This is also true when hybrid warfare opponents operate "among the people" and the combined arms fire, even very precise, is not sufficient to solve the issue. It is necessary to mix it with a responsive and adequate air and artillery fire support, as well as with air maneuvering with UAVs and ground maneuvering with multiple-protection transport vehicles. The well-practiced capacity to integrate these capabilities is a precondition for success.

The use of heavy forces to fight hybrid enemies that have moderate training, organization, and advanced weapons is also a key element. These forces consist of tanks and infantry fighting vehicles. Light and medium forces can complement heavy forces, particularly in urban and other complex terrain, but they do not provide the survivability, lethality or mobility inherent in heavy forces. Quite simply, heavy forces reduce operational risks and minimize friendly casualties.

By building up pre-crisis capabilities to deal with hybrid approaches, allied nations will be better able to assign responsibility to an aggressor nation, which is key to triggering NATO involvement in a crisis. As Gen. Breedlove mentioned "we need to build the nations' ability to fight through that first onslaught, attribute to an aggressor nation, and then NATO Article 5 kicks in."15 NATO members, especially those states that border Russia must also take into account the necessity to build the capacity of other arms of government, such as interior ministries and police forces, to counter unconventional attacks, including propaganda campaigns, cyber assaults or homegrown separatist militias.

Conclusions

Even if historical evidences acknowledge regular and irregular operations in many if not most wars, military theorists sustain the idea that next century war will comprise a kind of hybrid war, projecting all elements of national power along a continuum of activities from stability, security and reconstruction operations, to armed combat. Both Romanian and Alliance decision-makers are aware of this new kind of war that can be applied in all former Soviet states and much of the European countries. Being developed by Russian military theorists to counter NATO and experienced in Estonia and Georgia, the scale and scope of the events, first in Crimean Peninsula and later throughout Eastern Ukraine, caught us unprepared and in defensive, which has created a considerable advantage to Russian decision-makers and allowed them to continue the military intervention, without fear of concerted retaliation by the Allies or serious sanctions from international organizations.

Romanian Armed Forces have gained some experience against hybrid opponents in the recent conflicts in Iraq and Afghanistan. The lessons from these experiences should be completed with the Allied experience in Lebanon and Gaza, as well as with ones from the crisis in Ukraine, to become relevant to understanding the capabilities the Romanian Armed Forces will require in the future. The use of combined arms fire with tactical maneuver is fundamental for gaining and maintaining the initiative against sophisticated hybrid opponents. Additionally, when hybrid warfare opponents operate "among the people", it is necessary to mix the precision, stand-off fires with a responsive and adequate air and artillery fire support, as well as with air and ground maneuver. Finally, the use of heavy forces is paramount to fight against modicum trained and equipped opponents, to reduce friendly casualties and operational risks.

Moreover, international and regional security organizations such as NATO, EU, UN and OSCE were taken by surprise and acted very late. This was influenced by the Russian Federation important membership of the UN and OSCE as well as the special status within NATO and the EU. Thus, the international reaction was "soft", without jeopardizing the Russian military continuous involvement in Ukraine or the measures taken to solve this crisis. In fact, military experts often addressed the question of "how international security organizations should adapt to such attacks?" We must not forget the frozen conflicts in the Black Sea proximity, which are serious issues of insecurity in the region, nor the volatile situation in the Middle East and North Africa (MENA), which poses special demands to military planners, regarding: the complexity of the battlespace; a large variety of actors and interests; the cultural diversity (clash of civilizations); volatility, dynamism and flexibility of the security situation in the region. These characteristics of future conflicts impose a thoroughly mix of conventional forces, almost entirely professionalized and capable of conducting joint and inter-agency actions, with religious fanatics using asymmetrical actions as efficient as possible, and integrated with active strategic communication and information campaign actions in a complex environment, in which could also operate other actors, almost unknown in conventional conflicts.

Hybrid warfare has been an integral part of the historical landscape since the ancient world, but only recently have analysts categorized these conflicts as new. Great powers throughout history have confronted opponents who used a combination of regular and irregular forces to negate the advantage of the great powers' superior conventional military strength. Moreover, hybrid wars are labour-intensive and long-term affairs. They are also the most likely conflicts of the twenty-first century, as competitors use hybrid forces to wear down Western military capabilities in extended campaigns of exhaustion.

Footnote

1 Frank Hoffman, "Further Thoughts on Hybrid Threats", in Small Wars Journal, www.smallwarsjournal.com, accessed on 01 Nov 2014, p. 5.

2 Ibidem, p. 6.

3 Ion Coscodaru, evolutii în fizionomia conflictelor militare viitoare. Operatii si forte expeditionare", in Strategic Impact nr. 2/2005, Bucuresti, Editura Universitatii Nationale de Aparare "Carol I", p. 63. "Carol I", p. 63.

4 Definition adopted in support of U.S. Joint Forces Command during the Hybrid War Conference, held in Washington, D.C., February 24, 2009

5 Colin S. Gray, Another Bloody Century: Future Warfare , London: Weidenfeld & Nicolson, 2006, p. 14.

6 Frank G. Hoffman, "Hybrid Warfare and Challenges", in the JFQ Magazine,www.ndupress.ndu.edu, accessed on 02 Nov. 2014, p. 4.

7 Oleg Shynkarenko, "Russia's Hybrid War in Ukraine", http://iwpr.net/report-news/russias-hybrid-war-ukrain, accessed on 03 Nov. 2014, p. 3.

8 James N. Mattis and Frank Hoffman, "Future Warfare: The Rise of Hybrid Warfare," U.S. Naval Institute Pro-ceedings (November 2005), pp. 30-32.

9 Hybrid War, Hybrid Response?, video available at www. nato.int, accessed on 10 Nov. 2014.

10 Oleg Shynkarenko, op.cit., p. 2.

11 William. J. Nemeth, USMC, "Future War and Chechnya: A Case for Hybrid Warfare", a study of the Naval Post-graduate School, Monterey, CA, June 2002, p. 12.

12 John Vandiver, "SACEUR: Allies must prepare for Russia 'hybrid war'", www.stripes.com, accessed on 04 Nov. 2014, p. 1.

13Russell W. Glenn, "Thoughts on 'Hybrid' Conflict", www. smallwarsjournal.com, accessed on 04 Nov. 2014, p. 6

14 Brian P. Fleming, "The Hybrid Threat Concept: Contemporary War, Military Planning and the Advent of Unrestricted Operational Art", a study at the School of Advanced Military Studies, United States Army Command and General Staff College, Fort Leavenworth, Kansa, AY 2011, pp. 53-57.

15 John Vandiver, op.cit., p. 2.

References

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