Hybrid war

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The hybrid war or the hybrid warfare describes a flexible mixed form of the openly and covertly applied regular and irregular, symmetrical and asymmetrical, military and non-military conflict means with the purpose of blurring the threshold between the binary states of war and peace under international law .

The boundary to the insidiousness ( prohibition of perfidy ) prohibited by the Geneva Conventions is fluid.

etymology

The former director of the military academy at ETH Zurich and today's commander of the General Staff Schools, Daniel Lätsch, assumes that the term was first used in 2005 by the military author and political scientist Frank G. Hoffman. "Hoffman defines hybrid warfare as a combination of conventional and irregular modes of combat in connection with terrorist acts and criminal behavior."

The term was widely used in German-speaking countries in 2014 through descriptions of Russian military interventions both in Crimea and in eastern Ukraine . The Russian President Putin had deployed Russian troops without a national emblem in the Ukrainian Crimea. In a report by the UN High Commissioner for Human Rights (UNHCHR), parts of the accompanying Russian propaganda were described as hate propaganda prohibited by international law .

Hybrid Warfare Elements

Elements of this warfare are:

  • Use of covert troops, or soldiers and military equipment without national emblems, who operate on foreign territory,
  • Use of extensive weapons, which can also include nuclear, biological, chemical and improvised explosives,
  • Disinformation and propaganda campaigns
  • and recently also cyber attacks .

Other definitions speak u. a. of “a form of guerrilla war that makes use of modern technologies and information and advertising methods”. “The role of non-military means in achieving political and strategic goals has grown; in some cases their penetration is significantly higher than that of weapons ”( Valery Vasilyevich Gerasimov , Chief of Staff of the Russian Armed Forces).

Hybrid Warfare Issues

The hybrid war is not defined, which means that the "fighters" move at least partially in a lawless area as long as the international legal situation with regard to hybrid warfare cannot be clarified. This is all the more difficult as the use of hybrid warfare is particularly suitable for actors “who would have to justify themselves to the international community when using conventional methods”.

Alleged guerrilla fighters are veiled combatants from conventional troops or, conversely, appear as demonstrators. In addition to or exclusively instead of conventional military means, means are also used “that have not previously been assigned to states”, as the Swiss government defined it. Instead, the term hybrid war is predominantly associated with terrorism, misinformation, manipulation and cyber attacks. The "loss of valid conventions" was also noted by the Interparliamentary Conference on the Common Foreign and Security Policy of the EU. The “criminal disorder” makes the search for answers difficult.

At a NATO summit in 2016, geostrategists diagnosed that the new conflicts “are no longer determined only by armed force, but also by [...] social techniques for dividing societies”.

See also

literature

  • Margaret S. Bond: Hybrid War: A New Paradigm for Stability Operations in Failing States . United States Army War College (USAWC), Strategy Research Project, 2007.
  • Captain Scott A. Cuomo, Captain Brian J. Donlon: Training a "Hybrid" Warrior at the Infantry Officer Course . Small Wars Journal Blog Post, Jan. 27, 2008.
  • Wolfgang Schreiber: The New Invisible War? On the concept of “hybrid” warfare . In: From Politics and Contemporary History . Issue 35–36 / 2016 (August 29, 2016), pp. 11–15 ( online )
  • Center for ethical education in the armed forces (ed.): Hybrid wars - the impotence of the enemy? Ethics and the military 2015/2. ( online )

Web links

Wiktionary: Hybrid  - explanations of meanings, word origins, synonyms, translations

Individual evidence

  1. ↑ Florian Schaurer: Old New Wars - Notes on Hybrid Warfare ( Memento from April 12, 2016 in the Internet Archive ). In: Federal Ministry of Defense . August 2015. (PDF)
  2. ↑ Ueli Zoss: The reduit has had its day in modern warfare ( Memento from February 7, 2018 in the Internet Archive ). In: Zürichsee-Zeitung on Officers Society Zürichsee Right Bank. zsz.ch, April 2, 2015 (PDF; 2.8 MB)
  3. ^ Report of the UN High Commissioner for Human Rights in April . "Media monitors indicated a significant raise of propaganda on the television of the Russian Federation, which was building up in parallel to developments in and around Crimea. Cases of hate propaganda were also reported. "
  4. ↑ dpa : Little green men, a hybrid war and the problems of NATO. In: The world . June 25, 2014, accessed February 21, 2015 .
  5. ^ Frank G. Hoffman: Hybrid vs. compound was. In: Armed Forces Journal. October 1, 2009, archived from the original on September 17, 2010 ; accessed on October 11, 2015 .
  6. ↑ Gerasimov in an article in the Russian military-industrial weekly WPK (“Военно-промышленный курьер”) No. 8/2013. Quoted in “Spiel im Schatten - Putin's Undeclared War in the West” . In: ARD . 4th July 2016, minute 11:04
  7. ↑ Robert Helbig: How we will wage war in the future. In: Handelsblatt . August 7, 2014, accessed October 11, 2015 .
  8. ↑ Protection against hybrid threats Business database of the Swiss Parliament, January 20, 2015.
  9. ↑ Further development of the army - change in the legal basis . In: Swiss Parliament . 14th meeting June 18, 2015.
  10. ^ Information from the German delegation to the Interparliamentary Conference for the Common Foreign and Security Policy and the Common Security and Defense Policy for the attention of the Bundestag, June 11, 2015.
  11. ↑ Tom Schimmeck: NATO and hybrid warfare: The head as a target. In: Deutschlandfunk . July 7, 2016, accessed February 6, 2018 .