By Prashanth Parameswaran
From Russia in Ukraine to China in the East China Sea, it is worth assessing how the world may respond.
Earlier this week, the Institute of International and Security Studies, a leading British think tank, released the 2015 version of The Military Balance – an annual assessment of global military trends and capabilities. The report has long served as a useful weather vane for those who follow defense and security trends closely.
The concept of ‘hybrid warfare’ – broadly, situations where the adversary uses a combination of conventional and irregular warfare – features prominently in the editor’s introduction. That is no surprise, as the term has gained renewed prominence following Russia’s annexation of Crimea and fomenting of instability in Eastern Ukraine. Just last July, the then NATO secretary general Anders Fogh Rasmussen publicly accused Russia of waging hybrid warfare. And in a key indication of how the term has caught on among the chattering classes of late, this year’s Munich Security Conference – an annual gathering of bigwigs which just wrapped up a few days ago – specifically included the concept in one of its panel discussions.
What’s so new about ‘hybrid warfare’? Those who read widely on the evolution of warfare will know that the concept is hardly novel. The term itself at least a decade old and is often traced back to the U.S. Marine Corps, although one can easily find references to similar conceptions in other countries including Russia and China. But the general practice of blending conventional state-on-state conflict with irregular warfare has been around for centuries. Even if one were to avoid the rather quotidian reference to Chinese military strategist Sun Tzu, it has arguably played out recently in the Vietnam War, the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan, and Hezbollah’s attack on Israel in 2006 to cite just a few examples.
Read the full story at The Diplomat