The author of this important report in Politics Daily (also attached below), Dave Wood, is a very experienced combat reporter and one of the very best US reporters covering Afghanistan. (Truth in advertising: I have known and admired Dave for 25 years.) Wood has produced an an excellent, if grim, Afghan SITREP that is well worth studying carefully, including its hotlinks.
I think it would be a mistake to conclude that the situation being in a kind a balance, because we are in a strategic stalemate, however. While it is probably true we are in a strategic stalemate in the strictest sense of term ‘strategic,’ every year the Taliban is able to maintain its menacing posture gives the insurgents additional leverage at the far more decisive grand-strategic level of conflict: To wit, ask yourself if any of the following five trends (which are inversions of the five criteria defining a successful grand strategy) is way out of line:
(1) Polls tell us that the political will at home to continue this war is slowing deteriorating;
(2) our allies are also going wobbly and some have already pulled the plug;
(3) uncommitted countries are not being attracted to our cause and our warlike activities are alienating many in the Muslim world;
(4) the insurgents’ will to resist shows no sign of weakening; and
(5) no one the US government has a clue how to end this conflict on favorable terms for the United States that do not sow the seeds of future conflict in the region, or with Islam.
The Afghan insurgents may not understand grand strategy in these terms, but they understand instinctively that they can outlast invaders, because they believe they have done it before to Alexander the Great, the British at the height of their imperial power, and the Soviets. Is there anyone who not think the insurgents’ moral is being boosted by the prospect of outlasting the Americans?
A simple grand-strategic analysis reveals that time is clearly on the Taliban’s side and to assume that battle hardened leaders of the Taliban do not understand this is just a tad optimistic, to put it charitably. In fact, the breakdown of President Obama’s strategic review last December, which devolved into a dispute over when to leave, simply reinforced the obvious.
From the outset of my command in Afghanistan, two or three times each week, accompanied by a few aides and often my Afghan counterparts, I would leave the International Security Assistance Force headquarters in Kabul and travel across Afghanistan -- from critical cities like Kandahar to the most remote outposts in violent border regions. Ideally, we left early, traveling light and small, normally using a combination of helicopters and fixed-wing aircraft, to meet with Afghans and their leaders and to connect with our troops on the ground: Brits and Marines rolling back the enemy in Helmand, Afghan National Army troops training in Mazar-e-Sharif, French Foreign Legionnaires patrolling in Kapisa.
But I was not alone: There were other combatants circling the battlefield. Mirroring our movements, competing with us, were insurgent leaders. Connected to, and often directly dispatched by, the Taliban's leadership in Pakistan, they moved through the same areas of Afghanistan. They made shows of public support for Taliban shadow governors, motivated tattered ranks, recruited new troops, distributed funds, reviewed tactics, and updated strategy. And when the sky above became too thick with our drones, their leaders used cell phones and the Internet to issue orders and rally their fighters. They aimed to keep dispersed insurgent cells motivated, strategically wired, and continually informed, all without a rigid -- or targetable -- chain of command.
Why are so many of the most talented officers now abandoning military life for the private sector? An exclusive survey of West Point graduates shows that it’s not just money. Increasingly, the military is creating a command structure that rewards conformism and ignores merit. As a result, it’s losing its vaunted ability to cultivate entrepreneurs in uniform.
Valgustatud kindral Gerhard Johann David von Scharnhorst
Aivar Jaeski
Ajateenistusele pani Euroopas aluse Prantsuse revolutsioon, mis kukutas Bourbonide ülemvõimu, tõi õigused kodanikele ning lõi vabariigi. Kuidas juhtus nii, et Esimese maailmasõja alguseks oli loodud õlitatud, hästi toimiv süsteem? Kes olid nende muudatuste taga?
Revolutsioonis tekkinud Prantsuse vabariik ei kestnud kaua, kuid see kogemus valgustas paljude Euroopa mõtlejate meeli. Käesolev artikkel käsitleb ühte valgustatud meest, kindral Gerhard Johann David von Scharnhorsti, kes tutvustas ajateenistuse ideed Preisi aristokraatidele. Scharnhorst väärib tutvustamist ka juba kas või seepärast, et ta oli kuulsa sõjandusteoreetiku Carl von Clausewitzi õpetaja. Huntington on nimetanud Scharnhorsti refomistiks, kes pani aluse tõelisele lääne sõjaväelase elukutsele.
Teema käsitlemine on raske, sest vähene hulk seda puudutavaid materjale elas üle Teise maailmasõja. Maailmakaardilt on kadunud ka Preisi riik ning jäänud on vaid mälestus vapratest meestest, kes 1815. aasta juunis jõudsid Waterloo lahinguväljale napilt enne Wellingtoni armee kokkukukkumist. Ühe põhjuse, miks Scharnhorsti vähe teatakse, toob välja Charles Eduard White raamatus „Valgustatud sõjamees" („The enlightened soldier"). Tema väitel ignoreerivad nüüdisaja ajaloolased Preisimaa toonased reforme seetõttu, et Natsi-Saksamaa kolleegid neid liigselt imetlesid.
Special Operations Forces: Future Challenges and Opportunities
By Robert Martinage 2008 (abbreviated by R. Toomse)
Given the long expected service life of most of its major assets, the US military force structure, which underlies the concepts of operation that drive the US “way of war,” is still based primarily on the premises and experience of the Cold War and its immediate aftermath. Arguably, much of the current Program of Record (the forces the Department of Defense seeks to acquire in coming years) remains similarly reflective of that period. Yet the looming strategic challenges look to be significantly different. Thus there is a danger that many of the forces that the Defense Department plans to acquire may prove to be unsuitable for dealing with future threats.
Special Operations Forces (SOF) are elite, highly trained military units that conduct operations that typically exceed the capabilities of conventional forces.
There is a common perspective among a variety of defence and security establishments around the world that the nature of the current and future security environment we face presents complex and irregular challenges that are not readily apparent and are difficult to anticipate. Governments are faced with “unusual” or “unconventional” threats that dominate the attention of their political and defence leaders. The diverse set of threats are interconnected and have the potential to undermine wider international stability by creating a state of low level persistent conflict for the foreseeable future.
Special Operations Forces (SOF) provide an inherently agile instrument ideally suited to this ambiguous and dynamic irregular environment while allowing national and collective defence establishments to retain freedom of action through employing economy of force. SOF are characterized as strategic assets because of their ability to achieve political, military, psychological, and informational objectives that represent the foundational instruments of national power. SOF operate outside the realm of conventional operations or beyond the standard capabilities of conventional forces, thus providing a solution to extraordinary circumstances of political interest when no other option is available.
To assure the feasibility of the alternative options SOF provide to decision makers, successful special operations require optimized performance beyond that found in conventional forces. Optimized performance is that which is made as perfect, functional or effective as possible to mitigate the inherent political and physical risk.
A trend is evident from the evolution within many nations that the critical ingredient to optimize SOF is a dedicated national special operations organisation to provide coherent, long term stewardship, authority, and direction over all aspect of special operations. Just as chiefs of the military services serve in a custodial role, the national level SOF organization ensures that SOF are appropriately designed, organized, trained, equipped, and employed to achieve success.
No short cut exists to create SOF when crises arise. Instead, years of training, education, and experience acquired through an investment in time and resources are necessary to prepare SOF units to successfully perform special operations. In comparison to other defence expenditures, such a SOF capability requires a comparatively minor expenditure of total defence costs, especially when compared to the potential return on investment.
As strategic assets, SOF are understandably viewed primarily through the lens of national interests. However, the increasingly prevalent security perspective indicates that multinational collective security arrangements are a prerequisite for confronting the disparate and complex security challenges of the 21st century. Multilateral and collective SOF solutions will enhance national as well as collective SOF capabilities while capitalizing on the strengths of some and compensating for gaps among others.
Beginning in 2008, when news of the development of the Human Terrain Systems (HTS) program first came to public attention, a number of anthropologists began a systematic campaign to dismantle the program or at least ensure that it would never receive the imprimatur of legitimacy from professional organizations. Since the premise of HTS was that it would bring the insights of academic anthropology to the practice of military counterinsurgency, what might normally have constituted an irrelevant gesture (like the shy 9th grader deciding that she simply would not to go to the prom with the football captain, even if he asked) had some clout, in that many anthropology graduate students and unemployed PhDs who might otherwise have considered joining the program chose not to join for fear of being black listed and never landing a job in academia.
My own immediate response on hearing of the program was more ambivalent than that of most anthropologists, or at least than that of the ones who spoke out on the topic. As someone who has been studying Afghanistan for three decades, I was not ready to condemn the program out-of-hand. I am friends with many Afghans who would have to flee from their country – once again – if the Taliban came back to power, and I also knew that the US-led military efforts in that country were not only failing to dislodge the Taliban, but were also alienating the civilian population whose support was critical if the Afghan government was to consolidate its authority. Despite vastly superior training, leadership, and weaponry, the American military was gradually losing its grip, and one of the weaknesses of American efforts has been their lack of knowledge of the social context in which they were fighting. The social organization of tribal and non-tribal Afghans, the role of Islam, gender segregation, the protocols of respect and hospitality – these were all matters of central importance to Afghans, and matters of which American soldiers have been largely ignorant.
Updating close-air support. New doctrine and aircraft are needed for COIN warfare
LT. COL Paul Darling and LT. Justin Lawlor
When Army Gen. Stanley McChrystal took command of Afghanistan, one of his first orders severely restricted the use of fixed-wing strike assets in support of combat operations. The newly appointed commander of the International Security Assistance Force, Gen. David Petraeus, has been reluctant to change the order.
The order received much criticism, with many complaining that restricting strike assets posed too great a danger to soldiers on the ground. The order, however, reflected an unspoken reality, namely that the doctrine, structure and airframes currently used for close-air support (CAS) are fundamentally flawed and are an expensive and ineffective framework for counterinsurgency (COIN) operations. Our current CAS structure is hampering our mission in Afghanistan and reflects a reversal of lessons learned not only by U.S. forces in Vietnam but also by countries around the world engaged in COIN for the past 40 years.
How did we get to the point where the one area where we have unquestioned dominance is deliberately neutered to the point of irrelevance? It wasn’t easy, but fixing it can be. We can not only dominate the air, but effectively use it to our advantage as long as the military acknowledges our current failures, uses an analysis of our successful past and encourages an effort by all service branches to adjust to a post-Cold War environment. We can fight better, cheaper and more effectively only when we understand where we are and from where we came.
Thinking Critically about COIN and Creatively about Strategy and War: An Interview with Colonel Gian Gentile
Octavian Manea
That has been the whole problem with the COIN narrative that developed at least in US Army circles since the end of the Vietnam War. It was, and is, premised on the idea that the Vietnam War could have been won by better counterinsurgency tactics and operations.
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When General David Petraeus talks of the “right inputs finally being in place” he betrays a deep seated adherence to the COIN narrative that better generals and reinvented armies can rescue failed strategy and policy. Unfortunately, upon inspection history demolishes this myth.
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The warning it should provide is that you should never think that improved tactics, whether it is a conventional or a counterinsurgency war, can rescue a failed strategy or policy. Sun Tzu offers one of the most profound statements on the relationship between tactics and strategy: Strategy without tactics is the slow road to victory, but tactics without strategy is the noise before defeat. Another historical example comes to mind. The German army up to a certain point in WWII was arguably one of the finest tactically fighting armies in history. But it lost. The warning is to be careful how much faith you place in the idea that better tactics can save a failed strategy or policy
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By the way, have we lost Clausewitz in Afghanistan? Because it seems to me that General Petraeus designed a highly integrated comprehensive approach in Afghanistan, one in which economical, civil and military resources are all put in the service of a unified political purpose. All of these things were put together in a sophisticated integrated operational approach which essentially is boiling down to a nation building at the barrel of the gun. Can it work? Sure. But it is not going to take a few years, but multiple years, decades. If one looks to history in the modern world when has a foreign occupying country been successful in this kind of nation building endeavor or operation in a similar context that you have in Afghanistan? I keep using the metaphor of a box - the methods, tactics and techniques of nation building that have come to eclipse consideration of strategy and policy. But if you step out of the box of the tactics and operations of counterinsurgency (which it seems that many folks are locked into) and view things from the level of strategy and say, ok maybe COIN can work in Afghanistan, but it is going to take a very long time that will require a huge commitment of American blood and treasure. Then strategy demands to ask the question of this war relative to what the policy objective given to the military by President Obama is for Afghanistan. And the policy objective, the political objective that was given to the American military by President Obama is actually quite limited. Disrupt, dismantle and defeat Al Qaeda from using Afghanistan as a base for attacks. Our strategy seems to me out of sorts because we have a maximalist tactical approach to achieve a rather minimalist political objective.
Galula, Thompson and Kitson defined the center of gravity in a COIN campaign as being “the people”. Protecting and controlling the people became also the main emphasis of FM 3-24. Could we find an alternative center of gravity in a COIN campaign?
Absolutely. Let's go back to Clausewitz. He said that the center of gravity is something to be discovered. The problem with FM 3-24 is that it has taken a center of gravity which could; in theory, looking at the strategy, based on the political objective, and judging the alternatives; be the population. But it doesn't have to be. Let me repeat, IT DOESN’T HAVE TO BE. When we make by rule the population as the center of gravity for any counterinsurgency, well, we have just allowed the tactics of population centric COIN to eclipse strategy. We are trapped therefore in the tactics of population centric counterinsurgency. To prove how much the American Army has become locked down by this rule just peruse the issues of the journal Military Review for 2010 and see how much we have accepted the rule that in ANY counterinsurgency the population is the prize, or the center of gravity. This supreme dogmatism seems to me to preside over the death of strategy. When you say that the population is the center of gravity then you derive a certain set of operational methods. And that is Galula: dispersion of troops, as many troops you can get, live out amongst population, do clear hold and build, protect them, inject energy and resources thus trying to win the population over to your side. The problem is that when you make by rule that the population is the center of gravity in any COIN then you have no more strategy since you have excluded other options or alternatives for dealing with the instability or insurgency.
Why are the core principles of the population-centric technology contestable? After all, they are grounded in historical experiences and validated by the history of COIN campaigns-as the best practices in field. They passed the empirical test in Algeria and Malaya.
They didn’t pass Algeria because the French lost. It’s not that you want to devalue the point of not studying them at all - the tactical and operational activity. No. But one must be careful about how far you go with elevating the importance of tactics and operations when France looses a war like in Algeria. And then with Malaya? No. This has been the construction of the counterinsurgency narrative that is premised in a key way on what people think that British did in Malaya and the notion that the British, once they put a better General, Gerald Templer, in command in February 1952, and then he turned his army on a dime and starting doing population centric counterinsurgency correctly (hearts and minds), they focused on population protection, injecting energy and resources and persuasion to bring people over to the government side which in the end, as this story goes, broke the back of the communist insurgents. No. It is wrong. It is not supported by current scholarship or supported by the historical record. In fact the Malayan communist insurgency was broken before even General Templer took command. And it was broken by large scale resettlement of the Malayan Chinese population that severed their physical link with the communist insurgents. So yes the British did win at counterinsurgency in Malaya, but they didn’t win through a population centric hearts and minds counterinsurgency.
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The idea that hearts and minds have been won by foreign occupying powers in modern counterinsurgency war is just simply hokum.
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So I don't buy at all the whole surge triumph narrative, based on a flawed understanding of Vietnam and an equal misunderstanding of Malaya, that the American Army fumbled in Iraq from 2003-2006 but was rescued in 2007 by a better General who armed his army with a new method of COIN (codified in FM 3-24), the American Army was thus reinvented and because of what it did differently that is what produced a lowering of violence in the summer of 2007. No.
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Personally, I think that it should be organized and optimized around the principles of firepower, protection and mobility and not around the principles of nation building, stability operations and counterinsurgency. If you have an army optimized for combined arms warfare it still can do other kinds of missions. However, if you optimize an army to do nation building and small wars it becomes much more problematic to step into the direction of doing fighting at the high end of the spectrum. History shows that this tends to be the case: look at the Israelis in Lebanon in 2006, South Vietnamese Army between 1973 and 1975, and the British Army in the second Boer War. These were all armies that became predominantly focused on counterinsurgencies and small wars and when confronted with a foe that fought them in a sophisticated way they had problems and they paid a heavy price.
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We should absolutely retain the lessons, the experience, the institutional knowledge that we have gained in the last eight or nine years of operations. But we should be aware of one key lesson: we should get beyond tactics and not place our faith in the idea that improvements in techniques and methods will somehow make the problem of strategy go away. It’s just doesn’t work that way. Nor should we think that Iraq and Afghanistan define the face of future war.
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Does the American Army today know how to plan and execute a population centric coin (nation building) campaign? Of course it does. But does it have the capability to plan and execute a movement to contact into Pakistan to secure lose nuclear weapons, or to conduct a strategic raid with ground forces into Yemen to punish tribes associated with al Qaeda, or to conduct an extensive occupation of North Korea after it collapses which will require a good deal of fighting recalcitrant North Korean infantry dug in along the way?
In his classic history, Thucydides detailed the savage 27-year conflict between Sparta and Athens. Sparta was the overwhelming land power of its day, and its hoplites were drilled to perfection. The Athenians, led by Pericles, were the supreme maritime power, supported by a walled capital, a fleet of powerful triremes, and tributary allies.
The Spartan leader, Archidamius, warned his kinsmen about Athens’ relative power, but the Spartans and their supporters would not heed their king. In 431 BCE, the Spartans marched through Attica and ravaged the Athenian country estates and surrounding farms. They encamped and awaited the Athenian heralds and army for what they hoped would be a decisive battle and a short war.
The scarlet-clad Spartans learned the first lesson of military history—the enemy gets a vote. The Athenians elected to remain behind their walls and fight a protracted campaign that played to their strengths and worked against their enemies. Thucydides’ ponderous tome on the carnage of the Peloponnesian War is an extended history of the operational adaptation of each side as they strove to gain a sustainable advantage over their enemy. These key lessons are, as he intended, a valuable “possession for all time.”
The Second Lebanon War, 2006
In many details, the amorphous Hizballah is representative of the rising hybrid threat. The 34-day battle in southern Lebanon revealed some weaknesses in the posture of the Israel Defense Forces (IDF)—but it has implications for American defense planners, too. Mixing an organized political movement with decentralized cells employing adaptive tactics in ungoverned zones, Hizballah showed that it could inflict as well as take punishment. Its highly disciplined, well-trained distributed cells contested ground against a modern conventional force using an admixture of guerrilla tactics and technology in densely packed urban centers. Hizballah, like Islamic extremist defenders in the battles in Fallujah in Iraq during April and November of 2004, skillfully exploited the urban terrain to create ambushes and evade detection and to hold strong defensive fortifications in close proximity to noncombatants.
In the field, Israeli troops grudgingly admitted that the Hizballah defenders were tenacious and skilled. The organized resistance was several orders of magnitude more difficult than counterterrorism operations in the West Bank and Gaza Strip. More importantly, the degree of training, fire discipline, and lethal technology demonstrated by Hizballah were much higher.
Tactical combinations and novel applications of technology by the defenders were noteworthy. In particular, the antitank guided missile systems employed by Hizballah against IDF armor and defensive positions, coupled with decentralized tactics, were a surprise. At the battle of Wadi Salouqi, a column of Israeli tanks was stopped in its tracks with telling precision. Hizballah’s antitank weapons include the Russian-made RPG–29, Russian AT–13 Metis, and AT–14 Kornet, which has a range of 3 miles. The IDF found the AT–13 and AT–14 formidable against their first line Merkava Mark IV tank. A total of 18 Merkavas were damaged, and it is estimated that antitank guided missiles accounted for 40 percent of IDF fatalities. Here we see the blurring of conventional systems with irregular forces and nontraditional tactics.
Hizballah even managed to launch a few armed unmanned aerial vehicles, which required the IDF to adapt in order to detect them. These included either the Iranian Mirsad-1 or Ababil-3 Swallow. These concerned Israeli strategists given their global positioning system– based navigational system, 450-kilometer range, and 50-kilogram explosive carrying capacity. There is evidence that Hizballah invested in signals intelligence and monitored IDF cell phone calls for some time, as well as unconfirmed reports that they managed to decrypt IDF radio traffic. The defenders also seemed to have advanced surveillance systems and very advanced night vision equipment. Hizballah’s use of C802 antiship cruise missiles against an Israeli missile ship represents another sample of what “hybrid warfare” might look like, which is certainly relevant to naval analysts as well.
Perhaps Hizballah’s unique capability is its inventory of 14,000 rockets. Many of these are relatively inaccurate older models, but thanks to Iranian or Syrian support, they possess a number of missile systems that can reach deep into Israel. They were used both to terrorize the civilian population and to attack Israel’s military infrastructure. Hizballah managed to fire over 4,100 rockets into Israel between July 12 and August 13, culminating with 250 rockets on the final day, the highest total of the war. Most of these were short range and inaccurate, but they achieved strategic effects both in the physical domain, by forcing Israel to evacuate tens of thousands of citizens, and in the media, by demonstrating their ability to lash back at the region’s most potent military.
Ralph Peters, who visited Lebanon during the fighting, observed that Hizballah displayed impressive flexibility, relying on the ability of cellular units to combine rapidly for specific operations or, when cut off, to operate independently after falling in on prepositioned stockpiles of weapons and ammunition. Hizballah’s combat cells were a hybrid of guerrillas and regular troops—a form of opponent that U.S. forces are apt to encounter with increasing frequency.
Compound Wars
Historians have noted that many if not most wars are characterized by both regular and irregular operations. When a significant degree of strategic coordination between separate regular and irregular forces in conflicts occurs, they can be considered “compound wars.” Compound wars are those major wars that had significant regular and irregular components fighting simultaneously under unified direction. The complementary effects of compound warfare are generated by its ability to exploit the advantages of each kind of force and increase the nature of the threat posed by each kind of force. The irregular force attacks weak areas, compelling a conventional opponent to disperse his security forces. The conventional force generally induces the adversary to concentrate for defense or to achieve critical mass for decisive offensive operations.
One can see this in the American Revolution, when George Washington’s more conventional troops stood as a force in being for much of the war, while the South Carolina campaign was characterized by militia and some irregular combat. The Napoleonic era is frequently viewed in terms of its massive armies marching back and forth across Europe. But the French invasion of Spain turned into a quagmire, with British regulars contesting Napoleon’s control of the major cities, while the Spanish guerrillas successfully harassed his lines of communication. Here again, strategic coordination was achieved, but overall in different battlespaces.
Likewise, the American Civil War is framed by famous battles at Chancellorsville, Gettysburg, Vicksburg, and Antietam. Yet partisan warfare and famous units like John Mosby’s 43d Virginia Cavalry provided less conventional capabilities as an economy of force operation. T.E. Lawrence’s role as an advisor to the Arab revolt against the Ottomans is another classic case of compound war, which materially assisted General Edmund Allenby’s thrusts with the British Expeditionary Force against Jerusalem and Damascus. But here again, Lawrence’s raiders did not fight alongside the British; they were strategically directed by the British and supplied with advisors, arms, and gold only. Vietnam is another classic case of the strategic synergy created by compound wars, posing the irregular tactics of the Viet Cong with the more conventional capabilities of the North Vietnamese army. The ambiguity between conventional and unconventional approaches vexed military planners for several years. Even long afterward, Americans debated what kind of war they actually fought and lost.
Hybrid Wars
As difficult as compound wars have been, the operational fusion of conventional and irregular capabilities in hybrid conflicts may be even more complicated. Compound wars offered synergy and combinations at the strategic level, but not the complexity, fusion, and simultaneity we anticipate at the operational and even tactical levels in wars where one or both sides is blending and fusing the full range of methods and modes of conflict into the battlespace. Irregular forces in cases of compound wars operated largely as a distraction or economy of force measure in a separate theater or adjacent operating area including the rear echelon. Because it is based on operationally separate forces, the compound concept did not capture the merger or blurring modes of war identified in past case studies such as Hizballah in the second Lebanon war of 2006 or future projections.
Thus, the future does not portend a suite of distinct challengers into separate boxes of a matrix chart. Traditional conflict will still pose the most dangerous form of human conflict, especially in scale. With increasing probability, however, we will face adversaries who blur and blend the different methods or modes of warfare. The most distinctive change in the character of modern war is the blurred or blended nature of combat. We do not face a widening number of distinct challenges but their convergence into hybrid wars.
These hybrid wars blend the lethality of state conflict with the fanatical and protracted fervor of irregular warfare. In such conflicts, future adversaries (states, state-sponsored groups, or self-funded actors) will exploit access to modern military capabilities, including encrypted command systems, man-portable air-to-surface missiles, and other modern lethal systems, as well as promote protracted insurgencies that employ ambushes, improvised explosive devices (IEDs), and coercive assassinations. This could include states blending high-tech capabilities such as antisatellite weapons with terrorism and cyber warfare directed against financial targets.
Implications
The rise of hybrid warfare does not represent the end of traditional or conventional warfare. But it does present a complicating factor for defense planning in the 21st century. The implications could be significant. John Arquilla of the Naval Postgraduate School has noted, “While history provides some useful examples to stimulate strategic thought about such problems, coping with networks that can fight in so many different ways—sparking myriad, hybrid forms of conflict—is going to require some innovative thinking.”
Tomorrow’s conflicts will not be easily categorized into conventional or irregular. The emerging character of conflict is more complicated than that. A binary choice of big and conventional versus small or irregular is too simplistic. The United States cannot imagine all future threats as state-based and completely conventional, nor should it assume that state-based conflict has passed into history’s dustbin. Many have made that mistake before. State-based conflict is less likely, but it is not extinct. But neither should we assume that all state-based warfare will be entirely conventional. As this article suggests, the future poses combinations and mergers of the various methods available to our antagonists. Numerous security analysts have acknowledged the blurring of lines between modes of war. Hybrid challengers have passed from a concept to a reality, thanks to Hizballah.
