In spite of being new, hybrid warfare, up to now, has been used in many parts the world. However, as hybrid warfare uses a combination of various methods, not conforming to certain rules and being concealed by many tricks, it is not always easy to be recognized. Moreover, this type of war is manifested in different ways in each country and region; thus, its conception is not yet the same.
The identification of hybrid warfare
According to the Wikipedia, hybrid warfare is a type of warfare that blends various forms of warfare, such as conventional warfare, irregular warfare, low intensity conflict, chemical, biological, nuclear, information, and cyber attacks. However, US military experts, in another aspect, think that there is now a form of hybrid warfare that is occurring in the world; in which conflicts aim to cause the so-called “controlled chaos”. According to David Kilcullen, the English author of “Accidental Guerrilla”, hybrid warfare is the most correct to name modern conflicts that have a popular variation of guerrilla warfare and riot, civil warfare and terrorism. To conclude, not coming to an agreement yet, most people think that hybrid warfare is a combined war in all areas, waged by one or many countries against another or other countries; in which psychological and cyber warfare, riot, and terrorism play an important role.
In reality, one of the most typical hybrid warfare is the war in Lebanon between Israel and Hezbollah (2006). In this conflict, Hezbollah succeeded in adopting various guerrilla tactics to disable Israeli powerful military forces. From its secret tunnels, Hezbollah used anti-tank weapons to stop Israeli attacks from obtaining none of villages along Lebanon border line. Particularly, Hezbollah “cracked” Israel’s coded media network, for instance, mobile phone network to grasp the enemy’s situation. This is the reason why Israel’s modern weapons system, including aircraft, missiles, tanks, could not promote its efficiency. As for Middle East, recently, being backed by forces outside the region, wars and riots have continuously broken out in countries such as Iraq, Libya, Egypt. Not aiming at territory, these conflicts mainly destroyed the region’s existing collective security system. It was clearly manifested in the objective of the invasion of Libya, (carried out by the U.S. and NATO in 2011). It was the overthrow of Gaddafi’s government for a new pro-Western one; also bringing the country into “controlled chaos”. Accordingly, Libya, which once played an important role in the Middle East’s collective security system, was changed into “haven” for terrorism. That created conditions to conduct riots in Syria and other countries that did not follow their orbit. It was more strongly confirmed in Senator John McCain’s statement: “after Libya, the Arab Spring will spread over Syria and Iran”.
At present, it seems that the U.S. and NATO are conducting a hybrid war against Russia. Accusing Russia of being engaged in Ukraine’s turmoil, the U.S. and NATO increase the imposition of economic sanctions while strengthening acts of veiled sabotage to separate and weaken Russia. This is the reason why hundreds of Ukrainian citizens took part in notorious terrorist organization “Islamic State of Iraq and the Levant” when the country’s political crisis began to break out. The organization immediately came back to Ukraine and played a leadership role in riots in Kiev, causing the overthrow of President Yanukovych’s political regime. It did not surprise people that right after that, the terrorist militants together with foreign mercenaries directly engaged in the campaign against “terrorists” launched by Kiev. According to international analysts, in fact, the above-mentioned forces have received command and support from outside which were out of Kiev’s control in order to sabotage and weaken Russia as Western geopolitical objective. All of the issues above show that hybrid warfare is diversified and complex with the combination of factors, unpredictable to be realized in its beginning, and it could happen in any country worldwide.
Information warfare- the key factor in hybrid warfare
In military experts’ opinion, in spite of the fact that it is a war, its main features are turmoil, riot, terrorism, civil conflict, not just military and technical aspects or hi-tech equipment as usual. In this type of war, information warfare is one of the most important factors in hybrid warfare. It was proved by rapid development of radical terrorist organizations when they applied globally information warfare very successfully. Accordingly, they take advantage of the Internet, first and foremost social networks to implement their activities, such as intelligence, recruitment, and mobilization, which have gained certain success. Accordingly, Goh Nima, one of the experts who founded Google, claimed his invention of Egyptian “revolution” (2011) when Facebook helped to build and gather a force of tens of thousand of people for demonstrations against President H.Mubarak’s dictatorship. Many analysts also believe that in an information war, the Internet becomes technical means to command terrorist organizations and networks, particularly in propagation to panic the people. It is also the Internet that is the most effective means for terrorist organizations to popularize violence scenarios within the people. Thus, the self-proclaimed Islamic State (IS) have focused on developing propagation organs to perfect level, including media organs and high quality movie centres. With these ones and support of good experts (recruited by IS), they produced strongly impressive propagation videos to paralyze the enemy’s spirit of opposition as well as to encourage terrorist militants. Practically the Internet and services above allowed the organizations to publicize “horror” videos impacting millions of people globally.
At present, in Ukraine, information warfare is best exploited to accuse each other of territorial violation. Notably, posted designed videos on acts of violation of each other have had multilateral impacts on international opinion, which makes the Eastern Europe country’s crisis more severe. According to the former US Assistant Secretary of Defense , Professor Joseph Nye of Harvard University, as for today technology, no countries could prevent using social networks to limit and annul human activities of free ideology. The US military forces have now been able to use the Internet to create riots beforehand to deal with the enemy’s responses. This shows that the Internet and social networks are not only the key factor in hybrid warfare, but also a weapon of massive “destruction” in battlefield in the 21st century.
Responding to hybrid warfare
According to Evgeny Medxenon, theoretical expert of Tsar of Russia, to win a hybrid war, the most decisive condition is that countries must be always creative, proactive and flexible. Without the condition, a country will possibly fall into an enduring turmoil and crisis. Lessons drawn by many countries infected with “Arab Spring” show that in order to successfully respond to a large-scale hybrid war, it is necessary to maintain and build up a close relationship between the people and security and police forces, army, and other state organs. Besides, Governments should have preparatory policies for the people and train them skills of collaboration with military and security forces when situations happen. This is considered a key to limit hybrid warfare. Reality in Syria showed that large-scale terrorist acts do not often succeed in the places that the people closely work with army and police. Syria’s government suffered from severe losses, and then found out the way to effectively respond to this complex type of war.
Basically, hybrid warfare is intentionally carried out by hegemonic forces. However, its efficiency much depends on internal situation and pre-eminence of political regime of the country that is invaded. Therefore, to effectively respond to this warfare, together with developing economy, countries should focus on dealing with social issues, strengthening solidarity and consensus among ethnics in society; building pure and strong state politics, strong defence and security potential, appropriate foreign relations. These can be the most fundamental things helping countries stay strong against the storm of hybrid warfare.
Assoc Prof, PhD. Dong Xuan Tho