Committee on Armed Services House of Rep

The Evolution of Hybrid Warfare and Key Challenges Committee on Armed Services House of Rep

The United States and its joint forces must be able to respond to challenges across the full spectrum of conflict. Our tendency as a country to ignore forms of conflict that are not conventional and kinetic in character has impeded our performance in the past and will continue to do so until we grasp the full set of conflict types. A variety of terms are used to describe unconventional forms of warfare: hybrid warfare, indirect warfare, the gray zone, and others. Americans are used to thinking of a binary state of either war or peace. That is the way our organizations, doctrine, and approaches are geared. Other countries, including Russia, China, and Iran, use a wider array of centrally controlled, or at least centrally directed, instruments of national power and influence to achieve their objectives. Whether it is contributing to foreign political parties, targeted assassinations of opponents, infiltrating non-uniformed personnel such as the little green men, traditional media and social media, influence operations, or cyber-connected activity, all of these tactics and more are used to advance their national interests and most often to damage American national interests. These tactics are not new. The historical records suggest that hybrid warfare in one form or another may well be the norm for human conflict, rather than the exception.