Terrorism: Commentary on Security Documents is a series that provides primary source documents and expert commentary on various topics relating to the worldwide effort to combat terrorism, as well as efforts by the United States and other nations to protect their national security interests. Volume 141, Hybrid Warfare and the Gray Zone Threat, considers the mutation of the international security environment brought on by decades of unrivaled U.S. conventional military power. The term "hybrid warfare" encompasses conventional warfare, irregular warfare, cyberwarfare, insurgency, criminality, economic blackmail, ethnic warfare, "lawfare," and the application of low-cost but effective technologies to thwart high-cost technologically advanced forces. This volume is divided into five sections covering different aspects of this topic, each of which is introduced by expert commentary written by series editor Douglas C. Lovelace, Jr. This volume contains thirteen useful documents exploring various facets of the shifting international security environment, including a detailed report on hybrid warfare issued by the Joint Special Operations University and a White Paper on special operations forces support to political warfare prepared by the U.S. Army Special Operations Command, as well as a GAO report and a CRS report covering similar topics. Specific coverage is also given to topics such as cybersecurity and cyberwarfare, the efficacy of sanctions in avoiding and deterring hybrid warfare threats, and the intersection of the military and domestic U.S. law enforcement.

During the last decade, 'Hybrid Warfare' has become a novel yet controversial term in academic, political and professional military lexicons, intended to suggest some sort of mix between different military and non-military means and methods of confrontation. Enthusiastic discussion of the notion has been undermined by conceptual vagueness and political manipulation, particularly since the onset of the Ukrainian Crisis in early 2014, as ideas about Hybrid Warfare engulf Russia and the West, especially in the media. Western defense and political specialists analyzing Russian responses to the crisis have been quick to confirm that Hybrid Warfare is the Kremlin's main strategy in the twenty-first century. But many respected Russian strategists and political observers contend that it is the West that has been waging Hybrid War, Gibridnaya Voyna, since the end of the Cold War. In this highly topical book, Ofer Fridman offers a clear delineation of the conceptual debates about Hybrid Warfare. What leads Russian experts to say that the West is conducting a Gibridnaya Voyna against Russia, and what do they mean by it? Why do Western observers claim that the Kremlin engages in Hybrid Warfare? And, beyond terminology, is this something genuinely new?

Sponsored by the Army Capabilities Integration Center and in collaboration with the Joint Staff's Deputy Directorate for Global Operations (Strategic Multi-Layer Assessment Branch), this report examines the emergence of gray zone competition and conflict as important pacers for U.S. defense strategy. The authors argue that gray zone challenges are unique defense-relevant issues sharing three common characteristics-hybridity, menace to defense and military convention, and profound and paralyzing risk-confusion. This report and its authors offer an important opening venture into a vexing strategic question for senior defense and military leadership on the subject of gray zone threats. Namely, how can the American defense enterprise adjust to an era of relentless revisionist and rejectionist opposition to U.S. power? On the one hand, purposeful U.S. competitors pursue meaningful revision of the U.S.-led status quo through campaign-quality combinations of influence, intimidation, coercion, and aggression.

This book is available as open access through the Bloomsbury Open Access programme and is available on www.bloomsburycollections.com. Hybrid Warfare refers to a military strategy that blends conventional warfare, so-called 'irregular warfare' and cyber-attacks with other influencing methods, such as fake news, diplomacy and foreign political intervention. As Hybrid Warfare becomes increasingly commonplace, there is an imminent need for research bringing attention to how these challenges can be addressed in order to develop a comprehensive approach towards Hybrid Threats and Hybrid Warfare. This volume supports the development of such an approach by bringing together practitioners and scholarly perspectives on the topic and by covering the threats themselves, as well as the tools and means to counter them, together with a number of real-world case studies. The book covers numerous aspects of current Hybrid Warfare discourses including a discussion of the perspectives of key western actors such as NATO, the US and the EU; an analysis of Russia and China's Hybrid Warfare capabilities; and the growing threat of cyberwarfare. A range of global case studies - featuring specific examples from the Baltics, Taiwan, Ukraine, Iran and Catalonia - are drawn upon to demonstrate the employment of Hybrid Warfare tactics and how they have been countered in practice. Finally, the editors propose a new method through which to understand the dynamics of Hybrid Threats, Warfare and their countermeasures, termed the 'Hybridity Blizzard Model'. With a focus on practitioner insight and practicable International Relations theory, this volume is an essential guide to identifying, analysing and countering Hybrid Threats and Warfare.

The United States is entering a period of intensifying strategic competition with several rivals, most notably Russia and China. U.S. officials expect this competition to be played out primarily below the threshold of armed conflict, in what is sometimes termed the gray zone between peace and war. In this report, the authors examine how the United States might respond to Russian and Chinese efforts to seek strategic advantage through coercive actions in the gray zone, including military, diplomatic, informational, and economic tactics. The United States is ill prepared and poorly organized to compete in this space, yet the authors' findings suggest that the United States can begin to treat the ongoing gray zone competition as an opportunity more than a risk. Moreover, leaders in Europe and Asia view Russian and Chinese gray zone aggression as a meaningful threat and are receptive to U.S. assistance in mitigating it. In this report, the authors use insights from their extensive field research in affected countries, as well as general research into the literature on the gray zone phenomenon, to sketch out the elements of a strategic response to the gray zone challenge and develop a menu of response options for U.S. officials to consider.

With a renewed emphasis on national and homeland security, the United States is once again seeking to balance the needs of the state with both the rights of its citizens as well as those of other nations. This book represents an interdisciplinary approach to the legal dilemmas borne out by the war on terror-against the specific background of Afghanistan, Iraq, and this new kind of conflict. It is a strong contribution to a broader debate visible since 9/11, which will remain in the public eye for the foreseeable future. It addresses the overlap between religion, ethics, armed conflict, and law, within the context of the current conflict. While many issues in areas such as intelligence, reconciliation of civil liberties, dealing with terrorist threats, and the permissible bounds of interrogation, treatment of prisoners and laws governing armed conflict have long standing precedents under domestic and international law, this war has challenged even long standing legal interpretations. The contributors to this volume explore those precedents and contemporary challenges to them. Now that traditional wars between nation states are no longer the rule, the terrorist threat has gained credence (popularly, terrorism and its claimed breeding ground in failed states), linked in practice to issues of intervention on the territory of states harboring such groups. In military circles the idea of armed struggle between modern military forces and what were formerly called guerillas has now largely been replaced by asymmetric warfare and the concept of intelligence and preventive action interchangeably within U.S. borders and overseas. Opposing views contemplate that different-and presumably lower-legal standards may apply in internal armed conflicts. Such legal issues are visible under current circumstances of asymmetric warfare in conjunction with questions about prisoner status and detentions, including the permissible bounds of interrogation versus torture following the Abu Ghraib prison scandal in Iraq but also the treatment at the Guantanamo Bay facility of alleged Al Q'aeda captives from Afghanistan. All of the contributors in this book explore the changing circumstances against which these contentious new legal issues now unfold. The experts strike no consensus. Indeed, one of the work's many strengths can be attributed to the fact that the many facets of the ongoing debate are represented herein.

National security threats facing the West are fundamentally changing. In this book, Elisabeth Braw offers the first sustained analysis of how new tactics in the gray zone between war and peace dangerously weaken liberal democracies. She discusses the breadth of gray-zone aggression and presents strategies for better defense against it.

Just a few years ago, people spoke of the US as a hyperpower-a titan stalking the world stage with more relative power than any empire in history. Yet as early as 1993, newly-appointed CIA director James Woolsey pointed out that although Western powers had "slain a large dragon" by defeating the Soviet Union in the Cold War, they now faced a "bewildering variety of poisonous snakes." In The Dragons and the Snakes, the eminent soldier-scholar David Kilcullen asks how, and what, opponents of the West have learned during the last quarter-century of conflict. Applying a combination of evolutionary theory and detailed field observation, he explains what happened to the "snakes"-non-state threats including terrorists and guerrillas-and the "dragons"-state-based competitors such as Russia and China. He explores how enemies learn under conditions of conflict, and examines how Western dominance over a very particular, narrowly-defined form of warfare since the Cold War has created a fitness landscape that forces adversaries to adapt in ways that present serious new challenges to America and its allies. Within the world's contemporary conflict zones, Kilcullen argues, state and non-state threats have increasingly come to resemble each other, with states adopting non-state techniques and non-state actors now able to access levels of precision and lethal weapon systems once only available to governments. A counterintuitive look at this new, vastly more complex environment, The Dragons and the Snakes will not only reshape our understanding of the West's enemies' capabilities, but will also show how we can respond given the increasing limits on US power.