Hybrid wars: when conflicts modernize but nothing changes

Cold, fear or desolation. That is what the faces of the approximately 2,000 migrants reveal, according to the Government of Belarus, from the Middle East and Africa who remain stranded on the Belarusian side of the border with Poland in a clear maneuver of pressure to the European Union (EU).

On the other hand, there are the analyzes, essays and specialized texts that define this humanitarian drama as a “hybrid war.” But what are the media referring to when they talk about this concept?

The term was coined in 2007 by Frank Hoffman, a lieutenant colonel from USA in the reserve who works as a researcher at the National Defense University (Department of Defense), to refer to the conjunction of conventional military modes and strategies of war with terrorist tactics that encompassed violence and criminal disorder.

In practice, under the umbrella of the concept “hybrid wars” are framed situations in which the States make use of their military capacity against another country or non-state actor, at the same time that they use other means linked to the economic spheres, politician or diplomat.

The Undersecretary General for Security and Defense of the OTAN, David Cattler, already referred to hybrid threats in April this year, classifying them as “strategies that create confusion and disunity in States” and that can “undermine the democratic values ​​of their institutions, sowing doubts among the population.”

“Hybrid strategies are often used by NATO adversaries because they are aware that in a conventional conflict they could not be imposed politically, militarily or economically,” according to David Cattler.

Technological development and “hybridization”

Since 2007, technological development has led to an increase in the variety of tools to be applied in what for many specialists is nothing more than a modernization of the “guerrilla war” through the use of the internet or social networks to condition the result of electoral processes or through cyberattacks to jeopardize critical infrastructures of the States, such as their financial administration, health services or water or energy supplies.

“Hybridization also involves more actors apart from the state ones, we see how companies participate, criminal groups with whom depending on their interests they collaborate or not because, for different purposes, they have also decided to participate in a destabilization or aggression campaign against third parties” , explained the principal investigator of the Elcano Royal Institute on Defense and Security, Félix Arteaga, for whom “the States no longer have a monopoly on conflicts and are threatened by other actors.”

For Arteaga, the case of the Belarusian challenge to the EU on the border with Poland represents an episode of “hybrid warfare” to the extent that armed and security forces are used to “channel the migratory flows politically generated by a State (Belarus) ”And they are“ channeled against a country (Poland) ”and, therefore, against the European Union.

Difference from conventional wars

The difference between hybrid wars and conventional ones is that now these hostile actions occur in periods where there is no previously established declaration of war, oscillating in a gap between peace and war that geopolitical experts have dubbed the “gray zone” .

“You cannot respond with military means in most cases because they are in a gray zone, in which there is no fixed mix of how much military component and how much non-military component there should be,” Artega specified.

Frigate Captain Federico Aznar, who is also an analyst at the Spanish Institute for Strategic Studies, emphasizes that “the nature of war is not always necessarily military” and that “force should not be confused with power.”

“War is a political activity,” understanding this as the interest of the actors involved in the “creation of agendas to manage a conflict,” he said.

If before the hostile maneuvers between States could consist, in addition to the military deployment, in the withdrawal of diplomatic visas or the economic blockade, these continue to be maintained but the use of migratory pressure, cyberattacks or the use of the internet as a lever have gained strength. to orchestrate campaigns that condition public opinion through “fake news” with the same historically common objective: to destabilize adversary states until they break.