Hybrid warfare doesn’t work

The latest round of Russian provocations, inaugurated by the large drone incursion into Poland on September 10, has sent the Europeans into a tizzy. More drone incidents have followed in the Baltics, Scandinavia, Romania and now as far away as Denmark. A Russian jet cruised just inside the edge of Estonian airspace to widespread NATO panic; GPS is being jammed; elections are being targeted by cyberattacks, as in Moldova; undersea cables are being mapped and cut; Russian spies and saboteurs are being discovered. There seems to be no end to Russian mischief across the continent – only a worsening of it.

The Polish incident so disturbed the allies that they invoked NATO Article 4 consultations, for only the ninth time in the Alliance’s entire history. It resulted in a new NATO “military activity”, codenamed Operation Eastern Sentry, to strengthen allied air security and response. But every time the Alliance puts some new measures in place, the Russians up the ante and find new ways to probe and harass our defences.

The impact on European opinion is palpable, and this is in fact the point of hybrid warfare. Outrage is mixed with fear at what the enemy might do next, with confusion over to how to respond without triggering an all-out war, and with a sinking feeling that Europe is too weak and has no good options.

Despite the tough rhetoric and statements of resolve, nerves are strained by the belief that Russia is somehow “winning” with its campaign of grey-zone, sub-threshold aggression, by shaping – suppressing – Europe’s reaction and gaining a psychological edge which ultimately translates into political advantage.

Impunity can give the Russians an aura of superiority and control over the escalation ladder, intimidating the more feeble members of the Alliance and also eroding popular trust in the ability of NATO to provide adequate security. At worst, it can lead to paranoia about Russian infiltration and their assumed ability to cripple our critical infrastructure and public services at will, which breeds both chaos and paralysis in a crisis.

So what should we do about it? In short, the most effective response is to keep our cool and play it down, not up. This only means no hysteria – not “no response”. On the contrary: aggression must be met with new security measures – NATO’s Eastern Sentry is a good move – and vulnerabilities must be constantly identified and patched up. Yes, unfortunately this situation does imply a constant game of cat and mouse, a certain drain on attention and resources, and a certain level of tension, for as long as the eye can see. (Only a fundamental change in Russian political relations with the West can put an end to this behaviour.)

All this is sustainable from a material point of view, given the scale of the Alliance. We can easily afford to strengthen our air, maritime and ground security around our borders and national infrastructure, not to mention our information warfare capabilities. Technology, such as lasers and better and more persistent space surveillance, will increasingly help against drone incursions and for monitoring threats, for example.

The trick is handling the political impact of Russian hybrid warfare, not the practical one which by definition can only be marginal (otherwise it would cross into open warfare). This is largely a matter of strategic narrative, and it should be anchored in a clear realisation and communication of a basic fact: That hybrid warfare doesn’t work. It fails on every level and is in fact counter-productive for the one wielding it.

First, it is worth stressing once again that in material terms hybrid warfare has no hope of inflicting any strategic, debilitating blow to an adversary. At the other end of the spectrum, the Russians have been hurling thousands of drones and missiles at Ukrainian infrastructure for years now, without fundamentally affecting Ukraine’s ability to defend itself. Compared to this, random acts of sabotage conducted in the Western rear areas would be vastly less impactful, even if there is a “wave” of them.

But it’s unlikely such a wave can occur on any serious scale. Russia’s capacity to infiltrate and maintain a very large network of such saboteurs across all of Europe, so that it would amount to a threat of strategic significance, is extremely limited. Like with terrorists, the bigger the network the more difficult to evade detection and avoid suppression by our own security services. Yes, occasional arson attacks and the odd explosion at some armament factory in a country like Germany, Bulgaria or Britain might cause a stir, and even some regrettable losses; but it would not be decisive in any way and it would only lead to an increase in security and vigilance.

One other useful term of comparison here could be the partisan and “underground resistance” activities in Nazi-occupied territories in the Second World War. They took place on a much wider scale, from France to Italy, Czechoslovakia, Yugoslavia and the Soviet Union, and were of course happening on the home-ground of the partisans themselves. And yet, while scoring notable hits and causing real inconvenience to German forces at times, it wasn’t these activities that won the war, and arguably their absence would not have affected the outcome but at most delayed it.

Second, the information and political component of Russian hybrid warfare, to include electoral interference, is not only a consistent failure but also counterproductive for the Kremlin. There is no European country where it can be seriously claimed, let alone proven, that Russian interference, by itself, altered the course of any election.

This is because for over a decade, since the Maidan, the West has built up and honed its capacity and tools to detect and counter Russian information warfare. It has been so successful at this, in fact, that it is on course to matching the Russians in suppressing freedoms and imposing authoritarian surveillance and controls over our own societies.

This is devastating for European democracy, which is now becoming a farce – when it is not outright cancelled, as with the Romanian elections last December. But it does have the benefit of securing the Western regimes and making it more difficult for the Russians to “undermine our democracy” when they’re up against an adversary that is now using some of their own types of methods.

Furthermore, Russian information warfare has also gone wrong for Moscow in producing heavy collateral damage precisely among the European political opposition forces that it is supposed to “favour”. In reaction to bungled Russian political interference operations, the old European establishments have succeeded in making the “pro-Russian” label both toxic and easy to apply. This has now turned into a powerful tool for maintaining the political status quo across the EU and for justifying almost any form of domestic political repression against populist nationalists – exactly the opposite of what the Kremlin would want for its own separate reasons.

The Russians, including their Soviet forebears, have been at this game for a long time. Throughout the Cold War it was recognised that they had a much more sophisticated theory and indeed operational set-up for conducting information and psychological-political warfare against the West, assisted by their superior spying and Communist subversion apparatus. But it didn’t help them much, because the strategic value of these activities was consistently overstated. The same is true today.