In February 2017, during the annual Munich Security Conference, Foreign Policy proposed a ādefinite European security drinking gameā, daring readers to take a shot for each occurrence of those catchphrases and platitudes Transatlantic security conferences are often replete with. Hybrid threats āwhich have figured prominently in the lexicon of the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO) and its member states āmay well be listed among those words. Academics have often criticised this notion as a vague and ill-defined buzzword, arguing that the creation of new concepts for phenomena that have been part of war and foreign policy since ancient times amounts to a rediscovery of the wheel. While these objections have a point, the success of new concepts is often dictated by the weight and frequency of their use rather than their scientific correctness. If the notion of hybridity has gained momentum in NATO circles, it is due to its ability to shed new light on present phenomena and serve as a tool to raise awareness of present challenges to Transatlantic security among NATO members and allies. This introductory chapter briefly discusses the key concepts used in this volume and presents the different perspectives on civil-military cooperation and hybrid threats to be found in the ensuing chapters.
Among the merits of the hybrid threats discourse is the renewed emphasis placed on civil-military cooperation . Briefly defined as those threats posed by adversaries with the ability to simultaneously employ conventional and non-conventional means, hybrid threats have emerged as a key concept encompassing a host of different challenges to European, Transatlantic, and global security. These challenges vary in nature and geographical areas, ranging from the use of cyberattacks, energy disruptions , and information warfare to destabilise Ukraine and NATOās Eastern flank to the combination of insurgent, terrorist, and criminal tactics in Syria, Iraq , Afghanistan , Libya, and Mali . While different in scope and implications, hybrid threats share one key similarity. As they combine the simultaneous employment of military and non-military tools, primarily targeting societies at large, hybrid threats cannot be countered solely by military means but require an equally inclusive response encompassing military organisations, foreign ministries, development agencies, international institutions, non-governmental organisations, and the private sector.
The twofold connection between hybrid threats and civil-military cooperation has not gone unnoticed in NATO circles. As famously argued by NATO Secretary General Stoltenberg , hybrid threats are āthe dark reflection of our comprehensive approachā. While the comprehensive approach calls for the combination of military and non-military instruments in crisis management, hybrid warfare employs the same tools to destabilise targeted countries and societies. Strengthening the resilience of NATO members, allies, and partners by combining civilian and military capabilities is therefore essential. Academic research, however, has not examined the importance of civil-military cooperation in countering hybrid threats . While scholars have dedicated some attention to hybrid threats and civil-military cooperation, these two subjects have always been examined in isolation. Moreover, military organisations and civilian academics have rarely engaged in a dialogue on the exact meaning and implications of contested concepts such as CIMIC and hybrid threats. In the very spirit of civil-military cooperation, this book involves experts from specialised NATO competence centres such as the Civil-Military Cooperation Centre of Excellence (CCOE) and Collaborative Cyber Defence (CCD) Centre of Excellence, academics from civilian universities, high-ranking military officers, and officials from government bureaucracies and humanitarian organisations.
By combining academic and military perspectives, the volume offers a threefold contribution to the study of civil-military cooperation and hybrid threats alike. First, it resorts to different case studies to illustrate the importance of civil-military cooperation in enhancing the resilience of NATO members, allies, and partners to a wide range of societal destabilisation strategies. Second, it draws on the evidence provided by these cases to examine the institutional and cultural impediments to effective cooperation in addressing such threats. Third, it seeks avenues to overcome those hurdles, thereby contributing to the formulation of an effective response to hybrid threats. In doing so, the 12 chapters included in this volume provide a novel contribution to the study of civil-military cooperation and present security challenges.
1 Key Concepts
Before presenting each of these contributions in greater detail, this introduction will briefly outline the main concepts used in this volume. Agreement on the definition of key issues is a precondition for a meaningful dialogue between academics, military officers, government officials, and humanitarians. Still, academics and practitioners often do not share an identical understanding of notions like hybrid threats and civil-military cooperation . Indeed, the existence of different definitions and understanding of key concepts provides a measure of the existing gaps between civilians and military officers and between academics and practitioners. In order to maximise contributorsā academic freedom and obtain insights into how practitioners and academics use and assess these concepts, we decided not to provide our contributors with overarching definitions of such notions, leaving them free to choose among existing definitions or develop their own. Hence, the conceptualisations outlined in this introduction do not necessarily reflect in full the approach of all our contributors.
As concepts are āthe basic unit of thinkingā (Sartori 1970: 74), defining concepts is the first step in conducting academic research. This is especially the case in the social sciences, often focusing on phenomena that are not directly observable and do not exist independently from the observer. Security studies are no exception. Notions like power, threat, security, and war have all been considered āessentially contestedā concepts (Gallie 1962), which often embody normative as well as empirical dimensions (Huismans 1998). Consequently, social scientists have dedicated considerable attention formulating concepts and appraising the merits and shortcomings of different definitions. A comprehensive overview of concept formation is behind the scope of this introduction. Some elements of this academic discussion, however, are useful when searching for a definition of hybrid threats and civil-military cooperation .
Concepts consist of three key elements, sometimes referred to as the Ogden and Richards triangle: a signifier, namely the words used to label them; a set of properties that differentiate the phenomenon at hand from others; and a number of empirical referents, namely the population of cases and phenomena that a certain concept embraces. Concepts have two properties: an intension, namely the number of properties they have, and an extension, that is the range of empirical referents each concept covers (Mair 2008; Gerring 1999; Sartori 1970). An inverse correlation exists between intension and extension. A concept with a very large set of properties will be very specific and therefore embrace a narrow number of empirical referents. By contrast, a concept with a narrower set of properties will be more general and therefore applicable to a larger population of cases (Mair 2008; Sartori 1970). While relying on extremely specific concepts may turn social scientistsā vocabulary into a fragmented and abstruse jargon, hindering the ability to draw generalisations, overly general concepts are blunt tools that lack the precisions required by academic research, and may too easily be stretched to embrace phenomena that ultimately differ from one another, obscuring more than they reveal.
The Unbearable Vagueness of Hybridity
According to many academic critics, hybrid threats are incontrovertibly a stretched concept. The Oxford Dictionary defines the adjective hybrid as something āof mixed character, combining two or more different elements, or composed of different partsā. As pointed out by different contributors in this volume, the adjective hybrid has been juxtaposed to different security phenomena, namely war, warfare, and threats. Hybrid war and warfare refer to the blending of various means of conflict, both regular and unconventional (Lasconjarias and Larsen 2015). NATO defines hybrid threats as āthose posed by adversaries with the ability to simultaneously employ conventional and non-conventional means adaptively in pursuit of their objectivesā (2010: 2). According to these definitions, hybridity ultimately has one property only, namely the simultaneous use of conventional and unconventional means.
As rightly pointed out by critics, this property is hardly sufficient in differentiating between different types of conflicts and threats. The combination of different instruments of power, ranging from conventional military operations to economic and diplomatic tools, is in the nature of foreign policy and grand strategy. Virtually all contemporary wars have been characterised by the simultaneous use of conventional and unconventional means (Murray and Mansoor 2012). The awareness that waging military operations is only one among different power tools to be employed in combination with one another is already apparent in Clausewitz and Sun Tzuās conceptualisations of war as a policy instrument. Relatedly, hybrid forms of military action are not novel either. If hybrid action is about the deployment of both conventional and unconventional military instruments and the exploitation of both military and non-military power tools, then hybridity is as old as statecraft (Charap 2015; Murray and Mansoor 2012). As NATO Secretary General Stoltenberg (2015) conceded, āthe first hybr...