MESOPOTAMIA NEWS : Russian Hybrid Warfare

  13 Oct 2020 – INSTITUTE FOR THE STUDY OF WAR ISW – America’s current strategy for responding to the Russian threat is based on a misunderstanding of the Russian approach to war and exposes the United States and its allies to a high risk of strategic defeats. The 2018 US National Defense Strategy gives primacy to deterring major conventional great power wars. Russia also seeks to avoid such wars even as it designs a different way of waging war to achieve its revisionist objectives.

The US largely views this Russian approach, hybrid war, as a set of activities below the level of conventional conflict, but Russia includes significant conventional conflict in its conception and execution of hybrid war. This view misses Putin’s subversive efforts to shape regional conflicts in Russia’s favor using a variety of means, up to and including the use of conventional military force.  

If the US continues to focus on deterring the kind of war Russia does not intend to fight while underestimating the role military force can and must play in preventing Moscow from accomplishing its aims through hybrid war, then the US will likely suffer serious strategic defeats even as its defense strategy technically succeeds. 

This report recommends several responses for the United States that include: Confront Russian hybrid wars in their entirety as synthetic threats instead of confronting individual Russian lines of effort separately and partially. 

Counter the Kremlin globally as well as in Europe. 

Reinforce Western norms and institutions—key targets of Russian hybrid wars. 

Actively challenge Russian information campaigns. Deprive Russian private military companies and proxy forces of their deniability.

Enable deployed US forces to combat Russian hybrid wars with non-kinetic means.   

Read full paper http://www.understandingwar.org/report/russian-hybrid-warfare