I’ve eaten like shit all my life but I run a lot every day
In the early years of the new century, huge force-on-force clashes and low-level irregular warfare aren’t the only threats faced by US military forces. Relatively small hostile groups either have or could acquire in the next few years access to sophisticated and lethal weaponry.
With modest training, modern communications, and strong command and control, these forces can employ such advanced weapons in concert with established guerrilla tactics and gain lethal effects once unavailable to such fighters.
Analysts are calling this type of conflict “hybrid warfare”—blending elements of different forms of combat. Participants in hybrid contests will comprise both nation-states and nonstate actors—sometimes with both on the same side, sometimes opposing one another. This distinctly new type of military challenge requires national security strategists and force planners to understand new realities and prepare America’s armed forces.
Hybrid warfare blurs the distinction between pure conventional and pure irregular warfare. At present, it is also a term with at least three applications. Hybrid can refer, first, to the battlespace environment and conditions; second, to enemy strategy choices; and third, to the type of force the US should build and maintain. Early examinations of this phenomenon have often used the term to apply to all these possibilities. In February, Marine Corps Gen. James N. Mattis, head of US Joint Forces Command and NATO Supreme Allied Commander Transformation, referred to both hybrid enemies and a hybrid force the US might build.
