hybrid threats

This article analyzes how Turkey, Iran, and Russia use alternative ways to seek regional and global influence. They have created shadowy organizations in the forms of official armed forces and private military companies and exploit them to pursue their interests. With a focus on SADAT in Turkey, the IRGC in Iran, and the Wagner Group in Russia, the article showcases the foundations of these organizations and their involvement in domestic, regional, and global affairs. These shadowy organizations have been practical tools to target and repress the opposition who are seen as threatening to the existence of regimes at home as well as to expand the influence of these states outside of their borders. Finally, the article sheds light on future risks posed by these organizations and underlines why the world needs to turn its attention to shadowy organizations whose exploitations provide plausible deniability for the local and international violence, conflict, or illicit activity caused by Turkey, Iran, and Russia.

On 27 May 2020, Acting DEA Administrator Timothy J. Shea and United States Attorney for the Southern District of New York Geoffrey S. Berman charged Adel El Zabayar—a former Venezuelan National Assembly member—in a Manhattan federal court with narcoterrorism, a cocaine importation conspiracy, a series of weapons related charges, and money laundering. The charges were based on a DEA agent’s testimony and his broader investigation into El Zabayara’s links to Venezuelan Cártel de los Soles, Fuerzas Armadas Revolucionarias de Colombia (FARC), Hezbollah (Hizballah), and Hamas.

SWJ interview with Dr. David Kilcullen, author of the newly published Dragons and the Snakes - How the Rest learned to fight the West, Oxford University Press, March 2020. He is a professor of practice in the School of Politics and Global Studies at Arizona State University and a professor in the School of Humanities and Social Sciences of the University of New South Wales.

This article attempts to produce a framework that can help public health officials and military leaders develop strategies and operations to counter and eradicate Covid-19 type viral pandemics or other future bioweapon threats we might face on the hybrid-warfare battlefield.

As the U.S. Army looks forward to the next conflict, it must not lose sight of the current strategic challenges. Future adversaries will likely also adopt insurgent tactics, if not entire insurgent groups, in concert with their own modernizing forces in any conflict with the U.S.. Therefore, we must regrow the large-scale combat operations knowledge base in concert with, rather than at the expense, of COIN.

The United States is actively involved in two hybrid conflicts (ISIS in Syria and Iraq) and is supporting the Ukraine against hybrid threats from Russia. That said, America lacks a formal doctrine for dealing with such conflicts or even an agreed-on doctrinal definition of what they are.

NATO rarely, if ever, exercises the deployment to and operation of the force in an environment that is under “hybrid” attack.

The US must be capable of operating within an irregular war against hybrid forces, including in support of large-scale humanitarian operations to relieve suffering and prevent more refugee crises.

Even as coalition forces mass on the suburbs of Mosul and prepare their assault on the last major ISIS stronghold in Iraq, strategic planners are far from declaring victory.