by Frank G. Hoffman, Small Wars Journal
Further Thoughts on Hybrid Threats (Full PDF Article)
I commend everyone's attention to Dr. Russ Glenn's belated entry (Small Wars Journal, 2 March 2009) into the hybrid conflict debate. I share with him some concerns about new terminology but such changes in lexicon help distinguish changes or nuances. It's important to professional discourse, and sometimes new thinking requires new terms. The utility of the hybrid construct is not as a new entry into the long and pathetic list of US Joint Forces Command's (JFCOM) Three Letter Acronyms (TLAs). Rather it is critical to current critical debates we have presently having. Taking Dr. Glenn's argument to an extreme, there would be little utility to anyone in our community reading Rupert Smith's The Utility of Force, or T.X. Hammes The Sling and the Stone, or John Robb's Global Guerrillas. All of these scholar/ practitioners have offered useful constructs on top of those like Van Creveld non-trinitarian wars, Arguilla's Netwars and Bunker's Epochal Wars. To ignore them because they posed a new construct, or one not invented at JFCOM where Russ now sits is simply bunk.
Each of these books and essays have tried to help capture new elements (if not entirely new, then different) in the ever evolving character of conflict. I have shamelessly stolen from them. Each of these constructs has had to overcome the narrow if not dead hand of the traditional school in military affairs. Dr. Glenn is not part of that rigid community, having committed a number of years to enhancing our understanding of urban operations. But his stated position suggests he might be —to climb into bed with some traditionalist thinking that too often oversimplifies and underestimates our enemies. That approach has very little to show for it the last decade and is principally responsible for the ghastly cost we've paid since 9/11. Let's not repeat that mistake as we peer into the 21st century and tried to pierce the fog.
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I believe that Mr. Hoffman is quite correct concerning Hybrid Threats. It is unfortunate that he tries to use his thought process to discredit the idea of Effects Based Operations. EBO is meant to coordinate potential resources to achieve the strategic endstate. As he rightly points out, we have learned a lot since 9/11: where we took a strictly military viewpoint, we were less than successful; where we took a more EBO viewpoint, we were effective. EBO doesn't replace good judgement; one must know and try to understand his enemy first and foremost. EBO is only a methodolgy for applying all available elements of power in a coordinated manner. It is a planning process that must be informed by Situational Understanding and this in fact is where the IDF made its mistake. NATO has renamed EBO to Effects Based APPROACH to Operations to stress that point.