As NATO systematically addresses new hybrid challenges, the alliance identifies the urgent need of collaborative actions and argues whether hybrid warfare might be beneficial for strategists and decision makers in outlining future plans to deal with the hybrid threats that can emerge from nowhere in our reality. This chapter will review the hybrid warfare not only as the unique combinational threats created particularly to defeat an adversary but also a contemporary feature of global politics which are mostly associated with non-state actors (such as terrorist groups) and also will highlight the aspects that cause asymmetric conflicts.
TopAsymmetric Challenge
Hybrid war is an extraordinary combination of various military strategies, which is triggered by the result of such dramatic changes as, the globalization process, technological revolution, recent shifts in communicational process, new treats, etc. that leads to asymmetric challenges and conflicts. Asymmetric Challenge is perceived as a political jargon and is identified as a modern international political threat under aegis of transforming world order. The asymmetric challenge is associated with another new dangerous phenomenon – asymmetric warfare. It is a particular type of war between opponents, whose strategy, tactic and armament is significantly different. For several years’ policymakers, analysts, critics and officials, as well as writers on defense have used the terms “asymmetric” or “asymmetry” to characterize the nature of the threats we face and the nature of the possible warfare. It should be mentioned that the threat, which is now considered to be multidimensional, can be launched from anywhere on the earth. These threats, both strategic and tactical, comprise traditional anti-access strategies along with proliferation of weapons of mass destruction and potential information warfare. Some foreign military analysts believe that, in some cases, their countries have already been subjected to these new forms of threats. They also cite the possibility that the new technologies coming into being could lead to innovative. As Webster dictionary defines asymmetry is “not symmetrical” or “incommensurable”. Asymmetric threats according to some military magazines derive from threats of not fighting fair or attacking a weak point.(Bitner J.2007)
“This is another type of war, new in its intensity, ancient in its origin—war by guerrillas, subversives, insurgents, assassins, war by ambush instead of by combat; by infiltration, instead of aggression, seeking victory by eroding and exhausting the enemy instead of engaging him. . . It preys on economic unrest and ethnic conflicts. It requires in those situations where we must counter it, and these are the kinds of challenges that will be before us in the next decade if freedom is to be saved, a whole new kind of strategy, a wholly different kind of force, and therefore a new and wholly different kind of military training1” . The statement seemed to be strange and different of that time as if it hit the mark, but the speaker was President John F. Kennedy and he was addressing the West Point Class of 1962: “The Commander-in-Chief of U.S. Armed Forces and the head of the U.S. bureaucracy called for evolution—forty years ago and brought out the essence of typical asymmetric warfare” (Buffalo, 2006). Over the decades the terms “asymmetry” and “asymmetric” have become the main topic of American strategic and political science debates and discussions as they refer of contemporary type of war that is becoming more and more actual and turns into one of the central concepts of war affairs. Wars, antagonists, battlefield, strategies, armed conflicts, threats and challenges with many other phenomena that are connected to armed conflicts have been defined and labelled as –asymmetric.