BLURRED SPECTRUM OF CONFLICT: GREY ZONE & HYBRID WARFARE

1. Modern day geopolitical landscape has put to question the basic construct of war and peace as well as the spectrum of conflict. The lines defining distinct and variegated temporal and spatial spaces for conflict have dissolved in the domains of space, cyber and more importantly the cognitive domain. The idea of warfare as propounded in our scriptures was defined by raising of banners and blowing of conches on day break and the same sounded the end of hostilities even in the battle ground at dusk. Today a new paradigm of conflict spectrum exists; the C5 ie Cooperation, Competition, Crisis, Confrontation and Conflict. Even in the C5 paradigm, the application of kinetic and non kinetic vectors both in direct contact or non-contact are at work incessantly and relentlessly. The whole idea of declaration of conflict as it used to happen in yester years where heads of state would announce the same over a medium are done for. We are in a state of conflict at this very moment and its ironical that this state of conflict has been defined in a multitude of ways, unrestricted warfare by the Chinese, ambiguous warfare by Russians and hybrid warfare by the Western world. The question one must ask, is it a new phenomenon or its just old wine in a new bottle. ‘Ashwathama is Dead’ for those who have read Mahabharat would know is Psychological Warfare at its best. Infiltration of Lord Hanuman into Lanka and setting it on fire is an epitome of 4GW. From mythology to history, be it Rana Pratap or Shivaji use of hybrid warfare, unrestricted warfare or ambiguous warfare has been a matter of routine.

Fig-1: Quadrants of Conflict

2. It is today’s great irony that, despite the fact that the Indian Armed Forces have been at war since independence, rarely do we find the policy maker who speaks adeptly about our use of military power in a coherent manner as part of Comprehensive National Power (CNP). On the one hand, political leaders attempt to avoid categorizing our air strikes and raids targeting terrorist camps in PoJK and Pakistan as war, while on the other hand they conflate hostile Chinese acts with some form of hyphenated war. In this piece I argue that the adoption of two prominent and fashionable theoretical terms and their various iterations — the grey zone or grey zone conflict (usually described as the space between peace and war) and hybrid war (often described as new form of mixed-methods warfare) is an example of an Indian failure to think clearly about political, military and strategic issues and their vitally important connections. These terms, as well as the concepts arising from them, should be eliminated from the strategic lexicon. They cause more harm than good and contribute to an increasingly dangerous distortion of the concepts of war, peace and geopolitical competition, with a resultant negative impact on the crafting of the elusive security strategy for India. There are four key problems with grey-zone conflict and hybrid war and the related variations of each.

(a) They are examples of poorly constructed new theories that more often than not cloud rather than clarify.

(b) They distort or ignore history, sometimes by claiming to be new when we have seen similar confusion in the past.

© They feed a dangerous tendency to confuse war and peace.

(d) They undermine our strategic thinking via the construction of critical political and strategic documents on the basis of flawed ideas, even sometimes resulting in strategic guidance derived from a focus on tactical matters.

3. Advocates of hybrid and grey-zone ideas are today elevating the importance of these concepts to being a new theory of war. How do we judge whether this theory is valid and accurate? The results of theory, Clausewitz insists, “must have been derived from military history, or at least checked against it,” thus ensuring “that theory will have to remain realistic. It cannot allow itself to get lost in futile speculation, hair-splitting, and flights of fancy.” Most importantly, particularly in any theory addressing warfare, it “is meant to educate the mind of the future commander.”[1] Commentators frequently use the grey zone phrase to describe the wars being prosecuted by Russians and Chinese in various parts of the globe. Commentators use grey zone and its variations to describe China’s moves to cement its extralegal territorial claims in the South China Sea against weaker opponents, as well as Iranian moves in Syria and the Persian Gulf. The selective use of this theory to western adversaries while precluding actions by USA and Israel lends to its opacity.

4. The popularization of the term grey zone appears to have been inspired by its incorporation into military documents and speeches. The 2010 Quadrennial Defense Review references challenges that occur in an “ambiguous grey area that is neither fully war nor fully peace.”[2] But it took the remarks delivered five years later by General Joseph L. Votel, USA, the then head of Special Operations Command, to bring the term into the public eye. He incorporated the concept into his briefing to Congress on the unique challenges posed by Russia and the Islamic State, noting that “our success in this environment will be determined by our ability to adequately navigate conflicts that fall outside of the traditional peace-or-war construct.”[3] An article discussing “a ‘grey zone’ between traditional notions of war and peace” appeared soon after.[4] Collectively, this work gave us a generally accepted definition of the term. The best that can be derived from it is that a “new standard form of conflict” is emerging from “revisionist states” that are “competing below the threshold of major war.”[5] Ironically, grey zone is used by critics of America to describe what is seen as deliberate efforts to blur recognition of what is clearly a military action: the occupation of a sovereign nation.

5. The key argument being made by the proponents of this theory is; “A fundamental implication of grey zone campaigns is to blur the dividing line between peace and war, and between civilian and military endeavours. They are, in a sense, the use of civilian instruments to achieve objectives sometimes reserved for military capabilities.”[6] The problem is not that there is a blurring of the line between peace and war and in the behaviour of the protagonists. The problem is in the failure of analysts and policy makers to understand the differences between war and peace and the frequent conflation of acts of subversion, harassment and other forms of non contact and non kinetic actions (refer Fig-1) among countries nominally and legally at peace with war. War is a distinct state in which violence is used to achieve political ends. While new domains or new fronts of C5 between war and peace remains fixed despite the efforts of some to elide the difference. Recalling the relationship between the pursuit of the political objective and the elements of grand strategy; meaning how we use all the elements of national power in pursuit of a political aim. For example, what Pakistan has done in Kashmir since 1947–48 is to conduct successfully a war for limited political aims, using both active violent and subversive means. The failure to brand this war a war does not alter the facts on the ground or prevent honest analysis. But one must remember that the above-mentioned analysis applies to both peace and war. Just because a state is not at war with a rival state, it does not mean that the first state is not attempting to subvert the second. The C5 paradigm with China epitomized this. Currently, China is not at war with India, despite many insistences to the contrary including the violent face off at Galwan in Jun 2020, but both nations constantly practice forms of grey zone activities against each other, such as information warfare, legal warfare and cyber warfare. All nations compete with one another, and with regard to Pakistan and China one could brand them more accurately as adversaries competing with India even if they are not at war with us (i.e., actually involved in fighting them). In the end, the problem is that analysts writing about the so-called grey zone are confusing war with exploitation of CNP and its tools that are used both in peace and in war.

6. If the most important role of political leaders is to get the political aims right so that all else follows logically, an important consideration is the need for political and military leaders to communicate them clearly to friend and foe alike. Identifying key national interests and drawing sharp redlines around them while providing for their credible enforcement is key to avoiding situations that evoke the label “grey-zone confrontation.”[7] But this requires political leaders to understand what they want and to be clear and specific in their pronouncements. The continued use of these terms insists on the existence of a nonexistent space between war and peace and risks the dangerous possibility that these acts that take place beyond established red-lines for action will generate the jus ad bellum for war. More likely, the angst over shadowy activities short of war by malevolent actors could nudge policy makers to counter minor threats to Indian interests rashly, in ways that backfire or perhaps erode India’s legitimacy as a global influencer of stability and prosperity and also net security partner in Indian Ocean Region (IOR). Not understanding the difference between peace and war can cause miscalculations that precipitate the latter.

7. We can distinguish hybrid war from the grey zone by the fact that instead of describing a shadowy space where an alleged pseudo-war is ensuing, hybrid war pretends to describe the character of activities during what is clearly war among two or more entities. These activities take place at the tactical level of war, and analysts detail them so they can categorize the tools as a mix of conventional and irregular in the same space. The continual expansion of diverse tools and examples is considered evidence of the existence of hybrid war, a term now used to describe nearly every form of interstate competition and conflict from the tactical to the political. The result has been to confuse rather than clarify our understanding of war. The epistemology of hybrid war is an article by Frank G. Hoffman, Conflict in the 21st Century, although he first broached the issue in an article co-authored in 2005 with now-former Secretary of Defense James Mattis[8]. Moreover, it would be patently unfair to blame Hoffman for the proliferation of this term, as more than a decade’s worth of writers have exploited the existence of hybrid war and its variants in a dizzying number of articles and policy papers. These consider hybrid war to be made up of conventional and unconventional means, crime, terrorism, subversion and technological innovation. However, the idea of using and combining all the aspects of national power to achieve political objectives is an ancient one, and the failure of theorists to realize this is surprising.

8. In 2007, Hoffman provided the following definition — the foundation for the hybrid war texts that followed it: “Hybrid Wars incorporate a range of different modes of warfare, including conventional capabilities, irregular tactics and formations, terrorist acts including indiscriminate violence and coercion, and criminal disorder. These multi-modal activities can be conducted by separate units, or even by the same unit, but are generally operationally and tactically directed and coordinated within the main battle space to achieve synergistic effects” (italics in the original)[9]. At first glance, this definition seems entirely workable, and an accurate description of a growing number of battlefields and hot spots around the world. But it is hard to think of a single characteristic of war, particularly at the tactical level, that does not fit within it. If this is true, hybrid war becomes a redundant term; it simply constitutes war as we always have known it. Moreover, as we will see, the term introduces nothing different from what India has encountered from adversaries historically, or even what they have done to others in the conduct of war.

9. Hybrid war is at best simply a neologism for tactical innovation. Moreover, the theoretical problem is compounded when one digs deeper into the key texts. It is unclear whether hybrid war is supposed to refer to war, warfare, or a threat. For example, hybrid threats may be “competitors who will employ all forms of war and tactics, perhaps simultaneously,” as well as “criminal activity.”[10] This explanation is followed by the following: “hybrid threats incorporate a full range of different modes of warfare.” The same paragraph adds that “Hybrid Wars can be conducted by both states and a variety of non-state actors.”[11] The unfortunate result of this intellectual confusion is the construction of elements of Indian strategy on myth and misunderstanding and the militarization of grand strategy, producing what the late strategic analyst Michael Handel referred to as the tacticization of strategy.[12] Adopting badly formed western tactical concept and using it as one of the pillars for the creation of own strategic construct is a flaw we are besotted with. War’s very nature creates ambiguity, and seizing the initiative is part of the job when waging a war, as is paralyzing the enemy. There is nothing here that has not been practiced since ancient times; Chanakya would have defined this as simply war. Linking together a wide range of acts in multiple domains, in and out of conflict zones, serves to confuse more than clarify which is certainly the result here. Unfortunately, terms such as hybrid war have gained enough currency not only to pollute our lexicon and cognitive space. Fortunately, not everyone is buying what is being sold. Hybrid war is nothing more than a revival of the indirect approach discussed by B. H. Liddell Hart. Hybrid war becomes everything; thus it is nothing.

10. Discussions of hybrid war are simply discussions of the means and methods of waging war. This is nothing new, it is nothing exotic, it is nothing original. Studying the means and methods of warfare is critically important, but trying to make it something other than what it is by creating an illogical, imaginary category of war is an example of cloudy and potentially dangerous reasoning. If we focus laser-like on the means and methods, we forget what the war is about. Hybrid war as a term injures rather than aids our ability to do practical strategic analysis and leads to the construction of strategy on the basis of tactics. It also encourages the militarization of other elements of grand strategy while driving us to view every geopolitical act through a warlike lens. This should encourage us further to move away from use of this term. Moreover, by confusing the C5 paradigm among adversaries with things called hybrid or grey-zone war, we risk conflating everything with war; a dangerous proposition. If we are at war with another country, our citizens rightly can ask what exactly we are doing about it. If it is merely heated competition and international crisis, meaning who gets what, when, and where, then elements of national power other than force or threats to use force will have to be relied on to a larger degree. A second and related problem is a poor knowledge of military theory, particularly of the standard works such as Clausewitz’s On War and Chanakya’s Arthashastra, as well as past doctrinal practices. The related misuse of these works is perhaps a greater factor than an ignorance of them, particularly of Clausewitz’s On War. A third issue is the not-always beneficial drive to adopt something new in academic circles. This is particularly true in the international affairs and political science realms, where too often there is professional pressure to develop another micro theory to explain an element of political or military behavior or practice, and then to fit history into it rather than to analyze the past to see what patterns develop and what we can learn.

11. China’s recent encroachment in Eastern Ladakh and Doklam blatantly altering the status quo of existing rules and statutes in contravention to international law expose the flawed and hopeful assessments that have fuelled Indian foreign policy and grand strategy. What we need are concepts that clarify and inform our thinking, not muddy our intellectual waters and make it more difficult to pursue our political aims peacefully as well as to wage our wars. Buzzwords of last two decades were transformation, net-centric warfare and the revolution in military affairs which are now more or less extinct. Hybrid war and the grey zone soon will follow them into oblivion. When analyzing threats to India’s national security calculus, variations of the unclear and poorly defined terms hybrid war and grey zone to describe the intents as well as the actions of global, regional, and non-state actors, whether we are at war with them or not, and regardless of whether the discussion focuses on political or criminal acts, and regardless of whether military action is occurring in the tactical, operational, strategic or grand strategic realms. This is not merely unhelpful, it is dangerous; worse, it communicates that Indian strategic analysis is like castles made of sand, soon to disappear, then only to be remade frantically again and again.

[1] Carl von Clausewitz, On War, ed. and trans. Michael Howard and Peter Paret (Princeton, NJ: Princeton Univ. Press, 1984), pg 132, 141, 144.

[2] Robert Gates,The Quadrennial Defense Review Report (Washington, DC: U.S. Defense Dept., February 2010), pg 73.

[3] Joseph L. Votel [Gen., USA], “Statement of General Joseph L. Votel, U.S. Army, Commander, United States Special Operations Command, before the House Armed Services Committee Subcommittee on Emerging Threats and Capabilities” (18 March 2015), pg 7, available at docs.house.gov/ accessed on 07 May 22.

[4] David Barno and Nora Bensahel, “Fighting and Winning in the ‘Gray Zone,’” War on the Rocks, 19 May 2015, warontherocks.com/ accessed on 08 May 22.

[5] Michael J. Mazarr, Mastering the Gray Zone: Understanding a Changing Era of Conflict (Carlisle, PA: Strategic Studies Institute, 2015), pg 4.

[6] ibid, pg. 62.

[7] Van Jackson, “Tactics of Strategic Competition: Gray Zones, Redlines, and Conflicts before War,” Naval War College Review 70, no. 3 (Summer 2017), pg 46.

[8] Frank G. Hoffman, Conflict in the 21st Century: The Rise of Hybrid Wars (Arlington, VA: Potomac Institute for Policy Studies, December 2007), available at www.potomacinstitute .org/; James N. Mattis and Frank Hoffman, “Future Warfare: The Rise of Hybrid Wars,” U.S. Naval Institute Proceedings 132/11/1,233 (November 2005), pp. 18–19, available at www.usni.org/. This was preceded by use of the term in a Mattis speech; see Hoffman, Conflict, pg. 14 note 11.

[9] Hoffman, Conflict, pg 14. In a later piece Hoffman writes, “Hybrid wars are not new, but they are different. In this kind of warfare, forces become blurred into the same force or are applied in the same battle space. The combination of irregular and conventional force capabilities, either operationally or tactically integrated, is quite challenging, but historically it is not necessarily a unique phenomenon.” See Frank G. Hoffman, “Hybrid War and Challenges,” Joint Force Quarterly, no. 52 (1st Quarter 2009), pg. 36.

[10] Ibid pg 7.

[11] Ibid pg 8.

[12] Michael I. Handel, Masters of War: Classical Strategic Thought, 3rd ed. (London: Frank Cass, 2001), pp. 46, 353–60