Hybrid War: Some early thoughts

Here is our tweet on the subject.

Hybrid War: Innovation that happens when the world supplies a country (with an economy the size of Arkansas) to fight the number 4 super power for three years, on their own soil.

Don't be surprised that the face of war is changing.

The risk to NATO is much greater than before.

— US Advanced Computing Infrastructure, Inc. (@chicago_quantum) September 18, 2024

It is inevitable that the style of war fighting is changing to leverage new (and old) technologies.

Israel targets pagers used exclusively by Hizballah or Hezbollah, the radical Islamic terrorist organization. Pagers, as in prostitutes and drug dealers in the 1980s, along with pay phones. Pagers, as in 'I don't have the money to buy a flip phone, so I carry a pager,' or pager, as in a worker on the level 3 support desk of an enterprise IT department that needs to be reached 24 x 7 when a problem happens.

Now, in the modern day, those pagers could activate a network, that we know includes the Iranian Ambassador to Lebanon, to act and react immediately, and in a coordinated and synchronous manner. What happened? A Tom Clancy, super secret spy action by some country (might not be Israel), caused all Hizballah operatives and supporters that are senior or important (e.g., operatives, logistics, coordination, communications, transport) enough to get a pager now bear a mark of shame. They will forever be known as Hizballah. 

Israel is not allowed to massively attack Lebanon because of civilian impacts to infrastructure, and quality of life (as seen in Gaza protests and Kamala Harris's recent statements), but they can isolate and target a distributed terrorist organization via obsolete technology. 

The second event in the last 24 hours is Ukraine blowing up a massive weapons depot using drones. These drones are suspected to have jet engines (so they are a little more expensive), but they still could be the quad-copter types carrying a bomb.

This is a massive military victory for Ukraine. Drone warfare can reach hundreds of miles into an enemy territory and destroy strategic targets. 

I used to be able to buy a drone at Five Below, for $5.00, and learn how to fly a helicopter. Of course, these cost more than five dollars, but in the grand scheme of things, Ukraine can afford to launch a thousand of them in a night, on an attack deep into Russia, and not think twice about it. Probably the biggest issue is how to reduce, reuse or recycle the cardboard boxes they came in. You know...to fight global warming.

I hope you enjoyed this post. We are thinking about Russia's term, Hybrid War, and think that as the world pushes conflicts to last for years (think WW2 only lasted six years, but Ukraine has been fighting, actively for three years), innovations occur.

Those innovations will be harmful for NATO defenses, in our opinion, and require a rethink of military strategy and defensive posture in the twenty-first century.