What Is Hybrid Warfare? History, Methods, and How Russia's War on Ukraine Redefined the Concept
In today's reality, warfare has undergone a profound transformation in its nature and substance, taking on a hybrid character. At the same time, experts note that these features of military conflict are not entirely new or unique. Hybrid wars, and related forms of confrontation such as proxy wars, have a long history. They have been employed in various formats and scales over many decades — even centuries. Thus, despite the evolution of hybrid warfare tools and methods, the underlying patterns and historical context of interstate conflicts remain largely consistent.
The renowned Chinese strategist Sun Tzu, who lived in the 6th–5th centuries BC, emphasized in his famous treatise The Art of War: "To win one hundred victories in one hundred battles is not the pinnacle of skill. To subdue the enemy without fighting is the true pinnacle." The ancient Greek historian Herodotus of Halicarnassus described specific hybrid warfare techniques in his work Histories, drawing on examples from the Scythian–Persian War (6th century BC) and the Greco-Persian Wars (499–449 BC).
In the late 17th century, the French scholar Gabriel Naudé explored strategies of interstate conflict rooted in what we would today call hybrid warfare technologies, in his work Political Considerations upon Refined Politicks and the Master-Strokes of State.
In the second half of the 19th century, the Prussian general Carl von Clausewitz made a major contribution to the theory and practice of hybrid warfare through his book On War (1832). He articulated the foundational conceptual basis of hybrid conflict — that war is the continuation of politics by other means — and described instruments that today fall squarely under the hybrid warfare category.
When military force is chosen as the primary instrument of resolving interstate disputes, the result is war in its classical sense. When the goals of aggression are pursued through coordinated measures in the political, economic, and informational spheres — with military action playing a limited, supporting role — the result is the socio-political phenomenon known as hybrid warfare.
In hybrid warfare, aggression is conducted across all four domains simultaneously: political, economic, informational, and military. The primary drivers are not kinetic military strikes, but informational, sociopolitical, ideological, and economic influence operations.
Dr. Mark Galeotti, Director of the Centre for European Security, notes that in hybrid warfare, non-military forms of struggle predominate — with a 4:1 ratio in favor of non-military methods of invasion. Fundamentally, hybrid warfare is a stress test of a state's political resilience.
Hybrid warfare operates below the threshold of traditional war or direct open violence — yet delivers substantial results. It is simpler, cheaper, and less risky than full-scale conventional warfare, since it is far more cost-effective to sponsor and spread disinformation in cooperation with non-state actors than to deploy military hardware in a conventional conflict.
Clausewitz himself wrote that war can be thought of as a "true chameleon" — it changes its nature in every specific case. Hybrid warfare, by design, continuously shifts the rules of the game and simultaneously operates across both military and civilian dimensions.
The distinctive features of hybrid warfare are most fully evident in Russia's war against Ukraine, launched in late February 2022. Beyond conventional military operations, the adversary has actively waged — and continues to wage — energy warfare, food warfare, information warfare, and cyberwarfare as parallel campaigns.
As Academician Volodymyr Horbulin of the National Academy of Sciences of Ukraine argues: "Each specific element of this 'hybrid war' is not new in essence and has been used in almost all wars of the past. What is unique is the coordination and interconnection of these elements, the dynamism and flexibility of their application, and the growing weight of the information factor — which in some cases becomes an independent component no less important than the military one."
Horbulin identifies several terms established in modern international military-political thought for this new type of conflict: unconventional war, irregular war, compound war, or state-sponsored hybrid war.
Russia's annexation of Crimea, the subversive operations in Donbas that began in spring 2014, and the seizure of the Zaporizhzhia Nuclear Power Plant are all operations of hybrid warfare. They escalated in February 2022 into a full-scale military aggression combining classic conventional warfare with asymmetric elements.
Since 2004, NATO has recognized the term "hybrid warfare" as the most appropriate designation for new forms of aggression. From 2006, the term was already widely used to analyze military operations in Lebanon and other states.
In 2010, a NATO Working Group defined a hybrid threat as a danger created by a real or potential adversary (a state, non-state organization, or terrorist group) through the simultaneous use of conventional and unconventional military methods to achieve its objectives.
The final document of the NATO Summit in Wales (September 2014) stated in paragraph 13 the need for NATO to be capable of effectively addressing "specific challenges posed by hybrid warfare threats, where a broad range of overt and covert military, paramilitary, and civilian measures are used in a highly integrated design."
NATO member states view hybrid warfare as encompassing a wide range of combat operations, covert actions, partisan formations, civilian components, propaganda campaigns, cyberattacks, and local separatist movements. To address these challenges, NATO established a dedicated training center in Latvia — the Strategic Communications Centre of Excellence (StratCom COE).
In hybrid warfare, purely military instruments become auxiliary in achieving the aggressor's strategic objectives. The combination of military and non-military tools is what defines its hybrid character.
Before armed conflict begins, the aggressor concentrates efforts on:
Destabilizing the sociopolitical environment
Provoking public dissatisfaction with the ruling government
Inflaming separatist sentiment within society
Discrediting the political and military leadership of the target state
These domains — political, economic, informational, ideological, and military — can be viewed as separate "theaters of operations" in hybrid warfare. No single domain is inherently primary; the aggressor can prioritize any of them depending on circumstances. They function both in an integrated manner — complementing each other — and independently, each with its own specific methods of pressure against the target state.
A deeper analysis of the technologies, methods, manifestations, and instruments of hybrid warfare — against the state, society, business, and the individual — is presented in Sidcon's book "Modern hybrid warfare technologies" The publication proposes a comprehensive set of countermeasures at the state level, with a focus on the integration of artificial intelligence. Specifically, it addresses the creation of modern decision support systems and information filters. AI-powered tools enable the effective detection and analysis of disinformation and manipulative influence operations carried out as part of hybrid attacks. The deployment of such solutions enables more effective threat management, while information filters facilitate the automatic detection and blocking of false or harmful content — making the response to hybrid threats faster, more precise, and more effective.