Russia is suspected in a wide range of indirect attacks in Europe, including cutting undersea cables.
Max Boot
December 31, 2024
The Washington Post
On Christmas Day, a cable carrying electricity from Finland to Estonia was severed in the Baltic Sea, while four other submarine cables carrying data were damaged. Finnish authorities found an anchor drag mark on the seabed and seized a tanker that is believed to be part of the “shadow fleet” that Russia uses to export oil and gas in violation of Western sanctions.
This is only the latest act of sabotage in Europe attributed to the Kremlin. Just a month ago, a Chinese ship was believed to have cut two other data cables in Swedish waters at Moscow’s behest. In the past year, Russian operatives are also suspected of trying to plant incendiary devices on a cargo plane in Germany; plotting to kill the head of a major German company manufacturing weapons for Ukraine; committing arson attacks in Poland, Britain and Germany; and interfering in elections in Romania and Moldova, among other countries.
Russia is conducting “an intensifying campaign of hybrid attacks across our allied territories, interfering directly in our democracies, sabotaging industry and committing violence,” NATO Secretary General Mark Rutte said in November. But what exactly is a “hybrid war,” and what should the West do about it?
Coinage of the term “hybrid war” is sometimes credited to retired Marine Lt. Col. Frank Hoffman, in 2007, but Hoffman tells me that it originated with Jim Mattis, the now-retired Marine general and former defense secretary. Mattis gave a speech on the subject in 2005, and Mattis and Hoffman co-authored a prescient article that year in the U.S. Naval Institute’s Proceedings magazine entitled “Future Warfare: The Rise of Hybrid Wars.”
Their article warned that in future “hybrid wars” the United States could find itself dealing “with the fall out of a failed state” that “lost control of some biological agents or missiles”; “acts of violence” by “non-state actors against our critical infrastructure”; or “other forms of economic war” or “computer network attacks against military or financial targets.”
Mattis tells me that he adopted the term “hybrid war” to “break out” of the conventional mindset that America is at peace unless U.S. military forces are engaged in a shooting war. This binary logic doesn’t cover lower-level threats such as cyberattacks on the U.S. homeland — or cables cut in the Baltic Sea. “If we’re waiting for the ‘real’ war per our past time’s definition, we may not recognize the enemy is fighting war against us now,” Mattis wrote in an email last week. “The ‘hybrid’ term was used as a nudge to a broader view of warfare.”
It is imperative that the United States adopt a more expansive view of conflict, because that is how our adversaries think. Indeed, two People’s Liberation Army colonels, Qiao Liang and Wang Xiangsui, published an influential book called “Unrestricted Warfare” in 1999 that laid out a vision of what might be called hybrid warfare with Chinese characteristics.
These Chinese officers were reacting to the mastery displayed by the U.S. military in the 1991 Gulf War. Realizing that weaker nations such as China could not compete in conventional military terms in the short term, they argued for widening the concept of conflict to include such covert measures as buying off an opponent’s legislators and media outlets, assassinating financial executives, fomenting environmental disasters and launching computer network attacks. “The first rule of unrestricted warfare is that there are no rules, with nothing forbidden,” they wrote.
Fourteen years later, a U.S. Defense Department report in 2013 identified the “three warfares” strategy in Chinese military doctrine — psychological warfare (“to influence and/or disrupt an opponent’s decision-making capability”), media warfare (“aimed at long-term influence”) and lawfare (which “exploits the legal system to achieve political or commercial objectives”). China has used the “three warfares” approach to unlawfully assert control over the South China Sea by, among other measures, concocting spurious historical arguments (about a “nine-dash line”), building artificial reefs, and sending armed “fishing boats” to harass and chase away mariners from other nations.
Iran is another country that has made a heavy investment in hybrid warfare in recent decades. It has sought to assert its control across the “Shiite crescent” in the Middle East by backing proxy militias including Hezbollah in Lebanon and the Houthis in Yemen, while also interfering in U.S. elections and hiring criminals to assassinate regime foes abroad. The fall of Bashar al-Assad’s regime in Syria is a major setback for Iran (and Russia), but Tehran is likely to simply double down on its hybrid strategy. Even the “hermit kingdom” of North Korea is engaged in hybrid warfare, including cyberattacks and supplying munitions and troops for Russia’s use in Ukraine.
Russia, though, remains the preeminent practitioner of hybrid warfare. Its tactics range from conventional combat operations in Ukraine to sabotage and political influence operations in Europe to the dispatch of mercenaries to Africa and the Middle East to plunder resources and prop up warlords. All of it is designed to regain the power Russia lost after the collapse of the Soviet Union.
How should the West respond? The Center for European Policy Analysis recently published a useful article on “Making Russia Pay for Hybrid Attacks.” The author, Lithuanian diplomat Eitvydas Bajarunas, argued that the West must wage its own hybrid warfare that is “sufficiently devastating to make Russian eyes water and deter future misbehavior.”
His recommendations included increasing economic sanctions on “Russian decision-makers”; pursuing legal actions against individuals “involved in hybrid actions”; using cyberattacks to disable “Russian-controlled” botnets and servers; removing social media accounts that “spread false information”; and stepping up military efforts to counter Russian sabotage. One could add
other ideas, such as efforts to bypass Russian censorship and sabotage Russia’s oil-tanker shadow fleet — operations that Western intelligence agencies could undertake.
Mattis tells me he agrees that the United States needs to actively wage hybrid warfare. He suggests the need for a classified presidential decision memorandum, completed after consultation with leading members of Congress, to “frame the actions.” The retired general advocates a strategy to “widen the competitive space,” with a “commitment to make it hurt,” adding that the “indirect approach would allow us to seize the operational initiative while staying in retaliation mode [versus] escalation mode.”
But, unfortunately, it’s hard to imagine Donald Trump, the most Russia-sympathetic, NATO-skeptical president of modern times, implementing such an agenda once in office again. With the Trump administration taking charge, simply continuing current efforts to counter Russian hybrid operations, much less increasing them, will be a major challenge.
On Dec. 23, congressional Republicans succeeded in shutting down the State Department’s Global Engagement Center, which was set up to monitor and counter disinformation campaigns from Russia, China and other U.S. adversaries. MAGA Republicans falsely accused the center of engaging in censorship. That amounts to an act of unilateral disarmament in the multi-front hybrid war that, like it or not, the United States is engaged against a determined (and increasingly allied) axis of adversaries.
Max Boot is a Washington Post columnist and a senior fellow at the Council on Foreign Relations. A Pulitzer Prize finalist in biography, he is the author, most recently, of the New York Times bestseller “Reagan: His Life and Legend,” which was named one of the 10 best books of 2024 by the New York Times.