Hybrid Warfare : Concept & Implications for India

Prof. Gautam Sen

Distinguished Fellow, PPF

The term “hybrid warfare” describes a strategy that employs conventional military force supported by irregular and cyber warfare tactics. Conventional Western concepts of war are incompatible and fundamentally misaligned with the realities of conflict in the twenty-first century. The emergence of a unipolar post-Cold War world order has resulted in a significant paradigm shift. This change has to be ingested by India which is faced with serious issues on security since the early eighties especially after the creation of Bangladesh in 1971. A variety of complex situation has been faced by the Indian Government and the Indian security organisations ranging from separatist movements, secessionist movements, terrorist movement, cross border proxy war conducted by Pakistan in the form of Jihadi war based on religious fundamentalism including home grown terrorism. All these required and continue to require the Indian nation state to take actions to contain the threats that they posed to the very existence of the Indian nation state and required adoption of new legal, psychological, and strategic understanding of warfare and use of force, particularly by state actors from across the international borders from Pakistan. The term “hybrid war” which the military is comfortable to label as “hybrid threat” implies/connotes the use of conventional military power supported by irregular and cyber warfare tactics. In a tactical sense, the Russian concept of “nonlinear conflict” is an example of tacticising the hybrid warfare strategy. Hence we have to be very precise to distinguish between linear and non-linear conflicts which can be summed up as “Linear conflicts are defined by a sequential progression of a planned strategy by opposing sides, whereas nonlinear conflict is the simultaneous deployment of multiple, complementary military and non-military warfare tactics.” In this essay attempt has been made to understand the theoretical moorings of the Hybrid warfare and understand why Hybrid threats which have plagued the nation states around the world ever since the end of World War-II. The root cause of a hybrid threat emanates from a crisis of identity, unevenness in political economy amongst states and last but not the least from the method of governance and administering of governance across the international border. A global overview of the Countries where the Hybrid Warfare has taken place and covers the history of operation has been incorporated.

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