BRUSSELS – NATO adopted a new hybrid warfare strategy at the 28-member defense alliance’s foreign ministers’ conference on Dec. 1, the body’s collective security chief Jens Stoltenberg announced jointly with the head of the European Union’s highest foreign envoy Federica Mogherini.
The measure
was prompted mostly by Russia’s war against Ukraine, with the use of armed men
in military fatigues with no insignia, sophisticated information warfare and
economic sanctions designed to cripple the nation’s economy, according to on- and off-the-record briefings and conversations the Kyiv Post had with senior
NATO diplomats and officials on Nov. 30-Dec.1.
“Today, we
adopted at our foreign ministerial meeting NATO’s Strategy and addressing our
strategy on how we are going to fight hybrid threats,” Stoltenberg said
together with Mogherini.
On her part,
Mogherini said the EU is preparing a “framework” document that corresponds to
this new measure.
Yesterday on
Nov. 30, U.S. Ambassador to NATO Douglass Lute called the counter measure a “triangle
of responsibility” because it combines NATO’s military capabilities with the EU’s
“civilian” capacities and the 28-nation EU bloc’s member states to be the front
line of combating elements of asymmetric warfare.
“Hybrid conflicts
involve multi-layered efforts designed to destabilize a functioning state and
polarize its society,” wrote Peter Pindjak of Slovakia’s Foreign Ministry for
NATO Review magazine in November. “Unlike conventional warfare, the ‘center of
gravity’ in hybrid warfare is a target populace. The adversary tries to
influence influential policy-makers and key decision makers by combining
kinetic operations with subversive efforts. The aggressor often resorts to
clandestine actions, to avoid attribution or retribution. Without a credible
smoking gun, NATO will find it difficult to agree on an intervention.”
When Russia
took over Ukraine’s Crimean peninsula soon after disgraced ex-President Viktor
Yanukovych, then backed by Russian leader Vladimir Putin, fled office in February
2014, the Kremlin employed what defense and military analysts called a
sophisticated form of hybrid warfare.
“Usually (hybrid
warfare) involves a form of deception, below (the) threshold of force on aggression.
It’s not new…the extent to which it is used and coordinated, can reach new
levels. Doctrines and structures have been built to implement hybrid warfare
and that’s what happened with Russia,” said a senior NATO official on Dec. 1 who wished to remain anonymous because the session on Russia at the conference hasn’t taken place at the gathering in Brussels.
Kyiv Post
editor Mark Rachkevych can be reached at [email protected].
