Journal of Defense Management
Open Access

Abstract

A Framework for Hybrid Warfare: Threats, Challenges and Solutions

Ayodele A. Otaiku

To understand the problems involved in adapting to war, one must first come to grips with the complexities, ambiguities, and nature of war itself. This paper aims at theorizing multi-dimensionality of modern warfare antecedent?s non-state actors and state actor illuminated by Russia military capability to disrupt and deter Western activities and Eastern Europe infrastructure leveraged by the network grid of modern infrastructure as decisive point of victory. A framework for hybrid warfare (adaptive construct at war and peace time) set out a view of the character of conflict, depicts how military doctrine must change because of constrains and influence by globalization, technology and encapsulated by national interest in the battle space today. The framework components are (values/national interest, warfare ecosystem. human capital, infrastructure, scenario and stakeholders) depicting war strategy (ends/ways/ means) recentre of gravity nizing the limits of military expertise for collaboration; where, environmental degradation and food security are decisive point of victory that engage the most effective use of civilian buy-in during war campaign. The consequence of the ability of armed forces and war ecosystem to learn, adapt with distributed leadership capability and foresight to thrive on chaos because ?hybrid warfare? accentuate ?anticipation war doctrine?, war or peace is not declared, but in the continuum that examines the ?military capability? of every nation including the ?extra-terrestrial? like US Space Force, sixth military branch by 2020. Methodology thrives on change and evolution like the wars in Iraq, Afghanistan and Syria have shown that irregular warfare breaks from traditional understanding of how military and civilian leaders should each contribute to the overall effort of modern warfare (multi-modality, simultaneity, fusion, and catastrophic).