Geraint Hughes Following Anna Karenina’s suicide in Tolstoy’s eponymous novel, her lover Count Vronsky enlists to fight for the Serbs against the Turks. Vronsky’s decision reflected the contemporary reality of Russian volunteers taking up arms against the Ottoman Empire during the Balkan crises that preceded the Russo-Turkish War of 1877-1878, and it provides a reminder… Read More Historical Reflections On The ‘Grey Zone’
CHIARA LIBISELLER A few new concepts have come to dominate the more recent Western discourses on security and defence, both in the academic and practitioners’ sectors; these concepts include ‘hybrid war’, ‘cyber war’, ‘narratives’ and ‘resilience’.[i] They are invoked to help us understand, explain and react to threats that Europe and the United States are… Read More Conference Report: 2018 Vienna Conference on Strategy
DR GERAINT HUGHES On the night of the 20th-21st August 1968, Soviet paratroopers and spetsnaz soldiers seized Ruzyne airport outside Prague, proceeding subsequently to take over key points in the Czechoslovak capital. The following day, 22 Soviet Army divisions – augmented by contingents from four other ‘fraternal’ Warsaw Pact states (Bulgaria, the German Democratic Republic,… Read More The End of the Prague Spring – Fifty Years On
DR GERAINT HUGHES At the end of last month The Economist published a special report on ‘The Future of War’ by Matthew Symonds. Symonds’ report is well-researched and addresses a wide array of contemporary issues and conceptual challenges, ranging from the renewed relevance of Article 5 for NATO to the likely implications of introducing AI… Read More Predicting future trends in warfare
DR ROD THORNTON When it comes to the winning of wars, it might be thought that military organisations today, just as they have always done, would be concentrating their efforts on how best to use kinetic force. Military violence is, after all, what militaries do. But not, it seems, any more – or at least… Read More Current Russian and Chinese ways of warfare: the end (?) of military violence in peer-state conflict
DR EMMANUEL KARAGIANNIS and DR TRACEY GERMAN The conflict in eastern Ukraine has entered its fourth year with little sign of a negotiated resolution. Crimea has been absorbed into the Russian Federation and celebrated the third anniversary of its ‘integration’ in March 2017. To date, most scholarly analyses of the conflict have focused on the… Read More The Ukrainian Crisis: The Role of, and Implications for, Sub-State and Non-State Actors
DR CHRIS TUCK Why does hybrid war cast such a long shadow over Western conceptions of future threats? The ubiquity of the idea of hybrid war is interesting given the many serious problems with the concept. Hybrid war has, for example, little intellectual coherence, since different commentators define hybrid war in different ways. For Frank… Read More Hybrid War: The Perfect Enemy
By Dr. Rod Thornton Russian military thinking seems to have reached the point now where the idea of using force intentionally in conflicts with peer-state adversaries has been almost completely ruled out. This seems a radical move. But there has been a clear recognition within this military that better strategic outcomes for Russia will result… Read More The Russian military’s view on the utility of force: the adoption of a strategy of non-violent asymmetric warfare
DR GERAINT HUGHES Ever since the annexation of Crimea in February-March 2014, and the conflict in Eastern Ukraine, military analysts have debated the nature of ‘hybrid war’ – or ‘non-linear’/’ambiguous warfare’ – and whether it represents the military strategy of choice for Vladimir Putin’s Russia. The Polish, Estonian, Latvian and Lithuanian militaries in particular are using Ukrainian-style… Read More LITTLE GREEN MEN AND RED ARMIES: WHY RUSSIAN ‘HYBRID WAR’ IS NOT NEW
ROBERT SEELY Over 18 months into Russia’s not-so-very-proxy, proxy war in Ukraine, there remains a thriving and fascinating debate over the tools of conflict that Russia uses, how one describes those tools and where Russia’s next ‘target’ may be. I was asked to respond to Rod Thornton’s recent blog on Russia. In his excellent piece,… Read More RUSSIA HYBRID WAR – A RESPONSE
Defence-In-Depth 