Re: <nettime> The American theory of hybrid war

[Ted Byfield <tedbyfield@gmail.com>]

On 15 Mar 2022, at 0:07, Brian Holmes wrote:

> The American theory was produced after the 2005 Isreal-Lebanon war which
> resulted in the Israelis finally exiting the South of Lebanon. Origin of
> the concept is a guy named Hoffmann, 2007 (bit.ly/3MPtEVc). This is
> distinct from the Russian concept of hybrid war, it's not about
> information. Instead the model is a situation where irregular forces on the
> ground have a structural partner in conventional state forces using all
> levers except direct military intervention. In the Israel-Lebanon war, the
> irregular forces were Hezbollah and the conventional state was Iran. In the
> current conflict, you get it.

This is schematic to the point of being inaccurate.

Hoffmann's ideas have been influential, but giving a single person so much credit is like saying America's corporate, higher ed, agriculture, or tech sectors coalesced around a single theory. There are indeed theories that have had that level of impact in those sectors — Milton Friedman's proposal that corps should focus solely on maximizing shareholder value, for example, or ideas with murkier origins, say, that college tuition *should* rise — but Hoffmann's work is nowhere near that kind of systemic status. What he offered was less a manifesto than a carefully calibrated compromise: a sort of let's-agree-to-disagree lowest-common-denominator, why-can't-we-all-be-friends, just-don't-mention-you-know-what-in-front-of-the-in-laws approach that everyone could get on board with without rocking anyone else's boat too much. But it's even narrower than that.

The US military has a long history of para-academic theories about how do what it does, which can be traced back across a century+ of buzzy concepts: hybrid war, low-intensity conflict, counterinsurgency, anti-guerrilla, anti-partisan, and so on. And those are just the street-level theories about how to do old-fashioned stuff like actually try to win; what's notable is how divorced they are from the the 'strategic' theories driving showcase systems like missiles, advanced 'aerial platforms,' etc. Some of those buzzy ideas were significant, others were basically just rebranding. What they have in common is reaching a critical mass within the US mil/intel bureaucracies (which are VERY plural and contentious). Those ideas spilled into public discussion because they were translated into institutional agendas — i.e., budgets shifted, entities were created or combined, technical standards and protocols were developed, weapons systems were commissioned and acquired, education and training curricula were changed, personnel and materiel were moved around the chessboard, and so on. All of that requires overcoming mind-bending institutional inertia and cynicism — which, again, helps to account for why Hoffmann's ideas can be understood not just in terms of their impact but also in terms of their *lack* of impact.

Those non/changes point to a larger problem, which the US mil/intel establishment shares with US academia — because it has its own vast, internal version of higher ed, ranging from vocational schools to Ivy League-like prestige academies, think tanks, and all the rest. The problem? It produces far more qualified candidates than it can absorb. That has all kinds of effects, but the one that stands out is the explosion of private-sector para-mil/intel entities — think Blackwater/Academi, but multiply it by a few orders of magnitude. A huge chunk of that is arms manufacture, but another segment that's visible to the public in actual conflict are the 'private contracting' outfits. For the most part, those mercenaries get their orders and paychecks not from the DoD but from the 'intelligence community,' which itself is a sort of dumping ground for ex-military people. For us civvies, "turning an aircraft carrier around" is a metaphor for guiding impossibly cumbersome change, but in the military it isn't a metaphor: they actually turn real aircraft carriers around. Getting the DoD, the IC, *and* all their sprawling private-sector dependents to coordinate is more like turning a Dunkirk-scale flotilla around. Or turning an archipelago around: you don't actually move it, you just say you did. Again: if Hoffmann's work has been influential (and it has), that's partly because he found a way for lots of people and entities to say "Look! See! We're on board!" without changing that much.

Hoffmann and his work are closely associated with the US Marine Corps, whose aggressive branding compensates, in part, for its on-again-off-again, fill-in-the-blanks history. Check out the USMC's Wikipedia entry and you'll see: the history section has all kinds of surprising talk about the service's periodic 'dissolution,' 'decline,' 'malaise,' conflict with the army, dependencies on the navy and air force, and more. And you can be sure USMC loyalists police that entry as vigorously as they'd protect any forward-operating base. This too helps us to understand not just why and how Hoffmann's work would become influential but *where*: in a service that, despite its swaggering reputation, more than any other has to fight internecine battles over turf and budget on every front. IOW, it's not terribly surprising that the USMC would glom onto an amorphous, ecumenical model, because it provides a 'theory' for what they do anyway.

So: DHS was created in 2002, more or less immediately in the wake of 9/11, and very much in reaction to the understandable view that the US security establishment(s) had screwed the pooch in a spectacular fashion - on the front lawn, in broad daylight, during the neighborhood's annual block party. Hoffmann's book came out several years later. If it was embraced, it was largely by a newly established class of armchair academic-administrative warriors who needed a pitch that wouldn't set the old guard's teeth on edge. Singling his work out is a kind of Adam Curtis move: simplistic, almost the point of fictional, stories — about
Murdoch, Bernays, or Surkov, or maybe Bannon, Cummings, Dulgin, or now Hoffmann. Don't get me wrong, I *love* Curtis, in part because I think that kind of simplification is a genuinely helpful antidote to the dominion of narrow expertises, all clamoring for primacy. But — and this is key — it does so by appealing to a naive model of history: the Great Man. It's fun, and interesting, but nothing could be farther from the plain facts of US military global hegemony.

> It's amazing how the Americans/Nato have hewn to their doctrine. In Lebanon
> they were afraid of it. Now they are wielding it. They have only the
> Ukrainians to thank for its success so far. Which might be reaching its
> limits.

I agree it's been wildly successful so far, but we'll see how it works out. It's widely said that Trump didn't win the election so much as Clinton lost it, and we'd do well to see the conflict in Ukraine in a similar way. The Russians are completely fucking up, but it hardly follows that the US and NATO have succeeded militarily. What they *have* done is a decisive break from past practice: be open, strengthen alliances, avoid confrontation, don't settle for others' polemics or get sucked in by their negativity. That has pretty much nothing to do with Hoffmann's seminal brilliance than with Biden's plain-vanilla poptimistic approach, which he learned over decades of building legislative consensus.

That's all very well, but the real impact hasn't come directly from the US, EU, or NATO; instead it's come from the astonishing sense of purpose and coordination across commercial sectors. True, that was sparked by unilateral and multilateral sanctions; but if we know anything, it's that megacorps have zero problem doing business with vile regimes and without regard to larger consequences. *No one* expected transnational corporations to get into a beauty contest over how quickly and completely they could break from Russia.

That avalanche of volunteerism is entirely new. It certainly owes a debt to newly fiery regulators swearing they would punish anyone and anything that tried to wiggle through loopholes. But, much more than that, I think, it owes a tremendous debt to #occupy, #metoo, BLM, the LGBTQ+ "alphabet mafia," and less visibly ESG activism (Environmental, Social, and Corporate Governance). All of these progressive movements have mounted a sustained campaign that's forced corporations to build new kinds of political will and internal capacities — reinforced, of course, by the steady supply of younger people rising through the ranks.

And, look, if nettime doesn't say it, no one will: If Russia has been isolated with incredible speed and ruthlessness, we have LEFTIST ACTIVISTS to thank. Their work on gender and identity, race, and environmental justice paved the way for a seismic shift in the global political economy.

I should point out that both aspects of what I've said here — the fractious model of the US mil/intel establishment and the progressive origins of corporate international politics — are grounded in the conviction that focusing on individuals is at best a waste, at worst misleading.


Cheers,
Ted
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