So what are all these strategists missing? The problem is that the question constantly being asked is how?, but the better question to ask is with whom? There is an exhaustive amount of academic literature written about all the threats we might see on the battlefield and how theyвЂ™ll fight (Think Counter IED), but the focus is not on how they cooperate and collude with other entities in the Contemporary Operating Environment (COE) to leverage their strengths for victory over larger, better funded opponents.Д®nter Information Warfare and Network Theory. defense community's focus on 'emerging' threats and inability to deal with conflicts that quickly develop (ISIL). This incorrect philosophy is characterized today by the U.S. This evaluation by Chinese military officers fifteen years ago correctly foreshadowed the flaws in American military thinking that led to arguably two stalemates in Iraq and Afghanistan, and a poor strategic foundation moving forward. Qiao Liang and Wang Xiangsui wrote in 1999 in Unrestricted Warfare, that the American government and their generals rely too heavily on technology as a means of fighting and winning wars. Combat power in the form of superior weapons systems, cutting-edge technology and disproportionate force ratios may enable tactical success on the ground but does not guarantee strategic victory.' This is a correct assessment and sums up the erroneous trust placed in technology alone as a means to win wars. Farris state in Toward Strategic Landpower, 'The application of military force in its current form has limited utility when fighting modern wars among the people. military's current definition of hybrid warfare is that it focuses on technology as the major, underlying factor that dominates the modern battlefield. So, what are hybrid threats and why have they received so much attention lately? This paper will show, through the medium of Star Wars, that 'hybrid threats' are just recent, dramatic developments in technology that allow multiple state and non-state actors on the battlefield to network more efficiently and combine their military efforts for greater effect, resulting in military strategists to incorrectly identify them as previously unforeseen threat actors on the battlefield.

If everybody is a hybrid, then nobody is.' As Christopher Bowers states in Identifying Emerging Hybrid Adversaries, hybrid threats 'can include just about every type of organization from criminal gangs like MS-13 to the German Wehrmacht.

Unfortunately, this strategy has been a facet of warfare for centuries: The French and Indian War, The Peninsular War, Vietnam, and the 2006 Lebanon War just to name a few. The Army defines hybrid threats in Training Circular 7-100 Hybrid Threats, as 'the diverse and dynamic combination of regular forces, irregular forces, and/or criminal elements all unified to achieve mutually benefitting effects.' This means that conventional forces will work with different forms of irregular forces for mutually benefitting goals depending on their long-term and short term objectives. Army's definition of hybrid threats is familiar to most readers, it will be used as a starting point for simplicity. Echevarria also wrote that 4GW 'is based on poor history and only obscures what other historians, theorists, and analysts already have worked long and hard to clarify.' Hybrid threats are nothing new: Nation-states and non-state actors have been doing this throughout history when waging war. Echevarria II stated in, Fourth-Generation War And Other Myths, 'What we are really seeing in the war on terror, and the campaign in Iraq and elsewhere, is that the increased 'dispersion and democratization of technology, information, and п¬Ѓnance' brought about by globalization has given terrorist groups greater mobility and access worldwide.' The same is true for hybrid threats. Hoffman, state that hybrid threats are 'any adversary that simultaneously and adaptively employs a fused mix of conventional weapons, irregular tactics, terrorism, and criminal behavior in the battlespace to obtain their political objectives.' This is nothing more than a relabeling of 4th Generation War (4GW) espoused in the late 1980's by William Lind, et al. This debate is centered around the adversaries we might see on the future battlefield called Hybrid Threats. The more you tighten your grip, Tarkin, the more star systems will slip through your fingers.ДЄ debate has been ongoing involving the future of land warfare. From Droid Armies to Luke Skywalker: What Star Wars Teaches Us About Hybrid Warfare

Revenge of the droid army