Types of operations

Introduction

On February 24, 2022, when Russia invaded Ukraine, the international order was impacted sharply and abruptly. Russia’s invasion put the North American Treaty Organization (NATO) on center stage. As a contribution to international security, NATO’s deterrence capabilities take many forms. From nuclear weapons to cyberattacks, to be effective, deterrence must be scalable across a conflict spectrum that includes non-kinetic actions.

Introduction

What Motivates the Need for an IFC Concept?

Adversaries know NATO’s lethal capabilities and the thresholds for their use. And they exploit this. They avoid direct symmetrical engagements, instead maneuvering below lethal thresholds, pursuing their aims observed but undeterred. Or, they act indirectly through proxies or intermediaries, blending in and engaging only at times and places of their choosing.

Introduction

Soon after the defeat of Germany in World War II, the USA and the USSR found themselves in a global struggle for power and influence. In contrast to previous great power competitions, which often led to armed conflict, nuclear weapons changed the risk calculus for both sides. This had four key consequences.

Analyses of the international security environment have increasingly drawn attention to what is often referred to as the gray zone.[1] A RAND study exploring hybrid warfare/gray zone challenges defined this part of the competition continuum as “an operational space between peace and war, involving coercive actions to change the status quo below a threshold that, in most cases, would prompt a conventional military response, often by blurring the line between military and non-military actions and the attrib

Introduction

There is widespread confusion about the term resilience. The starting point is that its meaning changes depending on whether one speaks in a technical or non-technical sense. Thus, the idea of resilience discussed in engineering is different from the one conveyed in social science. In this article, the author carries out an analysis based on the latter meaning and discusses resilience in the context of global crises and emergencies.