When Disruption Is a Goal in Itself: Constructing Hybrid Threat Actors in Wargaming
When Disruption Is a Goal in Itself: Constructing Hybrid Threat Actors in Wargaming

Summary/Abstract: This article looks at the ways wargaming can reflect the diversity and ambiguity of rationales of hybrid threat actors in the time of a fracturing liberal international order. Sections cover wargaming as a research method; hybrid, subthreshold, and grey zone threats, including hostile state actors, ambiguous state actors, and hostile non-state actors; the role of the information environment in constructing hybrid threat scenarios; and constructing hybrid threat actors. In offering a more accurate representation of disruptive actors, and not assuming they have an overarching geostrategic rationale, wargaming can offer a better analytical tool for understanding and preventing peacetime disruption. Imagine a major port city at night. The work in container terminals slowing down, most dock workers away until the morning, the lights around a new hydrogen or LPG terminal still on. Now imagine a handful of USVs loaded with explosives and directed by agents from a safe distance - tiny boats, not easy to spot for the port radars, but easy to hide in a nearby marina. And consider that in all maritime attacks on European infrastructure known to the public since 2022, detection occurred after damage, not before.1 While this may appear, at first sight, a problem for hard security and defence experts, it is at least in equal measure a problem that can be addressed in a wargame that focuses on the disruption such an event would cause in the information environment - the communicative space shaped by media systems, platforms, cultural norms, and audience cognition. The chances of detection and prevention, and the scale of disruption and its political and economic consequences, depend not only on the capacity of security and intelligence services but also on the resilience of the information environment before, during, and after the attack. This article looks at the ways that wargames focusing on hybrid threat scenarios can construct the motivation and course of action of threat actors (both state and non-state) to retain analytical and educational relevance in the changing landscape affected by the fracturing international order and the rise of hybrid warfare. It addresses the diversity of rationales of hybrid threat actors and the need for wargame designers to recognise, rather than obfuscate, the strategic ambiguity and strategic diversification behind their actions. The article refers to hybrid threats primarily in the sense defined through EU and NATO policy documents, as explained below. The existence of a vast body of academic debate regarding the use of the term ‘hybrid warfare’ is not central to the article’s argument; however, the existence of this debate is important to mention. Some studies on the subject of ‘hybrid warfare’ see it specifically as a means to achieve superiority by maximising strategic ambiguity. Mumford and Carlucci argue ambiguity is the defining essence of hybrid warfare, and the Hybrid Centre of Excellence, Helsinki, has dedicated a paper to strategic ambiguity in hybrid warfare (2020). Both publications define hybrid warfare in a manner that seems captured by military theory - assuming that hybrid warfare ‘includes the strategic application of the use of (ambiguous) force to gain territory or attain another strategic goal’. As argued in this article, geostrategic understanding of hybrid threat actors’ objectives presents an unnecessary narrowing, because hybrid attacks can be guided by aspirations that are not geostrategic - e.g. by ideological contestation of norms underpinning political institutions and regimes. The article also looks specifically at the ways wargames focusing on hybrid threat scenarios depend on reconstructing the information environment where different types of threat actors engage in interpretation and meaning-making.

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