Democracies have woken up to the scale of hybrid warfare being waged by authoritarian regimes like Russia, China and Iran. But they have yet to move from recognizing and exposing the threat, to systematically preventing its impacts, mounting effective deterrents or developing their own hybrid toolkit. Over the next year, ISD will convene leading voices from different countries and sectors of society in a “policy sprint” initiative, designed to provide actionable recommendations to counter hybrid warfare holistically and outcompete authoritarianism. This Dispatch kicks off the policy sprint, framing the urgency of the challenge facing democracies and providing initial recommendations to begin operationalizing a more effective counter-hybrid strategy.

Authoritarian regimes’ use of hybrid warfare has increased precipitously over the past decade. A recent ISD report reveals the range of hybrid attacks experienced across all 27 member states of the EU since Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine began in February 2022 – from cyber and information operations to political and societal subversion, to kinetic operations like sabotage, arson and targeted killings.

While government response remains largely reactive and siloed across different departments and ministries, the overarching purpose of these seemingly isolated hybrid attacks is unified. The ultimate aim – the design of every drone incursion, ransomware attack or deepfake – is to prey on citizens’ psyches bit by bit. This contributes to the broader strategy of undermining trust in democratic institutions, political parties and governance, dividing liberal societies and weakening the international institutions undergirding the post-Cold War international order (EU, NATO etc.).

It’s working.

Though anti-democratic sentiment has its own domestic origins, hybrid attacks have capitalized on and contributed to declining confidence in democracy and a rise in illiberal forces around the globe. In many countries, societal cohesion and resilience is fraying.

The cognitive domain has become increasingly prone to manipulation. Rapidly evolving technology now offers authoritarian actors the ability to target citizens at unprecedented scale and precision. Adding to the challenge, the dominant information ecosystem in democracies is digital – and the infrastructure supporting that ecosystem is dominated by companies based in the United States and China. That imbalance makes countries’ attempts to defend against cognitive warfare at least in part reliant on the good will of foreign industry and political attitudes of foreign governments. Overcoming this overreliance and building the digital infrastructure and information ecosystem that aligns with democratic principles like individual rights, privacy, freedom of speech, transparency and accountability will require a generation of serious investment by democracies. In the meantime, they must use every tool in the policy toolbox to address the fact that authoritarians are using a suite of deceptive tactics including exploiting platforms’ algorithmic systems and, increasingly, AI data voids to manipulate citizens at the macro and micro levels, leading to epistemic corrosion.

Paradoxically, while national governments and multilateral institutions like the EU and NATO have been increasingly cognizant and publicly vocal about cognitive and hybrid threats, the current defensive strategy does not deliver results. Nations may take a whole-of-government approach but they largely address this strategic challenge with siloed, tactical responses rather than proactive measures that raise the costs on adversaries. Indeed, democracies have yet to shift from recognizing and exposing the threat, to systematically preventing its impacts, mounting effective deterrents or developing their own hybrid toolkit.

The urgency of the situation demands immediate course correction. Authoritarian regimes will never stop their hybrid warfare, but democracies must make major changes if they are to counter their adversaries. At stake is the future of liberal democracy.

Here are three recommendations for democracies to start to operationalize a more effective strategy to combat hybrid and cognitive warfare. Such a strategy will ultimately have to push the envelope of conventional practice in the counter-hybrid field but must still adhere to democratic norms and ethics.

1. Establish a counter-hybrid doctrine that demonstrates a willingness to win.

Nations need a comprehensive strategic plan to successfully counter a multi-vectored threat designed to erode the fabric of democracy. Without an overarching strategic vision, it will continue to be difficult for governments to mobilize resources to raise the costs on adversaries, assume more appetite for risk and make the case to the public that combating authoritarian interference operations is in their direct interest and requires the participation of all sectors of society. A counter-hybrid doctrine should contain the following elements:

• A declaratory policy that a nation will respond to hybrid attacks in a manner of its choosing, using flexible, asymmetric responses that involve all instruments of state power and national resources, reserving the right to escalate and de-escalate as necessary. This is not a novel concept. During the Cold War, the West relied on asymmetry to offset Soviet nuclear and conventional dominance in the European theatre. Rather than match the Soviet Union by putting thousands of tactical nuclear weapons on European soil, the United States deployed soldiers and conventional forces to Europe to defend NATO allies, making a full-scale attack too risky for the Soviet Union to wage.
• An assertion that developing reactive and offensive capabilities in the domains where authoritarian regimes target democracies may be necessary to identify and neutralize sources of hybrid warfare in authoritarian countries. This is an area Ukraine has excelled at, but it is also something the Biden administration and the first Trump administration did to combat Russian threats to U.S. elections in the cyber and information domains. Offensive capabilities may also be needed to address kinetic operations like undersea cable cutting, drone incursions and other attacks on military and critical infrastructure.
• A direction to government agencies to map adversaries’ vulnerabilities and pressure points, just as they do to us, and find the appropriate methods to exploit them. This would also entail an examination of adversaries’ weaknesses in the cognitive domain and a commitment to develop a more proactive approach to engaging citizens in authoritarian nations
• A commitment to a strategy that adheres to and defends democratic principles like freedom of speech and rule of law while taking steps to foster greater digital independence from the tech architecture and infrastructure that creates the conditions for authoritarians’ cognitive warfare to thrive.

2. Organize government to address hybrid warfare holistically and build flexible coalitions of the willing with allies and across sectors.

Despite all the attention given to hybrid threats, most governments still address the challenge in silos. A fragmented approach to addressing hybrid warfare across government badly misunderstands the interconnectivity of the threat domains and only reinforces a piecemeal, tactical response. Meanwhile, in the EU and NATO, not only are there similar silos but getting consensus on more proactive strategies to counter hybrid warfare will likely prove challenging given allies’ varying perceptions of the threat, appetite for risk and national capabilities. Across the transatlantic community, there have at least been efforts to improve coordination by creating information sharing and rapid response mechanisms, but these are mostly focused on information threats and results have been mixed. A limitation has often been that information sharing is itself siloed – government to government, civil society to civil society – and efforts at a more multi-stakeholder approach have faced resource and bureaucratic constraints. To address these shortcomings, governments should:

• Appoint a lead agency on combating hybrid warfare or a hybrid threat policy coordinator to wrangle different bureaucratic equities from the military, foreign offices digital and interior ministries, among others, to one table. This would also signal buy-in from the very top of political leadership.
• Establish a similar hybrid coordinating function within the intelligence services to ensure that threat information from across threat domains – cyber, information, financial, infrastructure, etc. – is being analyzed holistically.
• Partner with likeminded allies, even if that means working outside traditional EU and NATO channels. Countries that have more appetite for risk should bring their own tools to the table in informal coalitions around specific responses – exacting economic leverage, conducting cyber operations, defending critical infrastructure, taking a more proactive approach to messaging to citizens in authoritarian regimes, to name a few. The leading European nations with the greatest capacity and therefore the most at stake – Germany, France, the UK and Poland – should develop a framework for such cooperation, inviting the participation of other likeminded allies like the Baltic States, Ukraine, Canada and even out-of-area partners like Australia and Japan.
• Support the establishment of a Hybrid Warfare War Room that brings together diverse subsections of society – the military-industrial complex, banks, local governments, think tanks, and academic institutions, among many others – to formulate strategic responses to hybrid warfare, share threat intelligence, address crises jointly and conduct long-term preparedness exercises. This body would be modelled on the multi-stakeholder information sharing and analysis centers (ISACs) in the United States and EU – cross-sector membership organizations that protect critical infrastructure from cyber-attacks.

3. Put strategic communications at the forefront of the strategy to outcompete authoritarianism.

Democracies are losing the narrative battle with authoritarians in many regions of the world. Domestically, illiberal forces are gaining political power. There has been a collective failure to enlist the messengers most likely to build a big-tent coalition against authoritarianism. Internationally, there has been insufficient pushback against authoritarians’ propaganda and lies they tell their own citizens and message to foreign audiences. Weak efforts by democracies to project power and undermine authoritarians’ narratives only emboldens adversaries to double down on their hybrid and cognitive warfare and allows them to gain more supporters. Therefore, democracies should:

• Trumpet the successes of countering hybrid threats. As Peter Pomerantsev argues, Russia does an excellent job of selling its purported victories even when claiming victory is either badly overstated or completely unjustified – whether on the battlefield in Ukraine or on the hybrid battlefield in countries like the United States and Denmark. In the process, it peels off more supporters for its growing cohort of democracy skeptics. Democracies must do the same. Americans, for example, are very concerned about Russian and Chinese cyber-attacks targeting critical infrastructure. Democracies must attribute specific hybrid operations to specific threat actors more consistently. They must communicate to their own citizens and those who live in adversarial nations that democracies have taken concrete measures to strengthen defenses and degrade authoritarians’ capabilities. That helps to secure trust in democratic institutions’ ability to protect their people in ways authoritarian regimes perpetually jeopardize.
• Similarly, make the case to citizens that hybrid warfare affects their lives and livelihoods. British Member of Parliament Tom Tugendhat artfully outlines the human costs of adversaries’ hybrid attacks – critical services like hospitals and health care are paralyzed, citizens’ private data are siphoned for nefarious purposes, and personal and commercial assets are put at risk. If democracies are going to build more of a big-tent coalition to counter authoritarians’ surreptitious attempts to destabilize society, key voices will have to articulate how these threats impact citizens in their daily lives.
• Adapt best practices from related fields. For example, the Counter-Daesh Coalition, in particular their Communications Cell, supported, mobilized and coordinated efforts to disrupt the nefarious online infrastructure/networks of hostile states. They worked with a range of partners to expose and counter their messaging, using several innovative tactics at home and abroad. These included leveraging mainstream voices, as well as those who travelled to and lived in areas controlled by Daesh, all of whom could be trusted messengers to counter Daesh’s ideology among vulnerable populations. In addition, there need to be efforts to expose and shame the western networks hired or coopted to do the bidding of authoritarian states, and best practices from whole-of-society efforts to unmask Russia’s sanctions-evasion enablers should be studied.
• Empower civil society with the resources to implement a meaningful whole-of-society approach to countering hybrid and cognitive warfare. This would involve enlisting the national and local figures most equipped at transcending political party lines and most adept at speaking to both broad and narrow audiences – mayors, faith-based leaders, and online influencers, to name a few – to raise awareness of the threat from hostile states, get buy-in for counter-hybrid initiatives and relegate support for authoritarianism to the fringes of society.
• Finally, to message more effectively in authoritarian information environments, leverage technology and platforms to meet audiences where they are. Offsetting authoritarian propaganda will require more creative instruments than states’ global media apparatuses from a bygone era. Democracies will have to consider less overt means of winning the cognitive battle overseas, while staying true to democratic ethics. This will require engaging audiences in the online subcultures and environments that malign actors systematically target. To the previous point about empowering civil society, government is likely not the best actor or messenger to reach these audiences.