Last decades was full of incidents that it is quite hard to qualify as regular conventional military conflict, particularly actions undertake by state and non-state actors across the NATO’s east flank.
NATO member countries have been confronting various types of hybrid activities for decades. In recent years they were mostly struggling with non-state terrorism and this sort of actions were easy to identify.
Originally, they were easily identifiable as ideologically inspired terrorist actions and were generally intra-state in nature. The actions of the IRA or ETA, although they realized the prerequisites of terrorist actions and therefore also hybrid actions, were not explicitly international in its nature. Similarly, in the case of terrorist actions represented by Islamic terrorist organizations were recognized as incidents rather than full-scale warfare.
The game-changer in attitude toward terrorism was September 11, 2001. The aftermath of the attack was President G.W. Bush’s declaration of “war on terrorism”. It was then that for the first and so far only time there was a collective triggering of Article 5 of the Washington Treaty, as the terrorist attack of 9/11/2001 was recognized as a hostile attack against one of the member states of the North Atlantic Treaty Organization, giving grounds for a consensus under Article 4 and, as a result, triggering Article 5 of the Treaty.
However, hybrid threats have evolved since then. Today, hybrid warfare is not just terrorism, it is a multitude of actions below the threshold of viable kinetic actions leading to destabilization of the country against which they were undertaken. Unfortunately, the creativity of the actors who use this tool is endless, and states will be in the danger zone of such actions have related difficulties in identifying such actions and countering them. What is far more important, countering such threats is limited not because of a lack of military or operational tools, but as a result of legal constraints due to the delay of the legislative apparatus to the rapidly evolving catalogue of hybrid threats.
So, first of all, it would be necessary to create a catalogue of hybrid threats, but this task is not an easy one, as the issue is very broad. According to doctrine, they can be both military and non-military activities, carried out by state and non-state actors, using non-obvious tools such as propaganda, manipulation, cyber-attacks, economic influence, as well as influence through military pressure as well as quasi-military actions.
Although hybrid activities have a long history, however, what has come to be faced now has never had such a large scale of impact. In the age of technological development, global circulation of information, often unreliable and unverified, through the reach of these messages, the intensity and inability to trace the source of such actions, the scale and speed of their impact is enormous and poses a real threat to the stability of the state system.[1] In addition, the recipients of hybrid activities themselves, who have not developed the habit of critically perception of the information they read, do not apply the fact-checking process, which leads to spread of fake-news and disinformation.
In the float of disinformation, an uninformed recipient loses the sobriety of judgment of received information through which he misjudges reality and subscribes to the narrative shaped by the authors of disinformation. Thus, it is a priority, both collectively within the North Atlantic Treaty Organization and independently by each member country to develop procedures to counter hybrid threats. It is worth noting at this point, that NATO identifies two main state dominating the disinformation sphere, pointing to Russia and China. The threat from Russia is particularly relevant to Poland, since Russian Federation actions are targeting NATO’s eastern flank states particularly Poland and Romania.[2]
Of course, both NATO institutions and member countries understand the need to build resilience to hybrid threats both collectively and separately by each member. It is noteworthy, that NATO has created specific recommendations as well as pledged to support member countries in this effort, but firstly the ability to identify hybrid activities, which are becoming increasingly sophisticated, is crucial.
The first act talking about the identification of hybrid threats as activities leading to the destabilization of member states as well as the alliance itself was the declaration following the NATO summit in Warsaw, which took place on July 8-9, 2025. Paragraph 72 of the final declaration emphasized the role of the NATO as an institution that supports the actions of a member country in combating hybrid activities, and in cooperating with international institutions, including the European Union, on this topic.[3] However, it should be noted that the key conclusion was the possibility of triggering Article 5 of the Washington Pact in response to hybrid actions against NATO’s member state.[4]
It is worth mentioning, that since 2016, the European Union has also been creating a legal framework to ensure the ability to counter and combat hybrid threats in areas of raising situational awareness, building resilience, countering and responding to crises and cooperation and coordination with partners and international organizations.[5]
With the above in mind, it is worth taking a closer look at Poland’s efforts to build resilience to hybrid attacks. First of all, we note the lack of legal regulations preventing actions below the threshold of actions qualifying as war. And when we take a closer look at Girasimov’s doctrine currently in force in Russia, we can see what a change has occurred in the conduct of the conflict, where the key element is becoming precisely this non-military aspect, which the member countries and the NATO treaty itself, do not have adequate legal tools to be able to counteract fully effectively, since both domestic and international law was established in response to the “old type of war.”[6] Thus, this outdated legal regulations allow only for the reactive nature of the actions taken in response to attacks. Exactly such a situation we faced on the Polish-Belarusian border when the action “Sluice” was launched against the eastern border of the EU and NATO in 2021.[7] Therefore, not only the military, but also public administration, civil services, fire departments and police should be prepared for hybrid threats. Due to the expansion of the catalogue of threats to include hybrid actions, the range of competencies, tools and resources held by these institutions must be updated and adapted to the actions taken in the event of a crisis situation management.[8]
Final conclusions due to situation in Poland are not so optimistic. Despite the fact that Poland has undertaken actions to update the legal regulations and adapt them to the needs and threats, the process is time-consuming, requires the involvement of many institutions, numerous consultations, which prolongs the legislative procedure itself, not to even mention the actual implementation of the solutions once they are enacted by the legislature. Admittedly, this is a process that has already begun, but will continue for a long time to come.
[1] https://www.politico.eu/article/romania-politics-election-calin-georgescu-elena-lasconi-what-the-hell-is-going-on/ access 8.12.2024
[2] https://www.nato.int/cps/en/natohq/topics_156338.htm access 8.12.2024
[3] A. Ignaciuk, NATO i UE wobec zagrożeń hybrydowych – nowe otwarcie we wzajemnej współpracy?, Bezpieczeństwo Narodowe 26 I-IV, 2016, s. 85-98
[4] https://www.nato.int/cps/en/natohq/official_texts_133169.htm#hybrid access 8.12.2024
[5] W. Goleński, D. Zimny, Przygotowanie państwa na zagrożenia hybrydowe – konieczność natychmiastowych działań [w:] NIK, Kontrola Państwowa, numer 5 (418) wrzesień październik 2024, s. 18-38
[6] https://archiwum.rcb.gov.pl/konflikty-o-charakterze-hybrydowym-prawo-jako-narzedzie-walki/ access 08.12.2024
[7] W. Goleński, D. Zimny, Przygotowanie…, op.cit.
[8] W. Goleński, D. Zimny, Przygotowanie…, op.cit.
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