Applying systems thinking towards countering hybrid warfare

Carl von Clausewitz, a famous Prussian general and military theorist asserted that war's nature of being violent, interactive, and fundamentally political, does not change - only its character does. According to Clausewitz, the character of war is a dynamic phenomenon that manifests differently with the "spirit" of each age. In our current digital age, technology has heavily influenced interactions, including warfare. In addition to boosting traditional military means, technology has enabled rapid and widespread weaponization of social, information and infrastructural instruments for political coercion. A rising trend of combining national instruments of power to wage war simultaneously across the political, military, economic, social, information and infrastructural domains is a rapidly emerging threat, characteristic of modem "hybrid wars" being fought today. Traditional military-centric defense policies and strategies are ill-prepared to address such threats that deliberately operate in the "grey zone", playing on ambiguity and tailoring coercion to remain just below detection and response thresholds. In this research, a combination of literature review, descriptive study, inductive approach, normative research, case study and systems thinking are applied to analyze the hybrid warfare threat and then construct a suitable response framework, treating it as system with interrelated constituent parts, synergistically working together over time, within the wider international context, to deliver an emergent counter hybrid warfare capability.

Name thesis:degree_name

Master

Department dc:contributor.department

Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Engineering and Management Program

Grantor dc:publisher

Massachusetts Institute of Technology

Year dc:date.issued

2019

Author dc:creator

• Tan, Peihao Raymond.

Advisor dc:contributor.advisor

• Donna H. Rhodes.

• Engineering and Management Program.
• System Design and Management Program.

Statement dc:rights

• MIT theses are protected by copyright. They may be viewed, downloaded, or printed from this source but further reproduction or distribution in any format is prohibited without written permission.

Licence dc:rights.uri

• http://dspace.mit.edu/handle/1721.1/7582

Language dc:language.iso

eng

Handle dc:identifier.uri

https://hdl.handle.net/1721.1/121799

OAI identifier oai:identifier

oai:dspace.mit.edu:1721.1/121799