The changing nature of war.

For most of the twentieth century, Western thinking kept two kinds of conflict apart.

The first box held what most people picture when they hear the word war: tanks, artillery, air strikes and infantry, with one state's army fighting another's. It usually had a clear beginning. Borders were crossed, shots were fired, and sometimes war was formally declared.

The second box held everything kept quiet: sabotage, assassination, bribery, propaganda, covert intelligence work and, later, cyberattacks. This box was never small. In 1948 the American diplomat George Kennan described "political warfare" as "the employment of all the means at a nation's command, short of war, to achieve its national objectives."¹ The Soviet Union ran its own version throughout the Cold War, which it called active measures: forged documents, planted stories and front organisations.

Kennan's two words, "short of war", sum up the old way of thinking. Everything in the second box was defined by not being war. Officially it was peacetime business, a matter for spies, police and diplomats. In the 2000s, Western analysts started calling the mix of open and hidden tools hybrid warfare.²

A note on a word that often gets mixed up with these. Asymmetric warfare means a fight between sides of very unequal strength, such as insurgents against a modern army. The weaker side avoids the stronger side's advantages, but the fighting can be very open and very violent. Hybrid is about mixing tools and hiding the hand. Asymmetric is about an imbalance of power. They are different ideas.

The way we see it, the two boxes no longer hold. A better picture is a dial that can be turned up or down but rarely goes all the way back to zero.

Four ideas sit behind that picture:

• War is no longer binary. It isn't "peace" until a declaration and "war" afterwards.
• It is continuous. Pressure rises and falls but rarely stops.
• War and peace can exist side by side. A country can have open shops, working trains and normal elections while its undersea cables are cut, its warehouses set on fire and its public debate poisoned.
• The tools can be swapped. A state can move up and down the dial, mixing open force and hidden pressure, depending on what works and what it thinks it can get away with.

Take a real example. On Christmas Day 2024, the Estlink 2 power cable between Finland and Estonia was damaged on the floor of the Baltic Sea. Finnish authorities seized a tanker, the Eagle S, which they suspected of dragging its anchor across the seabed and which EU officials linked to the "shadow fleet" that carries Russian oil around sanctions.⁴ There were no soldiers, no front line and no declaration. Most people heard about it, if at all, as a technical story. On the dial, it sits somewhere in the middle.

Governments ask, "can we prove who did it?" Citizens can ask a simpler question. There is the war you can see, and the war you can't see. You are part of both.

The war you can see is what reaches the news as war: missiles, a front line, soldiers, a declared emergency. The war you can't see is the cable cut on a holiday, the warehouse fire, the hacked water system, the teenager recruited for a few hundred euros, the rumour that spreads in a neighbourhood chat group.

There is a famous line that captures this, though it needs handling with care.

The story of the quote is a small lesson in itself. A line travels, loses its context and picks up a more famous author along the way. The same thing happens to rumours during a crisis, which is one reason the hidden war often runs through information.

Not every country thinks of war and peace as opposite ends of a line. Europe's main adversary, in its official writing, does not.

In 2013, General Valery Gerasimov, Russia's Chief of the General Staff, wrote a widely quoted article arguing that "wars are no longer declared and, having begun, proceed according to an unfamiliar template," and that non-military means had in many cases become more effective than force of arms.¹⁰ Western commentators later called this the "Gerasimov doctrine". The analyst who coined that phrase, Mark Galeotti, has since said it was never a doctrine at all.¹¹ It is more accurate to call it Gerasimov's article.

A more useful word is protivoborstvo, usually translated as "confrontation" or "struggle". Russian strategic writing uses it to describe relations with the West as a lasting condition, with no clear beginning or end, carried on in peacetime as much as in war.¹² Russia's 2014 Military Doctrine describes modern conflict as combining military force with "political, economic, informational and other non-military measures."¹³

If you see yourself as permanently in a confrontation, acts the West would call acts of war (sabotage, assassination, attacks on infrastructure) can be justified in what is formally peacetime. Those acts are exactly what hybrid warfare is made of. Put plainly, the grey zone is not a gap in this way of thinking. It is where this way of thinking operates.

One distinction matters here. This describes a state's doctrine and official narrative, which are well documented. It does not describe what every Russian believes. Opinion polling under censorship is unreliable, and many Russians are disengaged from politics rather than mobilised by it.

None of this means every power cut is an attack. Some incidents turn out to be crime, accident or bad luck. Assuming the worst every time helps an attacker as much as ignoring the problem does, because both make it harder to see what is actually going on.

It also doesn't mean "we are at war" in the old sense. That would be alarming and, legally, untrue. A more accurate way to put it is this: you can be at peace on paper and still be under attack.

Some questions worth asking, of yourself and of the people who represent you: