Assessment of Whole-of-Society Hybrid Conflict: Fusion of Activity Signals and Analyst Insight

Analysis, assessment and decision-making in hybrid conflict is complicated for numerous reasons: signals of hybrid activities are multidimensional; combining information from multiple types of sources is necessary; and much of hybrid conflict is either covert or difficult to discern from normal state-to-state relations. Assessment of hybrid conflict needs to include strategic goals of adversary actors, societal vulnerabilities and context events exploited, activities performed across societal domains, and impact on the society targeted. In earlier work an analysis process was proposed based on these five elements of hybrid conflict. In this paper we build on this work and the wider intelligence literature to address the question of how to perform the assessment of hybrid conflict. Specifically, we outline a detailed assessment process that provides situational understanding for decision-makers to choose preventive and reactive responses to hybrid threats. The merit of the proposed process is in its integrated assessment of hybrid conflict combining both a targeted society perspective and an adversary actor perspective. Moreover, the presented assessment functions rely on the ongoing interaction between human-derived analytical insights – taking into account context, ambiguity, normality – and signals derived from incoming data – taking into account structuring and combining information from multiple sources. This integrated perspective goes beyond conventional analytical approaches. The assessment we present is well-suited to steer a combination of human and automated intelligence, and provides a blueprint for analytical methods and tooling to address the challenges of decision-making in hybrid conflict.