Out of the Shadows: The Shock of Non-Hybrid War
Russia's invasion of Ukraine and the subsequent attritional war has upended pre-war assumptions about "future war." Futurologists within the broad security penumbra increasingly argued that conflict was becoming hybrid, ambiguous and shadowy, with some arguing that the tools and assumptions of major war were becoming obsolete. While all wars to some degree are "hybrid", the unambiguous, industrial-scale clash in Ukraine is emphatically not what they expected. Why did bright minds fall prey to such expectations? The failure had several causes.