(HYB0002)

Written evidence submitted by Dr Robert Dover, University of Leicester

UK Select Committee on Defence: UK Response to Hybrid Threats

Abstract

Hybridity is a contested notion. The sensible view is that hybrid threats amount to activities that fall beneath the threshold for an overt military response by the UK. This evidence focuses on the information component within hybrid threats. It suggests that there are observable patterns within adversary disinformation campaigns that the UK government could respond to. It further suggests that there are observable patterns in the relationship and  amplification of misinformation between the legacy and new forms of media, but that the true impact of messaging on individuals and collectives is currently poorly understood. A better understanding of the mechanisms and impact of messaging would allow for more opportunities to mitigate the risk. The evidence concludes by arguing that the way to counter misinformation campaigns is through the production (and use in rebuttal) of verified or triangulated information, rather than by mimicking the tactics of adversaries. 

Context:

1)     I am an Associate Professor of Intelligence and International Security at the University of Leicester. I have undertaken research into hybrid warfare, albeit in the context of how government authorities should respond to fluid, crisis incidents. I offer the Committee my reflections upon the use of and response to hybrid techniques in the light of this experience, but not confined to it. I have chosen – for reasons of word length – to focus on only two of the Committee’s questions which questions the nature of hybrid threats, and to account for the UK’s vulnerability to these threats.

The Committee’s question: What are hybrid threats? Are they new?

2)     NATO defines hybrid threats as “those posed by adversaries, with the ability to simultaneously employ conventional and non-conventional means adaptively in pursuit of their objectives”.[1] In reality, defence and security scholars focus upon non-conventional tactics and those that fall below the threshold required to trigger a military response, by which they mostly mean non-military tools, used to advance political ends in third countries. Some of the definitional imprecision in this area exists because some states have used paramilitaries and special forces officers to carry out unattributable or deniable, kinetic operations and these have been brought under a wider definition of hybrid threats. There is a great deal of sense to the wider definition, but for the purposes of this evidence, I focus on the information aspects only.

3)     There is disagreement within the academic literature about whether the term hybrid war is valid. There are those, like Oxford University’s Robert Johnson, who argue that the term is overused and is in danger of skewing military resources away from true priority areas[2], and his colleague, Andrew Monaghan, who has argued – in relation to Russia -  that western analysts have over-read the significance of the Gerasimov Doctrine, which he (and Mark Galleoti) argue is a fiction, and under-read the core Russian strategy documents, official pronouncements and movement of personnel.[3] Others, such as David Gioe, have argued that the phenomenon runs wider and amounts to a hybrid intelligence system, whilst I have argued elsewhere that the really interesting phenomenon is the (often) reinforcing relationship between legacy and new/social media sources, particularly when this is placed within an offensive foreign or security policy strategy.[4]

4)     A key component of the hybrid threat has been plausible deniability, which – in turn – has sometimes led to implausible deniability, but deniability nevertheless. Hybrid threats are therefore really influence operations, more than they are threats amounting, or leading to territorial capture, with the notable exception of cases like the annexation of Crimea.

5)     The Russian government’s (denied) operations in the Crimea, prior to the annexation, and then in Ukraine after the annexation have been at the more muscular end of hybrid operations. These operations are said to have included unbadged military officials carrying out kinetic operations, funding and influence operations and so on, that are aimed at generating a political shift in Ukraine to return that country to acting as a buffer state between ‘the West’ and Russia. The Russian need for Ukraine to fall back into its privileged sphere of influence is driven by the assessment of having been betrayed by the United States and its pledge not to expand NATO’s sphere of influence in the 90s and 00s. The tactics chosen to achieve this end are ones which are geared to arrive under a threshold that might reasonably require a fully-fledged military response. This is not so much hybrid war, as tactics which are militarily appropriate for the moment.

6)     Aside from operations in Ukraine and Crimea, and the use of deniable forces and undeclared contractors, we tend to think of hybrid threats as being influence operations. These include the actual or soft recruitment of media professionals, academics, community influencers, the commissioning of ‘bots’ or so-called ‘trolls’ or ‘troll farms’ (all of which is akin to the notion of influence in marketing and commercialisation terms), to influence specific actions or views of citizens or subjects, or to change the tone of a public debate. And we have come to think of this approach as being new or novel, when the thing that is new is the speed at which mis- and disinformation can be broadcast, the technical means by which to disguise such operations, the closening proximity to the target that can be achieved through technology, getting the information not only into the home of the target but to private accounts on private devices, and the analytical techniques that can be employed to locate targets susceptible to particular types of messaging. We have become concerned with these techniques because they are said to have unduly influenced voters in the 2016 US Presidential election, the UK’s Brexit referendum also in 2016, and similarly that attempts were made on the 2017 French Presidential election and 2017 British General Election. But all of these examples fit two observable phenomena: 1) where we know there is impact, but find it difficult to accurately or conclusively measure it; and 2) where it fits within a schematic of misinformation that begins in new or social media, is amplified by bot accounts, picked up and amplified by knowing or unknowing supporters, is then further amplified by the neutral and reworked by legacy media outlets. This might be seen as a cycle or an iterative process.

The Committee’s question: What is the UK's vulnerability to hybrid threats and warfare and what defensive, responsive and resilience measures are in place?

7)     The UK is vulnerable to nearly all the identified tools of hybrid warfare. But these vulnerabilities emanate from the UK’s commendable openness, freedoms, access to the law and generally good levels of mobile and fixed line internet connectivity. To change these fundamental characteristics of the United Kingdom to mitigate the impact of the hybrid threats against us would be to change the UK for the worse.  Consequently, we have to think about defence more widely than direct mitigation, which would erode some of the features of free speech and openness that I think are still overall benefits to society and innovation.

8)     The ‘fake news epidemic’ is the result of a coalescence of: 

• technologies that are able to propagate messages quickly and widely, without effective checks;
• technologies that demand constant interaction – the creation of the ‘always on’ culture, in the rejection of expertise (which in my view has its origins in the Sorbonne initially in the 1920s, gained full expression there in the 1960s, was adapted and reinterpreted in this country during the satirical movements of the 1960s – 80s, continuing to today – all of which I enjoyed as entertainment - through to the mismanagement of information in the lead-in to the 2003 Iraq conflict, the 2008 financial crisis, and peaking in the 2016 referendum);
• and the privileging of opinion over evidence, to name but a few factors.

9)     The rejection of expertise has also been caused by the widespread inability of citizens to discriminate between verifiable evidence and mis- or disinformation. There are many factors (social, educational and psychological) why the public (both of this country and internationally) are so poor at discriminating between ‘fake news’ and evidence or structured analysis, but this is the reality we are operating within. This coalescence of factors has provided various actors with the opportunity to seek strategic advantage through the many unchecked information channels available today. One route around such vulnerability might come from an experiment currently underway in Ukraine, via a Ukrainian NGO called Internews which is seeking to educate citizens in how to avoid falling victim to fake news in the lead up to the March 2019 elections.[5] Ultimately, it is the openness of the British press (in terms of views and ownership) that has provided those adversaries, interested in the information aspects of hybrid threats, a permissive platform from which to operate.

10) Many analysts and commentators get caught up in the minutiae of the individual lies told, or spins spun, online spats, marginal libels and so on, but actually it is the overall impact of these messages that is the important factor. When the disinformation is deliberate its aim is multi-layered: at the micro-level, it is to cause discomfort and sometimes harm to the localised target, at the operational level, it is to set or provide a platform that advances an overall narrative, an overall way of looking at the world, or looking at authority, or whatever it might be. At the strategic level it is aimed at loosening the connection between officials, our Parliamentary democracy, and the population on the one hand, and – on a philosophical level – to reduce certainty in any item of knowledge. To get to the point where an individual would reject good advice, may be even life-saving advice, because they no longer trust expertise. So, the vulnerabilities we have as a society here are underdeveloped critical skills, which are being exploited by rogue actors, or those seeking to speculate or fill an information void for the sake of doing so, for an overarching aim, political ideology or for profit (there is evidence of some organised disinformation units, in the Balkans, operating to a ‘click revenue’ business model, whilst being entirely agnostic to a political position).

11) The registration – in the mind of the citizen – of expertise has become more fluid in the last forty years, and whilst the steady and overly comfortable truths of blind trust did need to be challenged, the constant subversion and besmirching of qualified, and eminent economists using verified or triangulated data – to use a contemporary example – does nothing to advance our understanding and evidence base upon which to make decisions or choices. It does – of course – also rely upon a receptive recipient, because if the recipient is unreceptive these messages have far less impact. Those wishing to bend our democracies understand this well, and it is this transformation stage of having identified an individual vulnerable to particular kinds of messaging, to delivering these messages, which represents the true ‘hybrid effect’.

12) If we turn to our university sector, the UK has had a historic vulnerability to influence operations in its universities, from ‘fellow travellers’ or ‘useful idiots’ (although the pejorative nature of this term is unhelpful), who devote themselves to the propaganda of foreign nations or adversary groups. This was at its height in the 1920s, when a large number of academics discretely dedicated themselves to the emerging international ideology of Bolshevism and played out in various ways during the Cold War, as is suggested by archival work done after the fall of the Iron Curtain[6], but more recent controversies around politicians has raised a counter-context about the way that files were kept at the time, and how incentive structures within those intelligence systems may have led to over-reporting and too many false positives. The role of the academic is – however  - worthy of discussion in this context, because of the assumptions in place that academics exist to provide evidence based assessments, and ‘objective’ readings of the evidence. The assumption is not – I think - that individual academics exist to advance political campaigns, and yet social media discourse (which sometimes gets transmitted into new and legacy media forums) is busy with accusations that particular academics operate with very particular bias and are actually involved in political campaigning.[7] The reasons why individual academics – who are opinion formers, and ‘influencers’ (to use the modern vernacular) – engage in these behaviours is beyond the scope of this evidence. What I am able to argue is that academics fit into the hybrid media system[8] that can be and has been operationalised as part of specific or general hybrid war operations by the UK’s adversaries.

13) The UK has a vulnerability to the phenomenon ‘lawfare’, which is the exploitation of laws and regulations for the purpose of degrading or distracting legitimate activity, whilst maintaining a level of plausible deniability. Such tactics have included the use of the law of libel – but clearly this is only open to those with considerable financial means – and the use of Freedom of Information rules to seek to curtail legitimate activity, via seemingly legitimate requests.[9] There are freely available toolkits and guides that help to facilitate what really amounts of political interference in our public institutions through the use of FOI requests, for example. But there is little additional that can be done to curtail this ‘lawfare’, because whilst curtailment of libel tourism is undoubtedly desirable, the Courts have chosen to hear the cases that have been picked by analysts. Similarly, Freedom of Information provisions do have safeguards built in, be they around personal communication or national security, to pick two and there are examples where FOI has been used to good ends. So, the balance is likely to remain in favour of preserving these legal tools, because of the public policy goods they deliver, whilst placing a heavy burden on those who are subject to vexatious and ultimately political requests, to understand what remedies are available to them to avoid having their work unduly disturbed. 

14) The obvious short-term mitigations to fake news run huge reputational risks. Whilst the UK’s adversaries are highly skilled and adept at managing information operations and understanding how to reach those susceptible to ‘fakery’ (across their legacy media, ‘independent’ new media, government controlled manual and automated social media feeds, and deliberate or unknowingly supportive social media feeds), and where directly controlled they have little compunction is breaking accepted social norms in doing so, this is at least consistent the values we attribute to their political systems, and indeed criticise them for. Whilst those states offer protestations of openness, transparency and freedom in their medias, very few accept them at face value.  For the UK to engage in an exact reciprocation would contain strong risks, precisely because there is an expectation that UK claims to openness and transparency should be able to be taken at face value.

15) The best antidote to fake news is verified information. The most effective rebuttal of fakery is with verified or triangulated evidence.

16) There are risks in allowing politically or normatively loaded misinformation to go unchecked. The unacceptable and stark lessons around the failure to arrest the tide of anti-Semitism in the 1930s, which was fuelled by what we would now describe as fake news, should be instructive. But matching like for like, will only result in achieving further uncertainty in knowledge. The rebuttal of hybrid threats in the information sphere can come from dry transparency, on the one hand, of encouraging healthier relationships with always-on technology and with a better, research-led, understanding of how messages impact upon recipients. By this I particularly mean, what are the triggers for a message to stick (with an individual or collectively) and what are the triggers for a message to contribute to change or to action? This is poorly understood, even in the area of marketing, where the sums spent on refining messages are large, and where effectiveness is measured by proximity of sales to the broadcast of particular messages, which is a somewhat crude measure. Only at the point of a better understand of the true impact of messaging upon individuals and wider groups, and the trigger points for change and action can more effective mitigations be designed and implemented.

17) In conclusion, the Committee’s lead question asks whether hybrid threats are new. They are clearly not new. We can trace activities we would now define as ‘hybrid’ over the centuries. Doctrinally (and guided by our morally driven legal frameworks) we have focused on the moral dimensions of military activity and legal compliance. Consequently, we have not been looking for, nor documented hybrid threats. The technological revolution underpinning the information age has increased the observability of information campaigns in hybrid warfare. But whilst I have focused on the information aspect, it is important to note that hybrid threats run far more widely, and the use of unbadged and plausibly deniable military officers has the ability to create significant strategic impacts.

14 December 2018