Are we at war?
Not Cold, not Hot … the Muggy War
and its consequences for contemporary behavioural geopolitics in a Fuzzy reality context
drs. Luc Rombout, MEconSc, MBA
April 2024
People active on social media and more and more journalists have recently wondered whether we are ‘at war’ with Russia.
This ‘We’ refers to NATO, the European Union or individual member states of either organisation.
This question has its origins in an increasing number of activities by the Russian regime or its proxies that we may categorise as hostile or as precursors to acts of aggression.
Industrial, economic, diplomatic/political and military espionage, attempts at subversion, occasional intrusions into Allied territory or the particularly unequivocal disruption of GPS and navigation in the air, on land and at sea around Kaliningrad, with effects in Poland, the Baltic States and navigation in the Baltic Sea.
There are as yet no answers to the questions “are we at war ?”. Partly because both the political leadership and the defence organisations at national level are not prepared for a ‘yes’ and this would therefore mainly have a purely symbolic value.
There is also partly the objective problem of the binary categorisation in which we identify conflict and for which we have created a regulatory and operational framework, art. 5 (Atlantic Treaty) and art. 42.7 (EU Treaty) where hostilities against a Member State will/would result in a collective allied response against the aggressor.
Only in the classical meaning and symbolism there are no (physical) battles and therefore it is not confirmed that we are at war,
but we are also not in a state of peace, because countries, governments, companies and populations are experiencing the consequences of cyber attacks, espionage or disruption of infrastructure and systems. Cyber defence services intervene daily to prevent system failure, espionage or cyber hostage-taking.
So there is something unnamed, what the director of the Dutch intelligence service AIVD calls “a gray zone between war and peace”.
Historically, this situation is not entirely unprecedented – we think of the low intensity period in the Eighty Years’ War or the exasperating aggression, political killings and acts of sabotage between Iran and Israel that have been going on for years.
However, with the expansion of Battlespace into the virtual domains of Cyber and Intel/Subversion/PsyOps in the broadest sense, there are more forms in which enemy acts can occur (or be disguised) and in many cases these acts are below the Threshold of Retaliation – they are, so to speak, ‘little bits’, each of which does not in itself justify military actions.
The period of very low intensity threat characteristic of the post-Cold War up to and including a few years ago (Putin’s Munich speech?) is over;
but we have not returned to a situation that bears the hallmarks of the Cold War.
During the Cold War there were occasional proxy wars outside the territory of both alliances (NATO and Warsaw Pact), espionage and preparations for wartime sabotage, but otherwise a relatively stable bipolar world based on deterrence through the principle of Mutually Assured Destruction (MAD) – and respect and rules for relations between NATO and the Soviet Union.
This is different now,
the nature, scale, frequency and potential consequences of threats and skirmishes are now greater and more volatile compared to the Cold War period. It can be something different every day and this can be taken literally.
The practical functioning of supranational organisations such as the United Nations is considerably complicated, reduced and in some areas made impossible by vetoes, withdrawal from the international legal order and manifest lies in a diplomatic context.
And finally, fundamental agreements and treaties, which made important contributions to pan-European / Atlantic stability, are being ignored or cancelled (CFE: Conventional Forces in Europe, Open Skies: Arms Control flights, nuclear ceilings, ban on certain types of weapons, etc.).
Not only are there numerous and daily forms of hostile behaviour, the most fundamental institutionalised bars against accidental or sudden escalation have also disappeared.
If we return to the question at the beginning of this text, we must conclude that the current situation cannot be captured in the bipolarity of war – no-war.
We do not see mere shifts within a known general social/political constellation, there is a fundamental re-alignment of the entire constellation underway, which is causing a number of paradigm shifts to arise (simultaneously) that cannot be captured in a nominal scale, but for which we need to develop an ordinal scale.
The Shades of Gray is a justified metaphor. The cognitive framework to deal with this is currently lacking.
To provide clarity, we should turn to two subdomains of cognition from (science and truth) philosophy: taxonomy and epistemology.
Taxonomy is the science that is responsible for the categorisation of knowledge, objects, living things, concepts.
Taxonomy is the logic on which we base the distinction and logical order between things, persons, etc. The classification of the animal kingdom (reptiles, vertebrates, etc.) is perhaps the most commonly used example to clarify the concept of Taxonomy.
We know the in aptitude of the old duality war / no war and in the past decade attempts have been made to name other situations: Hybrid warfare, Asymmetrical, Total, Grey-zone warfare, Non-linear, Tolerance warfare, etc.
None of these are actually holistic enough to be used as a catch-all concept around which to build a new reactive, political and military framework.
After all: there are parts of the conflict that are non-tolerant (e.g. hitting back after a cyber attack), that are not a Grey Zone (e.g. espionage, assassinations, sabotage), that are linear (e.g. conflict Ukraine) and therefore any name that refers to characteristics loses its universality.
Perhaps in the vagueness of things we will find a better concept: Muggy.
If we look at the cold/warm war of yesteryear from a meteorological framework, Muggy is particularly interesting… it is neither cold weather nor warm weather,
but a circumstance characterised by an uncomfortable sultriness.
Depressed and oppressive, little wind, humidity that flirts with the unbearable, and an unpredictable chance of stable sultry weather or a sudden thunderstorm, with downpours, gusts of wind and all possible consequences.
In my opinion, it describes in a palpable way the situation we currently find ourselves in.
Uncomfortable and unpredictable. It can change at any moment, it feels scary, exhausting, dry in the throat, causes palpitations. It disrupts what we would be doing in ‘fair weather’ (well-being, environment, prosperity, etc.).
Welcome to the Muggy War.
A framework concept is only necessary if we (want to) use that framework to get a grip on an otherwise incomprehensible fuzzy environment, because the core of the problem is that we intuitively regard numerous events as aggression and threats, but have no idea how to respond to them, neither in terms of content nor in terms of thresholds.
Even in the field of cyber attacks we lack that framework: when are defensive actions taken, when are offensive attempts made to eliminate an enemy asset, when do they scale up from police to military action, when from national to Coalition Allied?
We therefore need to start thinking in a kind of epistemological way to map the diversity of threat and aggression phenomena, to agree at an allied level about the nature and qualification we wish to give to it (is something punishable or not, a threat or an act, interference or subversion, etc.).
The old masters such as Sun Zsu and von Clausewitz can be read with avidity again and the old manuals on subversion and all other forms of state-undermining behaviour also deserve attention and updating.
Because ultimately the intention is to create a new framework of Facts & Truths, in which the political leadership of our countries and the coalitions (NATO and EU) and in fact also for all economic actors, judicial and military agencies and even citizens it becomes clear what is happening, where tolerance limits are and what the range of reaction forms contains (revisit the Flexible Response doctrine too).
The Kaliningrad jammer disrupts GPS and communications in the airspace, on the ground and at sea of NATO member states or international waterways.
In this Muggy War it is currently not clear whether this is an act of aggression, against a country, a security coalition (NATO), the international community or not… the international regulations regarding Telecommunications say so… but … So What?
and especially in an era of denial of involvement and non-functioning of the international community – e.g. the United Nations Security Council – it is therefore not clear what can or could be permitted, desired, anticipated responses to these situations.
Will this be tolerated – we all know the story of the slowly boiling frog – or will it be challenged (and how?).
Are we at war? – we could be – but it does not mean we “need to go to war”, and analysing, defining and preparing for this Fuzziness is a significant challenge, yet primordial to avoid unwanted escalatory catastrophe in the near future…
The official nuclear powers and some other countries have a full spectrum of instruments at their disposal to detect and analyse an opponent’s action and also have a wide range of military and covert intervention resources to generate an Adapted Response. But that would be a unilateral and not a coalition response.
It is different for the classic member states of alliances such as NATO and the EU that need each other or the Intelligence resources of one of the nuclear powers to detect and catalogue situations.
Moreover, they do not have an Intelligence Community or Armed Forces that have both the resources and the legal mandates to intervene in a way that may be desirable in the context of Adapted Response.
Governments of the member states of our alliances do not have the necessary reference framework in the existing Treaties to deal with this and to arrive at a joint position in a sine dubio way.
It is therefore imperative that our alliances grasp the reality of the Muggy War and, taking into account this diffuse environment, create political and operational military clarity by building Shades of Gray into alternative, more complex and much more realistically nuanced “Article 5” situations and responses.
This will undoubtedly lead to a more creative approach to the implementation of Military Operations other than War (MOotW), and subsequent adjustments to the national regulatory framework and the resources of the security services and Armed Forces.
Member states of the security alliances must have the opportunity to ‘draw the line in the sand’ with a tool that is more powerful than the expulsion of diplomats and more reactive than sanctions, but does not necessarily imply the declaration of an armed conflict.
The current nominal scale “War: yes/no” must make way for an ordinal scale, resulting in a Decisional Options Matrix.
Searching for precision in a Fuzzy World and offering member states and alliances the toolkit to engage in proportional defensive and offensive Power Play.
Carrying out this reflection exercise and open communication about it will also make it clear to current and potential opponents that it is no longer possible to escalate without consequence and to continue to flirt with the boundaries of manifestly hostile operations.
Adapting the framework to intervene and the assets to the characteristics of a Muggy War is at present timely, while at the same time it will maintain its relevance for the foreseeable future.
In 2022 before current high intensity conflicts and tensions, Galeotti described the turn in the world order as the emergence of the new Middle Ages or the new Renaissance, where permanent threats, power struggles and the absence of international rules of behaviour were characteristic.
Any comparison is undoubtedly difficult, but what is certain is that the existence of non-state actors who have access to low threshold means of destruction and who do not comply with international or humanitarian law rules cannot be undone.