Calvin Bailey
Russia’s hybrid campaign against Europe since the full-scale invasion of Ukraine shows that war in the 2020s is not defined by the moment tanks cross borders. Conflict today is a continuum, one in which hostile states use non-kinetic, unattributable means to degrade the ability of an adversary to function long before conventional forces engage. The West still tends to treat these actions as ‘pre-war’, or something separate from conflict itself. They are not. They are part of an escalatory strategy aimed at undermining and degrading our deterrence logic. This makes it difficult to ascertain where Europe is on the ‘spectrum of conflict’ with Russia. We may not be exchanging fire, but our infrastructure, airspace and people are still subject to Russian aggression.
To understand where we are, we must understand who Russia targets and why. Revisiting a model developed for an earlier era is helpful: John Warden’s ‘Five Rings’, first outlined in The Enemy as a System. Originally conceived for air campaigns against industrial states, Warden’s framework argued that a state could be paralysed by striking at the system that sustains it: leadership, organic essentials, infrastructure, population and, lastly, its fielded forces. Warden proposed delivering this effect through long-range precision strike, bypassing armies to attack the core. This doctrine has been central to how the US has waged war through its overwhelming airpower advantage.
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