Between War and Peace ‘Hybrid Threats’ and NATO’s Strategic Concept

Abstract：In war studies one can distinguish between the futurists on the one side and the traditionalists on the other: those holding that everything in today’s wars is new and unprecedented versus those holding that the nature of war is enduring and that what happens today on and off the battlefield has already been seen throughout history albeit in different guises. Within the debate between these two camps the question persists whether so-called hybrid war is war at all, whether we even need the ‘hybrid’ label, and whether we should not just focus on kinetic large scale warfare and allow the minor stuff to function as a safety valve to release tension.