Episode 299: Grey Zone Warfare and Strategic Ambiguity: Risk, Deterrence, and the Space Between Peace and Conflict with Dr Andrew Mumford
Today, Dominic Bowen hosts Dr Andrew Mumford on The International Risk Podcast to examine how grey zone warfare, hybrid tactics and strategic ambiguity are reshaping the contemporary security environment. They explore why sub-threshold activity has become a central feature of modern geopolitics, how states exploit ambiguity and deniability to pursue strategic objectives without triggering open conflict, and why these methods increasingly challenge traditional approaches to deterrence, escalation and international law.
The conversation examines how cyber operations, disinformation, sabotage, proxy warfare and infrastructure interference generate cumulative effects that erode resilience, undermine public trust and complicate decision-making for governments, businesses and societies. Together, they discuss why hybrid threats are best understood not as isolated tactics but as part of a broader risk-management approach to conflict, and what this means for democratic resilience, public-private cooperation and the future of indirect warfare.
Dr Andrew Mumford is Professor of War Studies at the University of Nottingham. His research focuses on contemporary and historical conflict, with particular expertise in insurgency, counterinsurgency, proxy warfare and military strategy. He is the author of The Counterinsurgency Myth, The British Experience of Irregular Warfare, and The West’s War Against ISIS. His work examines how states manage risk, legitimacy and escalation in modern conflict, offering insights that inform policymakers, security practitioners and institutions grappling with the rise of hybrid and grey zone warfare.
The International Risk Podcast brings you conversations with global experts, frontline practitioners, and senior decision-makers who are shaping how we understand and respond to international risk. From geopolitical volatility and organised crime to cybersecurity threats and hybrid warfare, each episode explores the forces transforming our world and what smart leaders must do to navigate them. Whether you’re a board member, policymaker, or risk professional, The International Risk Podcast delivers actionable insights, sharp analysis, and real-world stories that matter.
Dominic Bowen is the host of The International Risk Podcast and Europe’s leading expert on international risk and crisis management. As Head of Strategic Advisory and Partner at one of Europe’s leading risk management consulting firms, Dominic advises CEOs, boards, and senior executives across the continent on how to prepare for uncertainty and act with intent. He has spent decades working in war zones, advising multinational companies, and supporting Europe’s business leaders. Dominic is the go-to business advisor for leaders navigating risk, crisis, and strategy; trusted for his clarity, calmness under pressure, and ability to turn volatility into competitive advantage. Dominic equips today’s business leaders with the insight and confidence to lead through disruption and deliver sustained strategic advantage.
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Transcript:
Andrew Mumford: [00:00:00]
What shapes today’s environment in the hybrid grey zone space is that never before has it attained a strategic level of importance, that it has never been used with this regularity, this level of importance that is shaping geopolitics substantially.
Welcome back to the International Risk Podcast, where we discuss the latest world news and significant events that impact businesses and organisations worldwide.
Dominic:
Hi, I’m Dominic Bowen and welcome back to the International Risk Podcast, where we explore the risks that are shaping our world and the decisions that are confronting governments, business leaders, and academic institutions. Today we’re turning to a topic that increasingly defines the strategic environment.
We’re talking about grey zone warfare. These are the tactics that operate really in the shadows. They’re below the threshold of open warfare, yet clearly above the level of peace, and this includes cyber operations, election interference, disinformation campaigns, and increasingly what we’re seeing is things like sabotage and the use of state and non-state actors to achieve government [00:01:00] objectives, but without triggering that full-scale military confrontation that we’re all used to, or have at least seen in films.
In a world where we see everything managed so carefully, the question really begs answering: how are governments managing this? How are alliances, traditional and even some of the new alignments, responding to and managing these challenges, and how do societies and businesses defend their interests against these threats that are certainly out there?
And we see them in the news and many of us are working with them every day, but they’re occurring in that grey space in between. To help us unpack this topic, we’re joined by one of the UK’s really foremost experts on the topic, and that’s Professor Andrew Mumford. He works at the University of Nottingham and he’s the first Professor of War Studies there.
And his research really examines how states manage contemporary and historical conflicts, with a particular focus on insurgency, counterinsurgency, proxy warfare, and military strategy. He’s the author of The Counterinsurgency Myth, The British Experience of Irregular Warfare, and his most recent book from 2021 is The West’s War Against ISIS.
We’ll link to those [00:02:00] books in the show notes. Professor Andrew Mumford, welcome to the International Risk Podcast.
Andrew Mumford:
Dominic, thanks for having me on.
Dominic:
We speak a lot about hybrid warfare and grey zone warfare in so many different contexts on the International Risk Podcast. It could be when we’re talking about trade policy, it could be when we talk about some big cyber attacks.
It could be when we talk about water treaties and how states are responding, or not responding, to their treaty obligations with regards to natural resources. But can you help us understand what grey zone warfare is? What does it look like today, and how does it differ from perhaps irregular warfare or proxy conflicts that we saw during the Cold War?
Andrew Mumford:
That’s the million-dollar question, Dominic, and I’m going to try and do my best here, but with the biggest caveat possible that I cannot think of another form of warfare that is so contentious. Just the very phrase grey zone warfare has become a real academic football that’s been kicked about.
When you think of other forms of warfare, whether it’s proxy warfare or counterinsurgency, you just listed two other types of warfare that I’ve [00:03:00] researched in the past. Everyone is broadly in agreement as to what the parameters of that type of war are. Grey zone conflict and hybrid war really get academics arguing like no other topic in conflict studies.
And there are several reasons for this. Firstly, the very idea that it’s neither war nor peace sits quite uncomfortably with a lot of us. It has some characteristics of conflict, but it’s sub-threshold. It doesn’t meet that immediate limit of what war actually constitutes in the eyes of the international laws of armed conflict.
There’s an existential issue here about whether it actually exists or not. And one of the key reasons is partly history. If we take this idea that hybrid warfare or grey zone warfare is largely an amalgamation of different forms of conventional, unconventional, regular, and irregular types of activity, hybrid war is nothing new, and I take that point.
What I would argue is that hybrid warfare, grey zone conflict, or whatever phrase you want to use, is actually a really [00:04:00] helpful concept and idea to be using, in large part because it helps us understand old threats in a new environment.
So I’ve been discussing this with many colleagues at academic conferences and with policymakers in Parliament and within NATO, and we’ve been kicking this idea around as to whether hybrid war is actually a thing. I’ve settled on what I think is my own position.
I don’t deny the fact that we’ve seen this mishmash of different conventional and unconventional, regular and irregular activities in the same war. Think, for example, about World War I. Everyone thinks muddy trenches across Belgium, but at the same time Lawrence of Arabia is blowing up trains in the Ottoman Empire as a would-be insurgent.
I’m not going to deny the fact that there are hybrid elements to World War I for that reason. If you fast-forward to contemporary activity today by the superpowers, the powers challenging the United States and NATO, such as Russia, China, and Iran, they’re using that very same multiplicity of methods.
[00:05:00]
I think what matters today, what shapes today’s environment in the hybrid grey zone space, is that never before has it attained a strategic level of importance, that it’s never been used with this regularity. This level of importance is shaping geopolitics substantially.
Dominic:
I really like that aspect of the strategic importance of what’s being done. And I think that is really quite impactful. If we look at Russian sabotage operations across Europe, by many different metrics they’ve at least tripled between 2023 and 2024.
And I think one of the really defining features of grey zone operations is ambiguity. That strategic ambiguity, that deniability at the highest levels while still trying to achieve a significant impact, is such a powerful tool. Can you help us understand the deniability and the intent behind states that are really capitalising on hybrid warfare and grey zone warfare tactics today?
Andrew Mumford:
The word you just used there, ambiguity, is central to understanding all of it. Ambiguity is the central characteristic of hybrid war, and it’s the central [00:06:00] characteristic for several key reasons.
If you look at states such as Russia, China, and Iran, who are arguably three of the most prodigious users of threats in the grey zone, the reason that they couch their actions in ambiguity is for several reasons.
Firstly, the resort to hybrid threats allows states to turn weaknesses into strengths. Whether they’ve got constrained geopolitical or economic capacity, or they’ve not got a large financial resource to undertake large-scale military actions, they instead resort to hybrid threats. You can still get what you want in the international system, or at least make a big fuss about it.
Secondly, ambiguity is exactly the reason why these activities are sub-threshold in a legal sense. There is no direct line of responsibility between the state and the action, creating that level of uncertainty about attribution.
That’s key, because two things to really understand in relation to hybrid threats are the source and the method. And if you can create enough [00:07:00] ambiguity about the source of an activity, who exactly cut that underwater cable, who exactly undertook that cyber attack, then the multiplicity of different methods helps amplify this constant erosion.
And this is what states want: a constant erosion of security and a constant erosion of norms. This is why one of the attendant issues here is the phrase lawfare, which may have come up on the podcast before. If a challenger state in the international arena can erode, push, and nudge the norms of international behaviour, you erode the foundations of international law and suddenly you’ve created enough anarchy to get what you want.
So ambiguity is absolutely central. It’s not necessarily a cloak of convincing deniability. Take perhaps the most obvious example of modern hybrid war. Rewind to 2014 with the Russian annexation of Crimea, with the so-called little green men who had all their [00:08:00] Russian military insignia taken off their shoulders.
That veil of deniability was a bit of a joke, but there was enough ambiguity for the Kremlin to hamstring NATO’s response. The ambiguity over who was responsible, who was coordinating, whether this was a formal state military action or, as Vladimir Putin kept insisting, the actions of patriotic volunteers in Crimea.
It creates what I like to think of, for the target state, as being placed on the horns of a dilemma. If you over-respond to an ambiguous use of force, you yourself look like the aggressor. But if you don’t respond enough, you get the erosion of what we call in academia salami slicing. The enemy doesn’t take the whole salami at once. They take a slice at a time and hope nobody notices. And before you know it, they’ve got what they want, and you are left completely vulnerable.
And that’s why ambiguity is the biggest ally to states that want to utilise hybrid threats.
Dominic:
I think that salami analogy is a really good one. And I’ve been talking about this for years [00:09:00] with clients and speaking to government agencies about China’s actions in the South China Sea.
It’s this persistent encroachment and taking advantage of legal ambiguity. How much does a pile of sand that China may have laid on top of a coral reef actually count as a foundation for a claim to land, and then the militarisation of those locations.
I think it’s systematically and persistently eroding international law. We see it in the UN Convention on the Law of the Sea, and in the ignoring of tribunal rulings. There was a case in 2016 that was won by the Philippines, and it was simply ignored by China.
Economic exclusive zones that are normally legally binding are ignored, ports and airstrips are militarised, coral strips are transformed, and coast guards and fishing vessels are militarised.
I think that is exactly the sort of grey zone tactics that have proved to be very, very effective in the Indo-Pacific region. And so I wonder what this tells us about escalation dynamics and our ability to deter these sorts of [00:10:00] activities.
Andrew Mumford:
This is incredibly difficult, because responding to or even identifying an act of hybrid conflict and providing complete attribution is like the strategic equivalent of catching fog. You can see it, it’s there, but you can’t grasp it.
And for that reason, deterrence and escalation, which are of course two intertwined ideas, are incredibly difficult. The maritime space is a massively important arena in which hybrid threats are being played out, because it provides many recent examples of how ambiguity can manifest.
We’ve seen examples over the last few years where the Chinese People’s Liberation Army Navy has repurposed fishing trawlers, filling them with jamming equipment and sailing them close to Indonesian or Filipino naval vessels near contested islands in the South and East China Seas.
There was a case earlier this year when a fishing trawler was, to all intents and purposes, escorted out of the [00:11:00] North Sea off the east coast of the UK. The UK Navy had realised that this fishing trawler had been going backwards and forwards, seemingly mapping a major area of underwater sea cables linking the UK and mainland Europe. It then headed up into the North Sea and was tracked going back into Russian territorial waters.
And perhaps one of the most important maritime examples we’ve seen in recent years is the way the Houthis and their Iranian allies have disrupted global supply chains by creating a choke point through the Suez Canal.
There were some fascinating reports from US intelligence agencies during the height of that crisis. An unmarked vessel, Iranian-flagged, was operating at the time of the Houthi bombings of ships waiting to transit the Suez Canal. That vessel had to go for repairs in a port in East Africa, and [00:12:00] suddenly the bombing stopped and normal maritime traffic resumed.
When the vessel left port and returned to the area, the bombings started again. Intelligence agencies concluded that the vessel contained sophisticated naval analysis, radar, and jamming equipment that was feeding targeting information back to the Houthis onshore.
So the maritime space is absolutely ripe for exploitation through ambiguous hybrid threats. But how do you deter these? This is a huge question, and one I’ve discussed for many years with UK parliamentarians and NATO practitioners.
Deterrence as a concept has its roots in modern geopolitics through nuclear weapons. How do you prevent a nuclear war? The idea was that you prevent something happening because the consequences outweigh the gains [00:13:00] from the action.
But that traditional understanding of risk and reward goes completely out of the window when hybrid threats are used, because ambiguity is central. You don’t want to put your head above the parapet and show the world that you are doing something.
So how do you deter something that your competitor doesn’t want to be seen doing anyway? It’s incredibly difficult. Deterrence worked in conventional spaces. The Cold War remained cold because neither the US nor the Soviet Union wanted nuclear annihilation.
But in the sub-threshold grey zone, conventional thinking about deterrence no longer applies. And I don’t think deterrence theory has moved forward sufficiently to translate into this era, where threats are not conventional, not obvious, and not predominantly nuclear.
They’re about undermining elections, cyber attacks, and underwater sea cables. And that, I think, is one of the most pressing problems facing policymakers today: how to update and make deterrence effective against hybrid threats.
Dominic:
I think that’s a really great point, Andrew, and I’d love to explore something you mentioned earlier around the erosion of public trust and the fear around it.
I think the grey zone tactic of increasingly targeting critical infrastructure plays into that. We look at Taiwan’s government systems, which are reportedly experiencing around 2.4 million daily attacks, repeated attack after attack.
Then we see the repeated sabotage of Baltic undersea cables, the deliberate exploitation of loopholes in the law of the sea, and Russia’s shadow fleet and third-party flagged vessels conducting sabotage operations while preserving deniability from the Russian state.
These tactics are being used to sever undersea gas pipelines and [00:15:00] cut fibre-optic cables in the Baltic Sea. Can you help us understand what risks these tactics pose to our resilience as democracies, and also what risks they pose to authoritarian states that are employing them?
Andrew Mumford:
The real appeal in the utility of hybrid threats is that they pose a lot less risk to the nations utilising them, the Russias, the Chinas, the Irans, than they do to the target states on the receiving end of them, the Taiwans, the NATO member states, for example. And that is in part because of this idea I mentioned earlier about turning weaknesses into strengths.
And it puts the emphasis on response from those target states, who then have to make their response obvious and unambiguous. So, to that extent, your previous comment about escalation becomes key, because there is an inherent risk in getting the response wrong and escalating up the wrong ladder.
In academia, we talk about the ladder of escalation in conflict, right, and it [00:16:00] goes up incrementally before you get to the top level of the ladder of escalation, which is outright conflict. The issue, though, is directly related to modes of deterrence and levels of resilience.
Right now, I do not think levels of resilience across societies in the West that are on the receiving end of hybrid threats are strong enough. And the idea we need to understand is that resilience is intrinsically linked to deterrence, because the higher the levels of resilience in a society to hybrid threats, the higher the level of deterrence, because it is not having an effect.
So one of the things we need to understand here is that, in political terms and in security terms, there is a lot of talk about how certain issues are, or what are referred to as, whole-of-government problems. The thing about hybrid threats and grey zone warfare is that it transcends that. Responding to hybrid threats is a whole-of-society problem, and that is why we need to think about ways to increase resilience across societies.
It is not just about improving policy responses or ensuring that there are greater levels of military [00:17:00] funding to help give us a cutting edge on responding to things like cyber attacks. It is about ensuring that everybody is resilient to hybrid threats, and this can be manifested in several ways.
In the work that I have been doing over the last few years with NATO, it has become very clear, through several studies they have done, that there is a direct correlation between levels of mainstream media literacy in a country and levels of trust in government.
And the fact is that we are now in a day and age where the majority of people do not get their news from what has now been labelled the mainstream media, a broadsheet newspaper or a TV news bulletin, and they are instead relying on social media channels to get their news and information. You have massively extenuated the circumstances in which disinformation can reshape political narratives and open up that opportunity to drive a wedge between a society and its government.
And this is exactly why hybrid threats, grey zone warfare, are not just about territory. Earlier I mentioned the annexation of Crimea back in 2014 as a [00:18:00] territory grab, that is a bit of an outlier in terms of hybrid activity. The predominant issue is that Russia is able to pump out disinformation on social media.
It is about driving a wedge between the people and governments in the West, because it is not just about territory, it is about values, it is about norms. And if you can undermine those, you have started to unsettle the very fabric of liberal democratic societies.
And that is why this whole-spectrum approach to hybrid war, targeting critical national infrastructure, targeting voting systems, targeting the values that people hold dear, all of it collectively has a much bigger effect than simply grabbing territory.
All of them represent different slices of salami that have been taken at each point, and they add up to much more than the sum of the parts of the whole.
Dominic:
Andrew, your work on proxy warfare is really foundational, and I would love to hear your insight on this. I have had the benefit, both in the Middle East and in the Indo-Pacific region, of training and supporting local forces and [00:19:00] building up their capacity.
But I would love to hear from you, and from the work you have done and the study you have conducted. When the West does arm, train, and enable local partners, how do we maintain legality, especially when transparency is not always there? Support from other agencies is often very opaque, and it definitely does not reach the public’s eye.
How do we maintain that, and what lessons have we learned in London, Washington, and Canberra about how to successfully conduct these proxy campaigns without further escalating?
Andrew Mumford:
I honestly think we need to go back to the invasion of Iraq. Bear with me here, because I think in order to understand the controversy surrounding contemporary local partner force support operations, so-called working by, with, and through other agencies on the ground, we need to understand that the tectonic plates of international security have shifted significantly, even over the last quarter century.
And if you think about how the American launch of the Global War on Terror in response to [00:20:00] 9/11 created within the Bush administration this desire to undertake massive military operations that launched regime-changing wars in two countries in the Middle East, that then suddenly proved to be not only divisive, but unpopular and largely unsuccessful.
So what changed when Obama comes into power is an understanding that the large, aggressive, and very expensive displays of American military might around the world are actually incredibly counterproductive. But the one thing that was not going to change was the seeding of American interests around the world.
So what then becomes, I think, an incredibly risk-orientated approach to defence and foreign policy was saying: okay, no more wars, no more regime-changing interventions. And bearing in mind, of course, that one of the greatest foreign policy failures of the Obama administration really was to deal with the Assad regime in Syria at the beginning of the Syrian civil war, and the constant ignoring of Assad crossing these so-called red lines that Obama set time and time again. Obama was not going to use force, but he was not going to cede American interest.
So instead, that is why we then see the US response to the rise of Islamic State not being another major, hundreds of thousands of troops operation on the ground, but instead, essentially a proxy war approach, where you take a disparate, absolute alphabet soup of militia organisations on the ground. You airdrop them weapons, you take some of them to Jordan and create training camps, and you hope they can do the job for you in defeating Assad and the Syrian army, and again, at the same time as I should say, they are dropping bombs from the air, in this rather strange half-in, half-out approach.
[00:21:00]
That proved rather unsuccessful in its entirety. It was not one or the other. And I think now, it might sound very strange, but there is more in common with Obama’s approach to overseas war and Donald Trump’s approach than you might think, because both Obama and Trump were very keen on not undertaking large American wars overseas.
But at the same time, not wanting to cede American interests where they felt it needed defending. So this is why, because of that, because of the failure of the Global War on Terror as a massive military undertaking, the natural inclination then in subsequent administrations, as diverse as Obama’s and Trump’s, has been to rely on local partner forces.
Where appropriate, making very strange bedfellows out of a wide range of different insurgent groups, state militaries, and non-state groups to undertake actions that they believe are important for attaining American military strategic objectives. And that is why we are living through this era now of large-scale use of proxy conflict, which is, in and of itself, part and parcel of the broader spectrum of activities that comes under the banner of hybrid war.
Dominic:
Moving to something that is a little bit closer, that we all see and we all read, and we are not listening to right now, we can say the International Risk Podcast is not supported by any government entities, but we do know that [00:23:00] Western governments, and no doubt governments all around the world, really are partnering with different platforms, broadcasters, and NGOs in order to counter disinformation.
And I think most of us would say that is a good thing. If you are countering disinformation, if you are giving us the facts, that is excellent. But as we have sadly seen since 2016, there really has been this blurred line between what is fact-checking, what is censorship, what is outright bullying, and where is this line between offering support and actually influencing the narrative that gets shared with the civilian population.
So Andrew, where do you see the line between healthy government-funded support and where does that cross into covert influence? And even if it does cross into covert influence, is that okay? Is that something that we should just be happy and content with that our governments are doing on our behalf?
Andrew Mumford:
They have always done it. Let us not hide this fact. You look at the history of the Cold War, and there is a constant and regular level of Western interference in elections. Take Greece, Italy, for the prevention of communist governments [00:24:00] from being elected. Covert influence is part and parcel of modern statecraft on both sides.
Let us not hide from that fact, but what is problematic right now is the way in which populist narratives in the West are undermining efforts to tackle disinformation. The rise of right-wing populism in Europe and the United States is Russia and China’s dreams come true, because the ability to label anything that does not fit your political agenda as fake news immediately starts to undermine any collective effort to draw a line between information and disinformation.
And this is why social media, the landscape of social media, is fertile ground for hybrid activities. And I will go back and re-emphasise the point about media literacy. There is a direct link between people’s trust in their governments and people’s trust in media narratives.
This is where we have to take a bigger step back and think [00:25:00] about what is at risk. I do not want to get too hyperbolic here, but there are values at stake about liberal democracy and what we stand for, and the ability to call our governments out on their actions and what they say is an intrinsic part of living in a liberal democracy.
And we have to defend that. But here is the crux of the dilemma: how illiberal do liberal democracies need to be in order to protect themselves against misinformation, against cyber attacks? And this is why this issue of escalation is completely upended when we talk about this.
You see a cyber attack, but you are not going to respond with a missile attack. So how do you keep your response within the confines, not just of the framing of this grey zone, it is not war, it is not peace, type realm, but also in a way that protects and defends your liberal value base, your democratic political system.
And that is why liberal democracies now have got to think about whether a ladder of escalation needs to be put in place [00:26:00] in relation to hybrid threats. Do we need to respond in kind, a cyber attack for a cyber attack? Well, this is problematic, because of the way in which, as I said earlier, they are making strengths out of weaknesses, the things that they are attacking.
Large critical national infrastructure projects, the stealing of billions of dollars’ worth of intellectual property from higher education institutions and businesses across the West, they are attacking them because they do not have them. So responding in kind is very, very difficult, but it has to be done in a way that protects critical national infrastructure, protects business interests, and protects the values and norms that our liberal democracies stand on, because we cannot sacrifice those in the name of defending them.
Dominic:
It is a really great point, is it not? How much do we sacrifice in order to pursue what is important to us? How much do we give up of that? I think that is something that too often we do not ask, or analyse enough. And certainly in my experience around the world, strategic flexibility, ambiguity, deniability, risk management, these are all important components [00:27:00] of hybrid warfare.
Now, you have written extensively on counterinsurgency and proxy warfare. What lessons do you draw, and what lessons should we learn, from past conflicts where states have sought to fight indirectly and maintain deniability?
And what should we be looking for today, when we are trying to understand the international risk environment and the geopolitical environment? What should we be learning from the past and taking into today’s activities?
Andrew Mumford:
My study of the history of this type of irregular and indirect warfare, such as war by proxy, tells me that when states have a heightened sense of risk, they resort to more indirect forms of warfare.
So when it is too risky to send hundreds of thousands of soldiers into another country and undertake large nation-building projects, it does not mean that the goal of controlling or influencing the strategic outcome, or the strategic direction, of another country is abandoned. It just means the route by which they try and get to that objective changes from direct to [00:28:00] indirect, and that is why the Cold War remained cold.
Because there was that heightened sense of risk about what would happen if too many direct routes were taken to attaining strategic dominance over the other. Therefore, when we talk about the Cold War, we can talk about it and use that label in a Western sense, because we never saw the bullets fly.
But actually, if you talk to historians in Asia and historians in Africa, the Cold War is not cold. It is a series of hot wars fought locally with massive levels of external interference from the superpowers. This runs exactly parallel to the pendulum shift we saw after the failures of Iraq and Afghanistan.
It was too high risk to keep undertaking direct forms of regime change or direct forms of military action. But we did not want to give up the strategic interest. So instead we utilised indirect mechanisms to attain objectives. So I think we are, and perhaps for quite some time now have been, living through an era of warfare by risk management.
[00:29:00]
Political leaders are heavily attuned not just to the economic costs of large-scale direct warfighting, but also to public opinion, which has had an increasing effect on the way politicians in the West manage conflict.
Ever since Lyndon Johnson decided not to run for re-election in 1968, we have seen how public opinion regarding unpopular wars can influence political leadership.
And I think this is a broad rule of thumb we should be conscious of: recourse to proxy wars, especially in the West, becomes ever more prevalent when the risks of direct intervention are seen to be too high.
Dominic:
European business leaders, I suggest, and I continually advocate, that they should be, and I am not trying to be alarmist, highly concerned about the impacts of hybrid warfare on their companies. The evolving threats from increasingly targeting critical infrastructure, the impacts on supply chains, the impacts on logistics, information security, and even societal [00:30:00] cohesion, all of which is essential to successful commerce.
Now, perhaps you agree or do not agree with that thesis, but if you do, what do you think business leaders should be doing today in order to prepare their companies so that they have the robustness and the resilience to be able to navigate what is a really complex international environment?
Andrew Mumford:
I completely agree with you. Business leaders no longer have the luxury of assuming that they are a place apart from states, in terms of being targeted by other states. Now in the international arena, the rise of hybrid war as a strategic level problem in the world means that warfare is no longer a purely interstate activity.
State militaries are no longer targeting exclusively state militaries. Business leaders in the West do not have the luxury of assuming that they are immune to any of this, and I am sure that is not news to many of them, because they will have realised that they are already on the receiving end of cyber attacks.
For example, the reason why they cannot assume that they are immune to this is for several reasons. The intrinsically interconnected way in which globalisation has meant that the face of the West, as it were, for many, are high-profile multinational companies based here. Secondly, we cannot afford to silo the threats that emerge in the hybrid realm.
Andrew Mumford:
We cannot ignore climate change. Climate change is pervasive. It affects us whether we want to ignore it or not. It will affect us whether we believe in it or not. The way in which it is affecting everything, every aspect of the strategic ability of states to function and exist, means that on any risk register the biggest, most outsized items are the existential ones.
Given the fact that nuclear conflict has been carefully managed [00:34:00] since 1945 between nations, because we assumed that there were rational actors involved in the process, and maybe there still are, it is worth remembering that for a time after the Cold War there was even a movement to get nuclear weapons nominated for the Nobel Peace Prize.
Existential risk now is largely climate driven. It is forcing migration. It is forcing countries to think about how they can continue to exist into the future. And it is also going to have a significant impact on how and where business can be done.
For me, that hangs over everything, including national security, including warfare. We are going to be thinking about a future in which thousands of tanks that run on an inordinate amount of fuel can no longer be sent into battlefields because there are no fossil fuels left. We cannot undertake long-range missile strikes with huge gas-guzzling jets. It affects everything.
And the climate change agenda is not just about what war looks like, it is about why war is fought. If you are talking about what the future of war looks like, [00:35:00] resource wars are going to be central. I am not just talking about oil and gas. I am talking about water.
These are increasingly constrained resources, alongside some of the rarer minerals that are becoming the focus of growing geopolitical competition. We are absolutely going to see more aggressive forms of competition over rare minerals. Resource wars are something we need to look out for, and they are going to bring their own risks that will be exacerbated by climate change.
Dominic:
I completely agree with you, Andrew. I spoke at the European Risk Management Conference a few years ago, and the thesis of my talk was about water wars and their impact. It was very easy to draw examples from South Asia and East Africa, but there were also quite a few examples in Europe where we are extremely water scarce, and the impact that has on our societies.
So I definitely agree that we need to be analysing not just how wars are fought, but why they are fought. Natural resources are a pretty obvious motivator, especially as climate change continues to impact all of us. Thank you for raising that, and thank you very much for coming on the International Risk Podcast today, Andrew.
[00:36:00]
Andrew Mumford:
It has been an absolute pleasure talking to you, Dominic. Thank you.
Dominic:
That was a great conversation with Professor Andrew Mumford on the challenges of grey zone warfare, strategic ambiguity, and their impact on our societies.
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This episode was produced and coordinated by Katerina Mazzucchelli. I am Dominic Bowen, your host. Thanks very much for listening. We will speak again in a few days.
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