Specific laws of armed struggle are noted:
the dependence of the methods of armed struggle on the high-tech of the weapons
systems used;
the dependence of the intensity of the combat on the quantity and quality of forces
and means used in a given place at a given time;
the dependence of the course and results of the combat on the quality of the special
professional modern training of the personnel of the opposing sides, ideology (irregular
units fight well only if the high command respects, the belief in the justice of the
struggle), financial and specific motivation.
It should be noted that high technology is the key feature of wars and armed
conflicts of modern times. The use of high technologies has made the confrontation:
both comprehensive in the spaces where they are carried out, as well as physical - land,
sea, air, space, and virtual - information, cyber, cognitive and other spaces; all-
encompassing in the key spheres of human life; multivariate in forms of reference;
hybrid in nature, forms and methods of their conduct, involved actors, forces and
means.
Thus, hybrid war is a high-tech conflict that is a continuation of the policy of
states (coalitions, political groups, transnational corporations, etc.) aimed at imposing
their will on opponents with the help of complex, adaptive, asymmetric, conventional
and nonconventional synchronized actions on them in multidimensional and other
spheres, ensuring multiplicativity and synergetic results and a high level of uncertainty
for opponents on ultimate goals and their ways of achieving [29]. A hybrid in terms of
its content, forms and methods of conducting can be considered a specific variant of
fourth-generation wars (4GW).
In hybrid conflicts of any intensity, hostilities (operations) are an element of other
(non-force) actions mutually coordinated according to a single plan, mainly economic,
political, diplomatic, informational, psychological, cyber, cognitive, etc [29]. This
creates destabilizing internal and external processes in the state that is the object of
aggression (concern and discontent of the population, migration, acts of civil
disobedience, etc.). Hybrid wars are not declared and, therefore, cannot be completed
in the classical sense of the end of wars and military conflicts. This is a kind of
permanent war of variable intensity across multiple sectors, with cascading impacts
and synergistic destructive manifestations, in which the entire population of the country
and the international community are to a certain extent consciously or unconsciously
involved. The impactsare felt on all spheres of life, on all sectors of society and
throughout the state. Thanks to the use of innovative technologies, it became possible
to shift conflict from predominantly overt and forceful (kinetic) means, to less obvious
strategies focused on the structural vulnerabilities of adversaries, including
(importantly) achieving cognitive advantage over them.
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