Out of the Shadows: Ukraine and the Shock of Non-Hybrid War

Abstract

For two decades, a large body of security practitioners and scholars axiomatically expected “future war” to be ambiguous and hybrid, based on recent cases. The scale and overt form of the Russia–Ukraine war, which begun on February 22, 2022, demonstrates the limits of this orthodoxy. This article asks why informed opinion fell prey to such false expectations. It argues that as well as the pathologies of fashion in military-academic circles, there was an intellectual failure. Those who confidently expected war to remain in the shadows did not take seriously enough war’s political nature, and the possibility that it will intensify as political stakes rise. Either they assumed apolitically that war’s form was determined by the tools of globalization, or that the politics would be of the status quo, whereby the stability of the unipolar era would endure. Paying lip service to Carl von Clausewitz, in fact, they were unwittingly channeling Francis Fukuyama. To demonstrate this failure, I examine three representative texts of the genre and unpack their assumptions, by David Richards, Antoine Bousquet, and Sean McFate.