Mara Whitlock This week I collected one word from five capitals, and it wasn't 'war.' Officials in Berlin, Rome, Canberra, New Delhi and Tehran each described a country already under attack — drones over airports, cables cut on the seabed, cyber intrusions by the thousand — and each reached for the same substitute: hybrid.
Germany's case is the most literal. After a suspected explosive-laden drone approached Leipzig/Halle Airport this month, Interior Minister Alexander Dobrindt drew the line his government now uses daily. Security analyst Hans-Jakob Schindler dates the underlying campaign — disinformation, cyberattacks, espionage, sabotage, even alleged assassination plots — back more than a decade, according to the Berlin Briefing.
We're not at war, but we are the daily target of hybrid warfare.
Alexander Dobrindt, German interior minister, to Bild am Sonntag, via <a href="https://www.cnbc.com/2026/08/09/german-minister-warns-of-hybrid-warfare-after-suspected-drone-attack.html">CNBC</a>
That phrase is doing real work: it lets a state name an attacker without triggering what 'war' would — Article 5, war powers, a public bracing for the real thing. The vocabulary is arriving faster than the policy built to answer it.
Italy has gone furthest in saying so out loud. A leaked non-paper from Defence Minister Guido Crosetto describes the country in a daily, multidomain hybrid conflict already under way, reports Decode39; he is separately said to be requesting 10,000 to 15,000 additional troops to cope, according to Il Sole 24 Ore.
That last figure comes from the body meant to advise Congress. A Congressional Research Service report published 11 August catalogues Russian sabotage, assassinations, airspace violations, GPS jamming, damage to undersea cables, cyberattacks, weaponised migration and election interference, and concludes the scale and sophistication of the campaign have outpaced the policy response. Congress's answer so far: the 2026 National Defense Authorization Act directs the State Department to stand up a Countering Russian Influence Fund Unit.
The same gap is opening where Russia isn't the suspect. A National Security College paper urges Canberra to become the Indo-Pacific's 'preferred cable hub' and to sponsor multilateral vulnerability assessments, arguing the undersea cables linking Australia to the world sit exposed in some of the region's most contested waters, per the South China Morning Post.
India's defence ministry told a parliamentary panel this month that the Army is prepared for hybrid warfare across cyber, electronic, information and space domains, with a unified counter-drone grid under way, while the Air Force pushes a 114-jet fighter procurement that Dassault has offered to build locally, according to The Tribune.
Here's the steelman for skepticism: 'hybrid war' is also a convenient alibi. It buys bigger budgets and more troops without the evidentiary burden a declared war demands — Crosetto's own troop request is exhibit one. And the term isn't the property of the accusers. Iran's foreign ministry spokesman, Esmail Baghaei, has invoked the identical framework, calling on domestic media to counter 'inverted narratives' amid what he calls hybrid warfare in the information space, per Defa Press — from a government frequently accused of running hybrid operations of its own.
Hypothesis: this week's cluster of statements reflects less a coordinated doctrine than parallel pressure — Russia's campaign in Europe, catalogued by the CRS, running alongside unrelated contests in the Indo-Pacific and the Gulf. Supporting that: the incidents named share no common perpetrator, only a common tactic, ambiguity. Against it: NATO and EU bodies have spent years building shared hybrid-threat vocabulary, so some of this week's convergence in language was already under way before any of these five statements were made.
The alibi risk is worth watching — line items like Crosetto's tend to outlive the threat that justified them. But the CRS findings aren't rhetoric, and Congress is still arguing three years in about how to fund its response unit. What I don't have yet is a policy to match the word.
