Hybrid Operations Below the Threshold of War: Target Systems, Campaign Logic, and Vectors of Influence

This article examines hybrid operations below the threshold of war as coordinated actions that combine heterogeneous instruments to manipulate target systems and produce defined political, strategic, operational, or enabling effects. It distinguishes hybrid operations from broader concepts such as hybrid warfare, gray-zone conflict, irregular warfare, and malign influence. It introduces the related concept of hybrid campaigns as a sustained, adaptive, and integrated series of such operations conducted to achieve political or strategic ends. Using a structured comparison of selected case--Russia’s campaign in Mali and the Sahel, Russia’s sanctions-evasion procurement networks, Iran’s Axis of Resistance, China’s critical-minerals leverage, and Belarus’s instrumentalization of migration--the article explores how diverse actors pursue influence, coercion, circumvention, dependency creation, and dilemma generation without crossing into open war. The cases show that hybrid campaigns are best understood not as lists of tools, but as forms of operational design targeting systems such as security sectors, supply chains, border regimes, deterrence architectures, and elite decision-making networks. The article identifies common features across cases: exploitation of seams, adaptation, manipulation of ambiguity, creation of costly response dilemmas, and a variable role for corruption, from background condition to operational instrument producing strategic effects.