Logo: to the web site of the Swedish Defence University

Introduction

Instability and uncertainty characterize today’s security environment and this produces multidimensional challenges when it comes to mitigating hybrid threats. Hybrid threats can arise as a result of anything from changed conditions in the political landscape or shifts in relative power, to technological developments or something as simple as access to the internet. As a result, today a state actor with few resources can achieve great effects in a third country’s security environment using a toolbox that combines military and non-military means of power projection. A modern hybrid adversary can use an array of methods simultaneously to achieve its strategic goals, from traditional mechanized combat and cyberattacks, to propaganda wars and funnelling money to terrorist groups, to give just a few examples. An actor – state or non-state – can use assaults, subversion, disinformation, cyber intrusions or any other criminal act, to influence, spread fear or create mayhem.[1] Plausible deniability makes it very difficult to determine who the antagonist is in such an environment.[2]

Today’s hybrid conflicts include a spectrum of complex hybrid threats and warfare and require better intelligence than traditional conflicts. Hybrid conflicts are intelligence intensive because they generate considerably larger amounts of information on asymmetric threats.[3] A hybrid warfare operation is based on the intelligence it collects. The boundary between an ordinary military intelligence service and a civil security intelligence service tends to be blurred in hybrid warfare operations. This is a relationship that places special demands on the intelligence service and its practitioners as well as its customers. The aim of this chapter is to analyse bilateral intelligence challenges and the initiatives that have taken place in recent years, both within Europe and in international military operations, to combat the phenomena mentioned earlier.

Before moving on to a discussion on current multilateral intelligence cooperation, however, this chapter first provides an interpretation of the hybrid threat concept and discusses the concept of ‘hybrid antagonists’. There then follows a discussion on current multilateral intelligence cooperation to address hybrid threats within the European Union (EU), the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO) and the United Nations (UN). Finally, the conclusions outline seven challenges facing the international intelligence community in terms of analysis and organization.

What is ‘multilateral intelligence collaboration’?

A multilateral agreement is an accord among three or more parties, agencies or national governments.[4]

There is currently no consensus on the definition of multilateral intelligence. For the purpose of this chapter we will use the definition of Walsh (2010) who suggested that it is ‘the collection, protection, and analysis of both publicly available and secret information, with the goal of reducing decision makers’ uncertainty about a foreign policy problem’.[5]

So multilateral intelligence collaboration is an accord among three or more agencies or national governments working together to collect, protect and analyse information to reduce decision makers uncertainty about a foreign policy.