How will the revolution in military affairs interact with irregular warfare in future conflicts? CSBA's Jim Thomas believes this confluence is best described as hybrid warfare:
I think we are at a point where if you take the old debate about the military technical revolution and you overlay it on the debate that we are having about irregular warfare the synthesis is really hybrid warfare involving the interplay of twin competitions: the competition between control and denial and the competition between conventional forces and paramilitary or sub-conventional forces. Now we talk not only about classic insurgencies, that historically are relatively low-tech, but what if in fact you create these hybrid forces where you have partisans armed with very high-tech weapons. The difficulty is that an insurgency is good at hitting and running but it falls down on traditional military tasks. Now, we are going to a direction where small groups of partisans can achieve effects that rival those of large militaries and that is truly revolutionary.
Thomas discussed hybrid warfare, as well as the history of the military technical revolution and ongoing conflicts in Iraq and Ukraine with Small Wars Journal's Octavian Manea.