Situasjonsforståelse ved sammensatte trusler - et konseptgrunnlag

Situation awareness is a premise for making sound and timely decisions. However, hybrid threats challenge the ability to obtain situation awareness. The purpose of this report is to support the future development of a concept aiming to improve the national situation awareness in encountering hybrid threats. This report is written by the FFI project Multinational Capability Development Campaign (MCDC) as a part FFI’s research on hybrid threats. One important objective of the project is to make available results from the MCDC activities Countering Hybrid Warfare (CHW) I-III in a national context. Hence, the content of the report is based on results and recommendations from the MCDC CHW activities together with input from several national and international workshops. In the report, we use the MCDC CHW definition of the term hybrid threats: «the synchronized use of multiple instruments of power tailored to specific vulnerabilities across the full spectrum of societal functions to achieve synergistic effects». The instruments of power covers military, political, economical, civil, information and legal means, combined to exploit vulnerabilities within various societal sectors. Hybrid threats appear in every part of the conflict spectrum, from peace to military conflict and war. In this report, we focus on the « grey zone» in between peace and conflict where the border between societal security and state security is blurred. In the grey zone, a threat actor can exploit properties of hybrid threats in order to achieve short and long-term objectives simultaneously challenging our situation awareness. This report provides suggestions and recommendations on how we can improve the ability to obtain situation awareness facing hybrid threats. The ability to obtain situation awareness is individual and depends on several factors. However, fundamental is the availability of information about threats, vulnerabilities, effects and the state of the societal functions. The nature of hybrid threats requires mechanisms for sharing information about threats and effects between different sectors across society. Further, it is necessary to understand the accumulated effect of single incidents on the societal and state security, and whether the effects are in line with anticipated goals and objectives of potential adversaries. In this report, we recommend the establishment of a cross-sectorial situation picture to support cross-sectorial situation awareness. The situation picture is a part of the decision basis developed to support decision making with respect to preventing and managing hybrid threats. Further, we recommended establishing a strategic capacity for the analysis of hybrid threats.