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ID: 188410

Game-theoretic Analysis of Hybrid Threats / Balcaen, Pieter; Bois, Cind Du; Buts, Caroline

Bois, Cind Du	Journal Article
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Summary/Abstract

For decades, the concept of deterrence and the fear for nuclear confrontation withheld large powers from waging aggression against each other. Recent technological developments and the growing interconnectedness however allowed some states to find ways to challenge the West by using so called ‘hybrid threats’. This way of waging war entails the synchronized use of a broad spectrum of instruments that are well-designed to stay below the thresholds of detection, attribution and retaliation. Combining these (relatively cheap) threats with conventional military hard power confronts the liberal democracies with a difficult choice in terms of defence budget allocation. Whereas arms race stability in the conventional and nuclear domain leads to a peaceful stalemate, this article demonstrates that adding hybrid threats to the spectrum of state power projection leads to a gradual shift of the power balance. While hybrid threats have been extensively studied within the international relations literature, we are (to the best of our knowledge) the first to study these changing security paradigms from a defence economic point of view. Moreover, this article is the first to represent this increasingly complicated state power competition in a game theoretic framework.

Key Words

Deterrence ; Game Theory ; Russia ; Hybrid Threats ; Hybrid Warfare ; State Competition

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ID: 189456

Sharing the Burden of Hybrid Threats: Lessons from the Economics of Alliances / Balcaen, Pieter; Du Bois, Cind; Buts, Caroline

Buts, Caroline	Journal Article
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This article discusses the effects of the changing (hybrid) conflict environment on the burden sharing debate. We discuss the actions taken by both the alliance as the member states in repelling these threats, arguing that this mainly produces security outputs that are private or impure public. As the burden sharing literature currently lacks notions of hybrid threats, we believe the current modelling to be ill-suited to provide reliable assessments of member states’ burden sharing behaviour. We address this void by adjusting the Joint Product Model, extending a country’s security activities to a more inclusive ‘whole of government (WoG) approach’. We depart from this WoG model to stress the challenges associated with comparing the contributions of member states in countering these threats. This leads us to dispute the use of aggregate military expenditures as a main variable to measure a country’s degree of free riding. More and other types of (non-military) variables and proxy-indexes should be taken into account. The same remark goes for estimating the benefit-burden concordance within this framework of permanent non-linear state competition.

Key Words

NATO ; Burden Sharing ; Hybrid Threats ; State Competition

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