Defending Europe Against Hybrid Warfare

The central argument — that resilience alone is insufficient and that an effective deterrence scheme is needed — marks an important shift in the European hybrid threat debate. For the past decade, “resilience” has functioned as the dominant policy response, partly because it avoids the attribution and escalation questions that deterrence raises. This joint Hybrid CoE / JRC report argues that position is no longer tenable: hybrid threats have escalated to the point where passive resilience without active deterrence leaves a structural vulnerability that adversaries can continue to exploit at acceptable cost.

The Resilience-Deterrence (RD) framework proposed here combines proactive, active, and reactive approaches across both strategic and operational levels. Whether European institutions have the political cohesion and institutional capacity to implement a deterrence posture for hybrid threats is a question the report appropriately leaves to political actors. But it provides the analytical scaffolding for that conversation, and the joint Hybrid CoE / JRC authorship signals that this is intended as a foundational document for EU-level policy development rather than a purely academic exercise.