Hybrid warfare refers to military strategies that blend conventional warfare with practices such as insurgency, terrorism, cyberattacks, and disinformation campaigns. This has blurred the lines between wartime and peace in an unprecedented way. As a consequence, decision-makers in both the police force and the military are required to cooperate and accommodate each other’s differences. This makes it difficult for police and military commanders to identify the strategic context in which they are operating. Many experts are now asking the question: Are existing security concepts compatible with the challenges of today’s hybrid warfare? Read More
Jostein Mattingsdal at the University of Bergen explains that recent security crises have revealed flaws in crisis management, because the importance of interagency collaboration is typically underestimated. However, there is a remarkable lack of research into police-military sector differences in national security crises.
To counter this, Mattingsdal and his team have conducted research to explore military and police commanders’ decision-making in the context of hybrid warfare. In their study, 102 commanders from military and police backgrounds were included in a simulation involving hybrid attacks on Norway. They used a simulated national headquarters, where Norway was transformed from peacetime into war and then back to peace.
The researchers aimed to assess how sharing responsibility to counter attacks impacts decision-making. They also wanted to evaluate whether changing threats that traverse sectoral boundaries impact the decision-making of police and military commanders.
Firstly, they found that police and military commanders generally favoured their own forces. However, during wartime, police commanders were less likely to prefer their own forces over military forces.
During wartime, commanders showed a greater preference for using interagency solutions. Military commanders particularly favoured interagency solutions, whereas police commanders preferred interagency forces only when the alternative was using police forces alone.
Next, the research team found that, during the post-conflict phase, police and military commanders had differing views. While police commanders’ preferences for interagency forces in the post-conflict phase were similar to peacetime, military commanders seemed to prefer interagency solutions more in the post-conflict phase.
Mattingsdal and his colleagues hypothesise that police commanders perceived post-conflict and peacetime in the same way, while military commanders believed that post-conflict required a more flexible approach.
Finally, the study found that experienced police commanders consistently favoured interagency solutions more than their less experienced counterparts. For military commanders, however, this effect was only seen during peacetime.
Throughout the study, commanders’ actions seemed to be greatly influenced by their past experiences. Given this, it is key that future studies use psychological theories and quantitative methods to explore this further. The team’s findings offer new insights that are key to improving interagency cooperation in major security crises.
