Upstream operations: resilience to malign intent – ‘Analogical reasoning’ for new options to detect and engage

Description

Ukraine’s territorial sovereignty was subverted and borders likely irrevocably re-written by Russia’s invasion and annexation of Crimea in 2014. Against this unhappy backdrop, and with activities ongoing in other areas of Ukraine as well as the global rise of the ‘self-affiliating franchise’ model of terrorist group expansion – the hope for early and effective upstream interventions by liberal democracies to avoid costly future downstream commitments has seemingly become a good deal more difficult. This paper seeks to present some concepts that might help shape practical strategies and tactics for upstream operations – by looking at analogies of, for example combating or making more difficult the ‘quiet’ invasions exploiting benign start conditions such as were present in Crimea (cf. Racz 2015). I will sketch some early ideas on making environments less benign for such hybrid or ‘full spectrum conflict’ warfare (Jonsson & Seeley 2015).

Period	9 Dec 2015
Event title	Upstream Effects: Capacity Building, Stabilisation and Counter-Terrorism (Land Intelligence Fusion Centre, British Army and Oxford University)
Event type	Conference