Media coverage of hybrid warfare and informational warfare has been very gradual. It was Qiao and Wang's ultrawar that was first discovered, after their book was translated by the CIA in 1999 and published in Panama, under the title “unrestricted warfare”. The title is a little misleading: this strategic doctrine describes not 'unrestricted' warfare, but how to wage war beyond the limits of the military domain by combining operations in other domains such as information, cyber, economics, diplomacy and psychology. This new way of waging war invades areas that were previously strictly civilian.
Conversely, Cindynics extended their field of application to include conflict, as the development of Informational Cindynics made it necessary to model the notions of conflictuality, divergence and disparity of perception. These relativized (second-order) models belong to fundamental Cindynics, and are applicable to all cindynic domains. Extended to third order (and fourth1 for L2I or perception warfare), they constitute Relativized Cindynics. From the outset, these models were conceived as an actionable response2 to Qiao and Wang's concepts, an approach that was all the more natural given that the notion of cindynic vulnerability can be seen as a conceptual hacking of the central concept of the Art of War.
These conceptualization steps were accompanied by regular monitoring of the Sahelian situation. The first weak signal detected was a dispatch3 from the xinhua agency in March 2013, which described the MNLA Tuaregs as terrorists by conflating the independence movement with Islamist terrorists, and mentioned the willingness of some actors to send the FAMA to Kidal. But in 2016, it is Russia that the GPM4 asks for help in quelling the Tuareg rebellion. Russia has realized that this issue could be manipulated: the Prigozhin nebula then conducts informational operations in the Sahel to oust French actors. For a long time, these operations would remain unnoticed, particularly by French diplomatic personnel. The media frequently mention the mercenaries of the Wagner group, but hardly ever the troll farms financed by Prigozhin : even the farm set up right inside the presidency in Bangui5 is rarely mentioned, and the disclosure of its existence raises no diplomatic reaction. When the fabrication of the fake mass grave at Gossi is discovered, the French army is initially reluctant to broadcast the aerial images proving the attempted manipulation. Eventually, however, it seems that some sound advice is heeded, and Pascal Ianni announces6 that the decision has been taken to broadcast them : the importance of Russian hybrid warfare is now taken into account. In West Africa, French officers would later acknowledge that they had been lagging behind in this domain, but would note the delays in adapting to this new threat.
While no one mentions China's ultrawar anymore, with the ousting of Barkhane, Russia's hybrid warfare is finally getting some media coverage. Today, Russian meddling in the 2024 US presidential campaign has become commonplace media fact. If Qiao and Wang's Great Art of War (大战法) is conceptually remarkable, Russian hybrid warfare is rustic and brutal, manufactures racial hatred7 , and exploits or instrumentalizes informationally vulnerable populations, whether in Africa to install military juntas or in the United States to exacerbate tensions and favor the Republican candidate.
Then, in April 2024, the Washington Post disclosed a confidential document8 , appended to an official document dating from March 2023, describing the Russian Federation's foreign policy concepts. While the official document adopts a rather classical or politically correct rhetoric, the confidential annex bluntly describes the practical objectives of Russian hybrid warfare: to weaken Russia's adversaries through offensive informational operations and coordinated actions in the politico-military, commercial and economic, informational and psychological, or axiological fields. While Qiao and Wang wouldn't have written it any other way, this appendix specifies that the concepts it presents must henceforth serve as an ideological framework for Russian foreign policy actors: Russian hybrid warfare, previously a shadow war waged by services or the Prigozhin nebula, is now promoted to the status of institutional ideological framework.