Defence and strategy

Towards Developing a Multidimensional Concept of Armed Forces’ Resilience Towards Hybrid Interference

Vendula DIVIŠOVÁ, Libor FRANK, Jan HANZELKA, Antonín NOVOTNÝ, Jan BŘEŇ

In this paper, we contribute to the recent debate on resilience by exploring a specific issue of the armed forces’ resilience towards hybrid interference. While hard (or technical) resilience of some hybrid campaign elements such as cyber-attacks has been addressed in the literature, the soft dimension of resilience is seriously underdeveloped. For that purpose, we elaborate on the concept of soft resilience and describe its psychological, institutional, social, and national dimensions. This theoretical discussion enabled us to develop an understanding of resilience in the military as the capacity of the military to fulfil its core mission enabled by physical and moral components of the fighting power and to continually transform and adapt in face of external hostile influence targeting perception and decision-making of the armed forces members and leadership.