"Russia's hybrid attacks against NATO look like war", writes Deborah Haynes for Sky News. She is referring to grey-zone warfare, attacks that sit under the threshold of conventional war and include sabotage, cyber hacks, and assassination plots. Significantly, this is not the first caution published in the recent media of Russia's employment of this type of warfare and the risks of a failed NATO response.
As Edward Lucas warns in The Times, Russia's war in the grey zone is actually chipping away at the heart of NATO.
When I read these warnings, my gendered military experiences are at the forefront of my mind. I am a female, current serving RAF Reservist and former RAF Regular. I am also a PhD student, with my research centres around gender and RAF organisational culture.
Whilst connecting diversity, inclusion and sub-threshold warfare may seem a stretch to some and arguably to others, a further distraction from the more immediate threat of war, I am well aware that the impact of grey-zone warfare has far reaching consequences.
Grey-zone warfare conducted in 'peacetime' using information, money, or even physical force is powerful. Not only does it have a physical impact on UK and NATO defence through the seemingly endless impact of drones, hired thugs, and now "seabed sabotage" damaging infrastructure, energy, computer networks or transport systems; but most significantly, the cohesive nature in which we fight together, reducing the ability to defend against threats.
By "posing dilemmas and stoking divisions" the MoD is being pulled in ways which undermine the foundations of the organisations purpose.
The real target, as Edward Lucas writes, is decision making. The act of distracting and undermining decision making equates to sub-threshold warfare, reducing the ability to effectively operate. So where does gender and diversity link in?
In the real world?
In November 2024, the HMNZS Manawanui, a New Zealand Naval ship, crashed and subsequently sank under the command of Yvonne Gray, whose Naval career notably spanned over 30-years in both the New Zealand and Royal Navy. Despite this, her gender and sexuality were directly attributed to the incident. As a "diversity hire", she has faced a barrage of hostile and toxic abuse in the street.
Quoted directly in The Times, John Mclean, author of A Mission of Honour: The Royal Navy in The Pacific, clearly outlines the problem. "The Navy is over-promoting women beyond their capacity in order to meet gender and sexual orientation goals". In New Zealand, other women in uniform received similar abuse in the wake of the incident.
March this year saw one of the worst weeks for aviation history in the US, as a commercial jet and military helicopter collided in Washington DC. In immediate response, President Trump blamed D&I initiatives and so called 'diversity hires' as the reason for the accidents and a Transgender pilot was wrongly blamed and vilified for the crash.
When only 2 days later a small medical transport plane crashed in Philadelphia, it was unsurprising that the mourning family of one of the pilots refuses to release their name, out of concerns for gendered attacks and abuse.
Pervasive and closer to home, these type of gendered attacks are gaining momentum and increasing in prevalence. When a group of Palestine Action protestors recently broke into RAF Brize Norton and vandalise a Voyager aircraft, the Station Commander of RAF Brize Norton, a female Group Captain, was outwardly mocked as a 'woke wing commander' and forced to deactivate her social media due to gendered trolling attacks.
The attacks against her cite her gender as the reason for her position, and it is because of this that the airfield security failed.
In a paradoxical twist, the effort to resolve such issues of gendered discrimination is far reaching in its risk of being a mere rhetoric of inclusion. Within the same week of the sinking of the HMNZA Manawanui, Kevin Maher states in The Times, "I couldn't interview ...