There is a particular danger in the phrase "new normal." It sounds like acceptance dressed up as realism. When European Commission President Ursula von der Leyen used it to describe Russian drone incursions across the continent, she was not being alarmist; she was being precise. But precision about a slow-motion crisis is exactly how societies talk themselves into tolerating what they should never accept.

NATO Secretary General Mark Rutte's response, that the Alliance must build "necessary capabilities" to counter such threats, was the correct instinct. But it also revealed something uncomfortable: the West is still reacting to a doctrine it has understood in theory for over a decade, without having built the muscle memory to respond to it in practice.

The Doctrine Nobody Wanted to Believe

In 2013, Russian General Valery Gerasimov published what would later be called the Gerasimov Doctrine, articulating a theory of "new generation warfare" that prioritized psychological and political effects over traditional military ones. The idea was not new so much as newly systematized: use non-military pressure, information operations, deniable sabotage, and economic coercion in phases, so that if armed conflict ever becomes necessary, it is cheaper and shorter because the adversary has already been softened, confused, and divided.

Western military theorists had their own parallel term. Frank Hoffman coined "hybrid warfare" in 2007 to describe adversaries who blend conventional operations, irregular tactics, cyberwarfare, and influence campaigns simultaneously, precisely so that no single act rises to the threshold that would justify a unified, attributable response. That is the entire point of the strategy: not to win a battle, but to make sure no battle is ever officially declared. Drones that may or may not be Russian, that may or may not be armed, that violate airspace without quite triggering Article 5, are not a glitch in this system. They are the system working exactly as designed.

A Balloon Over South Carolina, A Drone Over Poland

Europe is not the first Western power to face this particular species of ambiguity. In early 2023, a Chinese high-altitude balloon drifted across Alaska, western Canada, and the continental United States before being shot down off Myrtle Beach on February 4. American officials eventually concluded it carried intelligence equipment, the equivalent of "two railroad cars" of surveillance gear, yet also determined it likely had not successfully transmitted data and may have blown off course rather than following a deliberate flight plan.

The balloon incident is instructive precisely because of its ambiguity. Was it espionage, an accident, or a test of American reaction time? Washington never fully resolved the question, and that unresolved quality was itself useful to Beijing. A society that cannot agree on whether it has been attacked will struggle to agree on how to respond. Europe's drone incursions carry the same built-in confusion. Was a given drone Russian military hardware, a rogue civilian device, or something adjacent designed to look deniable either way? The uncertainty is not a side effect. It is the weapon.

What History Teaches About Slow Aggression

Skeptics might argue that hybrid warfare is an overwrought concept, vague enough to explain almost anything, and serious scholars have criticized it on exactly those grounds. But dismissing the framework because its edges are blurry ignores how often history has rewarded precisely this kind of incremental probing.

Consider Nikita Khrushchev's approach to Berlin in the late 1950s. Rather than launching a direct confrontation over the divided city, the Soviet leader spent years testing Western resolve through ultimatums, threats to sign a separate treaty with East Germany, and calculated brinkmanship, only backing down when the Americans made clear they would not yield West Berlin by force. When he pushed again in 1961, the result was not tanks rolling into West Berlin but a wall, an act of hybrid coercion that reshaped the city's reality without a shot fired at NATO forces. The Soviets understood that ambiguous, deniable, below-threshold pressure could achieve what open invasion could not risk.

Moscow's own domestic history offers a darker parallel about the costs of underestimating irregular threats. The Beslan school siege of September 2004, in which Chechen militants took more than 1,100 hostages, ended in catastrophe partly because Russian security forces were unprepared for the specific, asymmetric nature of the crisis they faced, resulting in over 300 deaths despite overwhelming conventional force. The lesson generalizes uncomfortably well: superior conventional military strength does not automatically translate into competence against irregular, ambiguous threats. Europe's air forces are, on paper, vastly superior to whatever is sending drones across Polish and Baltic skies. That superiority is irrelevant if the doctrine, the political will, and the legal thresholds for response have not been updated to match the actual shape of the threat.

The Danger of Calling It Normal

There is also a historical warning embedded in the very act of normalization. During the Cold War, the Soviet Union tolerated significant policy variation among satellite states; Yugoslavia, Albania, and Romania all pursued distinct paths, provided Communist Party dominance itself was never threatened. Moscow learned that flexibility on secondary matters bought compliance on the one thing that mattered. Applied to today's hybrid campaigns, the parallel is unsettling: if Europe tacitly accepts drone incursions as an unfortunate but tolerable irritant, so long as no missile actually lands on a NATO capital, it is granting exactly the kind of strategic patience that authoritarian pressure campaigns are designed to exploit. Von der Leyen's "new normal" framing is honest, but honesty about a slide toward acceptance is not the same as resistance to it.

There is a more hopeful historical thread worth pulling as well. Vietnam, devastated after reunification in 1976 and further strained by a costly 1978 invasion of Cambodia and a stagnant command economy, eventually chose a different path. In 1986 the Communist Party introduced doi moi, market reforms that opened the country economically even while it preserved one-party rule, and by 1995 Vietnam had normalized relations with its former adversary, the United States. The lesson is not that adversaries always soften. It is that strategic patience and adaptive policy, sustained over years rather than news cycles, can outlast even entrenched hostility. Europe's response to hybrid warfare will require exactly that kind of patience: not a single dramatic countermeasure, but a sustained, boring, well-funded institutional adaptation.

Lessons From the Trenches

Perhaps the most useful historical analogy is also the least flattering to military establishments: the debate over British General Douglas Haig in the First World War. For decades Haig was remembered through the bitter phrase "lions led by donkeys," a symbol of commanders who threw men against machine guns without adapting tactics to new technology. Yet historian Gary Sheffield has argued that this verdict is too simple; Haig's forces, by 1918, had transformed into a genuinely modern army, coordinating tanks, small infantry units, and aerial observation in ways that proved decisive. The transformation took four brutal years of learning.

NATO does not have four years to figure out drones. But the Haig story is a reminder that militaries which survive new forms of warfare are the ones willing to admit, quickly and without institutional vanity, that old doctrines no longer fit new technology. The frontal assault mentality, waiting for an unambiguous, attributable attack before responding, is the 2020s equivalent of marching in formation into machine-gun fire. It is technically brave and strategically obsolete.

What Actually Needs to Change

Rutte's call for new capabilities is right, but capabilities are the easy part; money buys radar, interceptors, and counter-drone systems. The harder part is doctrinal and legal: NATO and the EU need pre-agreed, rapid attribution frameworks and response thresholds that do not require proving a drone's provenance beyond all doubt before a proportionate response is authorized. Ambiguity is the entire Gerasimov playbook; the antidote is removing the payoff for ambiguity, not waiting to resolve it.

Europe should also resist the linguistic drift embedded in "new normal." Normalizing an adversary's incremental aggression is itself a strategic choice, and it is usually the wrong one. The Cold War was won not by treating Berlin ultimatums or Cuban missiles as tolerable background noise, but by drawing clear, if quiet, lines and holding them. Drones over Poland and the Baltic states deserve the same clarity, not resigned acknowledgment that this is simply how things are now.