Tactical mobile ad hoc network (MANET) is a collection of mobile nodes forming a temporary network,without the aid of pre-established network infrastructure. The routing protocol has a crucial impact on the networkperformance in battlefields. Link reliability based hybrid routing (LRHR) is proposed, which is a novel hybrid routing protocol, for tactical MANET. Contrary to the traditional single path routing strategy, multiple paths are established between a pair of source-destination nodes. In the hybrid routing strategy, the rate of topological change provides a natural mechanism for switching dynamically between table-driven and on-demand routing. The simulation results indicate that the performances of the protocol in packet delivery ratio, routing overhead, and average end-to-end delay are better than the conventional routing protocol.