Surrogate Warfare. Andreas Krieg
ubiquitous type in the entire social and political history or organized warfare.”56 The Cretan slingers, the Syracusan hoplites, and the Thessalian cavalry used by the Persians in their civil war in the fourth century BC are as much a testimony to this tradition as Alexander the Great’s use of the Phoenicians for his navy a century later or Rome’s use of Balearic slingers and German tribesmen as auxiliaries in the conquests en route to building an empire. The concept of the state’s monopolization of the means and the execution of violence is just as historically anomalistic as the modern idea of the sovereignty and territoriality of the nation state. Up until the 1700s, 25 percent to 60 percent of all land armies in Europe were composed of foreign auxiliaries.57 Hence, from today’s point of view, the externalization of the operational burden of warfare to auxiliaries is an anachronism—a return to an era when the sociopolitical underpinnings of warfare were fundamentally different from those espoused by classical thinkers such as Carl von Clausewitz, Helmuth von Moltke (the elder), and Basil Liddell Hart. That being said, even in the classic post-eighteenth-century world the use of auxiliaries had not completely ceased. Even in the era of people’s wars and vibrant nationalism, force multiplication through surrogates was common. Examples range from auxiliaries in the British navy over local surrogates for the protection of colonial interests to the French Foreign Legion.
The externalization of strategic burdens of warfare to substitutes is just as common in the history of warfare. The famous proverb of “my enemy’s enemy is my friend” derives from the Arthashastra, a Sanskrit treatise on statecraft from the fourth century BC, which reads, “The king who is situated anywhere immediately on the circumference of the conqueror’s territory is termed the enemy. The king who is likewise situated close to the enemy, but separated from the conqueror only by the enemy, is termed the friend (of the conqueror).”58 The Arthashastra thereby inspired a maxim for the cooperation with or employment of forces that are coincidentally or deliberately supporting one’s own cause, in an effort to minimize one’s own costs. Niccolò Machiavelli advises in his sixteenth-century magnum opus The Prince that a strong ruler is “supporting the less powerful without increasing their strength, undercutting the strong.”59 He writes further that “once the populace has taken up arms, there will always be a foreign power eager to come to its aid.”60 Accordingly, there is a realization that the externalization of the burden of warfare to local surrogates is an effective means to undermine the strength of the enemy without directly engaging in war: a classic case of surrogate warfare. The risks of a Volksbewaffnung, or “people in arms,” is something that Clausewitz outlines in chapter 26 of book six of On War. Leading a war through local surrogates rising up against an established order could be an effective means for the enemy to undermine the integrity of a state—thereby picking up on Machiavelli’s latter point.61 Sun Tzu’s maxim of “he will win who knows how to handle both superior and inferior forces” is considered as a “valuable insight to understanding surrogate warfare” and the role in it of SOF.62 Hence, the externalization of the burden of warfare has been common practice throughout military history—even if the pretext and the context has changed.
It is the context of globalized, privatized, securitized, and mediatized war in the twenty-first century that adds another layer to the millennia-old practice of externalizing the burden of war.63 In an effort to understand surrogate warfare as a postmodern sociopolitical phenomenon, the next chapter defines the context of neotrinitarian war in contrast to the traditional trinitarian context of warfare prevalent in modern literature.
Notes
1.Healy, Qadesh 1300 BC, 27.
2.See Schulman, N‘rn at the Battle of Kadesh.
3.Milliard, “Overcoming Post-Colonial Myopia,” 2.
4.Lace, Sir Francis Drake, 51.
5.Coote, Drake, 157.
6.Sugden, Sir Francis Drake, 128.
7.Andrews, “Aims of Drake’s Expedition,” 739.
8.Joby Warrick, “Iran’s Natanz Nuclear Facility Recovered Quickly from Stuxnet Cyberattack,” Washington Post, February 16, 2011.
9.Albright, Brannan, and Walrond, “Did Stuxnet Take Out?”
10.Zetter, Countdown to Zero Day, 9.
11.Langer, “Stuxnet,” 49.
12.Ellen Nakashima and Joby Warrick, “Stuxnet Was Work of U.S. and Israeli Experts, Officials Say,” Washington Post, June 2, 2012.
13.Thucydides, History of the Peloponnesian War, 169–75.
14.Ball, Rome in the East, 35.
15.Bowersook, Throne of Adulis, 107.
16.Singer, Corporate Warriors, 25.
17.Fuhrer and Eyer, Schweizer in Fremden Diensten.
18.Kiernan, “Foreign Mercenaries and Absolute Monarchy.”
19.Ferris, “Small Wars and Great Games,” 201.
20.Sinnreich, “Accursed Spanish War,” 135.
21.Boot, Invisible Armies, 274.
22.Mumford, Proxy Warfare, 12.
23.Sharpe, US Foreign Assistance.
24.Byman, Deadly Connections, 5.
25.Bell, Secret Army, 556–57.
26.Mannes, Profiles in Terror, 315.
27.Lwin and Lwin, “Future of Land Power,” 82–83.
28.Gray, Cyborg Citizen, 57.
29.Stone, “Cyber War Will Take Place!,” 106.