Surrogate Warfare. Andreas Krieg

       INTRODUCTION

A GLIMPSE AT THE WORLD IN 2019 REVEALS AN UNCERTAIN GEOSTRATEGIC environment: a Western Hemisphere in a deep identity crisis, new powers arising in the East challenging global leadership, statehood in decay across Africa and the Middle East, transnational actors filling the voids left by states unable or unwilling to honor social contracts, rogue regimes trying to defy their immanent decay, and millions of individuals on the move to find a better future away from home. With the United Nations (UN) increasingly incapable of enforcing international law or upholding human rights against the will of its constituent member states or transnational nonstate organizations, the world arguably looks more anarchical in the early twenty-first century than it has ever been in modern times.¹ The perceived anarchy of the post–Cold War era, therefore, seems to be more substantial and more medieval than the realist and neorealist anarchy of the early Westphalian system, the Concert of Europe, the interbellum years, or the Cold War.

The root cause of this anarchy appears to be the increasing fragility of statehood, which renders the international system more uncertain and unpredictable than it might have been in the conceptualizations of Niccolò Machiavelli or Thomas Hobbes. Challenged domestically and externally by organizations operating globally and transnationally, legally and illegally, and often beyond statist regulation, the state as the predominant unit of analysis in international relations is under pressure.² Nonetheless, communities, although willing to partially substitute or supplement traditional state functions with transnational, sometimes global assemblages, tend to still hold on to the state as the primary, even if primus inter pares, provider of communal security.³ The legitimacy of the state and its institutions is still connected to its ability to bring coercive power to bear in an effort to provide security inclusively to the communities under its auspices. As such, the state still stands out as the patron entrusted with the mitigation of threat and even more so with the minimization and management of risk. To this end, the state is supposed to raise the coercive means to tackle both tangible threats and fabricated risks.

Working with military organizations and defense planners in Europe, the United States, and the Middle East for many years, we have come to appreciate the mammoth task of trying to predict the future by interpreting the past amid a context of perfect uncertainty. Blending subjective securitization with objective analysis—that is, the “known unknowns” with the “known knowns”—defense planning becomes an institutionalized attempt to prepare for potential risks in the future. Therefore, mitigating the likelihood and impact of the unknown unknown has become more prevalent since the end of the bipolar reality in the early 1990s. In the words of Ulrich Beck, we are living in “risk societies,”⁴ for which defense is no longer limited to building adequate coercive means to withstand military threats but becomes an exercise of managing a range of risks of which the political risks of inaction today and irreversible harm tomorrow are often assumed to be higher than those of overreaction. For the state to maintain its standing as the primary communal protector, it has to explore innovative avenues to achieve more perceived security with fewer resources and at a lower cost of blood—possibly without any kinetic effect whatsoever. Yet rather than concentrating on soft-power alone, the state confronted with the ever-increasing risks and uncertainties of transnational conflict has to have a hard-power lever that can coerce those irresponsive to soft-power.

This coercive lever of power that states used to monopolize has been subject to a fundamental evolution. Warfare is no longer just limited to the use of armed force but has expanded throughout the late twentieth century to include alternative means of violence that generate destructive and disruptive force to achieve a strategic effect without relying on physical violence. Carl von Clausewitz’s assertion that warfare was the “act of violence intended to compel the enemy to do our will” might still hold true if violence equals not only physical force but any disruptive or destructive force with a strategic effect.⁵ In the era of “soft war,” wherein warfare moves beyond kinetics into the cyber and media domains, coercion remains at the heart of any definition of war.⁶ Therefore, although we extensively look at warfare as a form of organized violence, we do include alternative means of cyber and media war that fall short of conventional forms of physical violence. Nonetheless, these alternative levers of coercive power can extensively disrupt and destroy the authority and legitimacy of state and nonstate actors, a primary objective of an aggressor committed to traditional warfare.

Therefore, coercion might be under more scrutiny domestically, globally, and locally than in the past. The use of violence—low-intensity as well as high-intensity, physical as well as nonphysical—does not occur in a vacuum but is subject to an omnipresent media attention that shapes the narratives on the legitimacy, morality, and success of the application of violence. The management of print, broadcast, and social media has become a strategically vital extension of the war effort because it is where perceptions of right and wrong or victory and defeat are consolidated.⁷ While publics at home primarily demand wars to be efficient in terms of investing both treasure and blood, the global public is primarily concerned with ethical and moral legitimacy. Local populations affected by war want to minimize the collateral externalities put up them by domestic and external belligerents. All of the above present the state with a new security dilemma: having to engage in transnational conflicts overseas against intangible threats while presenting this effort as cheap, effective, and legitimate.

      In the Pentagon and in Whitehall, standoff warfare has become the standard answer to squaring the circle of postmodern warfare. It is a return to the ancient tradition of warfare by surrogate—namely, the delegation and substitution of the burden of warfare, partially or wholly, to a deputy. In an effort to minimize the exposure of one’s own troops to the operational risks of war and thereby minimize the political risks for policymakers, states increasingly share and delegate these risks with proxies, auxiliaries, and technological platforms. What emerges are interwoven networks of protectors and protégés, of patrons and proxies, and of sponsors and beneficiaries. Players in this complex transnational web of conflict neither necessarily follow the old Sanskrit proverb of “my enemy’s enemy is my friend” nor its realist derivate of “my enemy’s enemy remains my enemy.” Instead, as warfare departs from being exclusively reduced to organized violence, surrogate warfare becomes another tool to achieve foreign and security policy objectives, sometimes in cooperation or reliance on unlikely partners. Therefore, the partnering with surrogates on the strategic, operational, or tactical levels might not always be a part of a major combat operation. Quite the contrary, it allows states to engage in protracted conflicts and simmering low-intensity wars that may be geographically dispersed and far removed from the direct vicinity of their borders.

      This book engages with the concept of surrogate warfare both historically and conceptually in consideration of the imminent sociopolitical transformations of the late twentieth and early twenty-first centuries. Thereby, we do not intend to narrow the book’s focus on particular case studies of “barbarian” force multipliers in antiquity, the medieval mercenaries, or the reliance of colonial powers on indigenous forces—let alone limit the concept to the proxy wars of the Cold War era. In essence, this book looks at the strategy of externalizing the burden of warfare and the consequences it involves on the conduct of war, be they political, strategic, operational,