Surrogate Warfare. Andreas Krieg

to deputies but also to externalize the entire burden of warfare to proxies that would operate with limited strategic control and oversight. Thus, apart from operations—that is, the preparation and conduct of military action—in cases of indirect surrogacy, the strategic planning of war is also being outsourced to a surrogate who might receive aid, training, and equipment but does not necessarily remain receptive to patron control. Here loyalty is often a product of the ancient Sanskrit principle of “My enemy’s enemy is my friend.” That is to say, as long as both patron and surrogate have overlapping strategic interests, cooperation can be mutually beneficial. Nonetheless, because of the lack of direct proximity between sponsor and substitute and the lack of direct control over surrogate strategy and operations, indirect surrogacy is often a temporary phenomenon. During the Cold War, most of the proxy wars were fought using indirect surrogates—forces whose primary strategic objectives may have been similar to those of the patron while the ways to achieve them were often different. As interests and motivations evolved, the strategic consensus between patron and surrogate often evolved as well, undermining the sustainability of the relationship. The few exceptions might have been the superpowers’ state proxies outside the military alliances of the Warsaw Pact and North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO). These state proxies, such as Cuba, itself a proxy of the Soviet Union / Russia, and Israel, the US proxy in the Middle East, and even North Korea, the Chinese proxy on the Korean Peninsula, have remained state proxies for the patrons for decades.

Indirect surrogates tend to be parties to a conflict before the patron gets involved.⁴¹ The patron merely exploits an already existing movement or state that holds stakes in a conflict. The surrogate is thus not a creation of the patron. Surrogate warfare in the twentieth century provides a whole host of examples, even outside the bipolar struggle for ideological supremacy. When the United States intervened in Iran in 1953 to restore the power of Shah Mohammad Reza during Operation Ajax, America could already rely on a surrogate on the ground: Iranian royalists in the military who were exploited by and supported with millions of dollars from the CIA.⁴² In the North Yemen Civil War starting in 1962, Saudi Arabia, interested in maintaining control of the small country south of its border, supported the royalists who were already fighting against the Arab nationalist revolution incited by Egypt. Despite their mostly Zaidi Shia religious background, the royalists were guaranteed money from the Wahhabi Kingdom of Saudi Arabia, which was eager not to lose its feudal state Yemen to the Nasserist seculars from Egypt.⁴³ Saudi Arabia’s support for the mujahedeen in Afghanistan more than a decade later followed a similar pattern. Perceiving itself as the defender of Sunni Islam, Saudi Arabia wanted to repel the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan, seen as an ideological crusade by secular communists encroaching on an Islamic country. Without a noteworthy military of its own, Saudi used its petrodollars to support an already existing resistance movement, the mujahedeen, against Soviet aggression.⁴⁴ Another example of indirect surrogate warfare outside of East-West divide was Iran’s support for the Iraqi Dawa Party during the Iran-Iraq War of the 1980s. The party had been founded in the 1950s as a Shia Islamist movement and maintained extensive networks in Saddam Hussein’s Iraq—networks that Iran exploited to carry out bombings against Iraqi regime targets both inside and outside the country.⁴⁵

In the Global War on Terror, the United States has relied on a range of indirect, strategic surrogates, such as Pakistani, Yemeni, and Somali government forces trained and equipped by the US, to crack down on terrorist organizations.⁴⁶ The CIA also used an estimated fifty prisons in twenty-eight countries, mostly in the Middle East and Eastern Europe, as “black sites” to illegally detain prisoners.⁴⁷ In the war in Syria, the US has trained and equipped rebel forces fighting both the Assad regime and ISIS. In general, the war in Syria has witnessed the development of a variety of different, complex, indirect patron-surrogate relationships. The US has relied on the Gulf Cooperation Council (GCC) to deliver military aid to the opposition before providing more open support to the Free Syrian Army. Saudi Arabia and Qatar have had their own indirect surrogate partnerships on the ground—the latter supporting Wahhabi organizations such as Jaish al-Islam,⁴⁸ with the former supporting organizations close to the Muslim Brotherhood in Syria.⁴⁹ Even nonstate actors such as al-Qaeda got involved in Syria through Jabhat al-Nusra, a direct strategic surrogate at first that increasingly developed into an indirect surrogate, planning and executing operations without effective control from the core of al-Qaeda. By 2016, Jabhat al-Nusra had severed its ties with the terrorist organization, rebranding itself Jabhat Fateh al-Sham and later Hayat Tahrir al-Sham in January 2017.⁵⁰ In Africa, surrogate wars have also been on the rise as state sponsors employ existing liberation and rebel movements operating within an opponent’s territory. Uganda’s support for the Mouvement de Libération du Congo (MLC) and Rwanda’s backing of the Rassemblement Congolais pour la Démocratie (RCD) during the Second Congo War in 1998 resulted in a proxy war in Central Africa between two indigenous Congolese movements that were supported by state sponsors across the border.⁵¹

At this point it is important to point out that the proximity between patron and surrogate is a dynamic one, allowing indirect surrogates to develop into direct ones and vice versa. The most obvious example for the intrinsic dynamic of surrogate warfare is the US intervention in South Vietnam, which escalated from an indirect strategic support for the South Vietnamese military under President John F. Kennedy in 1963 to a large-scale US military intervention supported by South Vietnamese operational surrogates in 1965 under President Lyndon B. Johnson.⁵² The same was true in 2014 when the US had to realize that it could not win the war against ISIS by merely relying on the forces loyal to Iraq’s Maliki regime as indirect strategic surrogates. Since November 2014, consecutive US administrations had to repeatedly augment troop levels in Iraq to help the Iraqi security sector cope with the jihadist onslaught. The direct coordination of anti-ISIS operations between Washington and Baghdad meant that the Iraqi security forces developed into a more direct US surrogate.⁵³ The direct nature of this relationship became obvious during the battles to retake Fallujah, Ramadi, and Mosul from ISIS, where US SOF forces not only trained Iraqi forces but embedded with them to advise on matters of operational planning, synergy, and the delivery of close air support (CAS).⁵⁴

Finally, surrogacy can also be entirely coincidental—that is, lacking any direct lines of communication between patron and surrogate. Although rare, in the post–Cold War era in which strategic and operational environments become increasingly complex, burden sharing between unlikely partners amounts to the most indirect form of surrogacy. In the Syrian Civil War, Hezbollah coincidentally advances the interests of its archenemy Israel by guaranteeing the survival of the Assad regime against Salafi jihadists, who for Israel are arguably the worse of two evils. In the war on ISIS, the United States could rely on the strategic overlap of interests with Iran and Russia—two powers that in the international arena have been Washington’s most passionate antagonists in recent years. Despite the absence of direct correspondence or coordination, the US Air Force indirectly provided air cover for Iranian ground troops in Iraq in 2014 and Russian ground troops in Syria in 2016.⁵⁵ Iran and Russia thereby functioned as US force multipliers, providing ground components to a US airpower-only campaign. While this form of coincidental externalization of the burden of warfare is mutually beneficial, it does not guarantee any control of one party over the other. Although the US and Russia actively try to deconflict their airpower operations over Syria, both operate autonomously, without any leverage over or accountability to each other as the multiple failed attempts of establishing a cease-fire in Aleppo in 2016 demonstrated. The lines between patron and surrogate become blurry as both parties to the conflict benefit from the commitment and input of the other.

       Conclusion

As this chapter demonstrates, the use of surrogates in their various forms is hardly a new phenomenon of the twenty-first century. In fact, surrogate warfare is as old as the mercenary profession—arguably the oldest profession in the world. Men specializing in a niche capability of warfare might well be the earliest division of labor in the first civilizations of mankind. As Peter W. Singer writes, “The constant of conflict in human society meant that specialists in it could gain their livelihoods by marketing their relative efficiency in the use of force. They could do so locally