Surrogate Warfare. Andreas Krieg

in this book we attempt to produce a more holistic picture of how surrogacy, although a constant in human history, has been rediscovered in its full complexity in the twenty-first century to allow states to cope with a globalized, privatized, securitized, and mediatized context of warfare.²⁴ In so doing, the concept constitutes a departure particularly from the traditional conceptualizations of warfare that have dominated the literature since the nineteenth century. In this book, warfare by surrogate will not just be examined on a historical continuum in reference to the narrowly framed modern concept of trinitarian war but also as a sociopolitical phenomenon in a globalized world. As Clausewitz famously noted in his magnum opus, On War, “Very few of the new manifestations in war can be ascribed to new inventions or new departures in ideas. They result mainly from the transformation of society and new social conditions.”²⁵ It is the reconstitution of sociopolitical complexes amid the era of globalization, exponential technological progress, and transnationalization that appears to redefine how communities interact with their political authority and ultimately how community and political authority approach organized violence. En route to what we define as “neotrinitarian war” in this book, the trinitarian state of the Westphalian era seems to have discovered the externalization of the burden of warfare as a means to survive as a primus inter pares, to remain the primary provider of communal security interests. Within a growing oligarchy over violence, both in terms of authority over and means of violence, the use of surrogates—human and technological; directly, indirectly, or coincidentally—provides the state with means to continue politics by coercive means.

       The Argument

      In this book we are going to present surrogate warfare as a sociopolitical phenomenon rather than just another mode of war. While throughout history surrogate warfare has been driven by shortages of capacity and capability or the need for deniability in the international arena, twenty-first-century surrogate warfare is primarily motivated by the state’s need to conduct warfare within the context of globalized, privatized, securitized, and mediatized war. The state is faced with intangible threats that are subjectively manufactured by policymakers vis-à-vis near absolute uncertainty, taking into consideration risks that emanate from an increased number of state and nonstate actors operating across a transnational, multilayered, network-centric battlespace. Even small states with limited or no expeditionary capability or ambitions have to secure themselves and their communities against subtle risks that, even when originating domestically, are empowered by networks outside its borders. In essence, then, the trinity of society, state, and soldier (or of community, patron, and coercive capability) is no longer an exclusive, self-contained association. As communities develop more transnational links, sometimes to alternative patrons overseas, and security sectors are called on to conduct operations that are not exclusively concerned with communities at home, the traditional trinitarian bond that Clausewitz described in reference to the nation, the nation-state, and the national army is in a process of redefinition.

Instead of merely defining these new assemblages as nontrinitarian, it seems more appropriate to call them neotrinitarian because of the fact that the alternative security assemblages that develop outside the state display the same trinitarian aspects of a community, a communal authority, and a coercive apparatus under arms. These neotrinitarian assemblages can operate both in cooperation and in competition with the institutions of the state—that is, they can either help the state fulfill its trinitarian duty to protect or undermine it.²⁶ Thus, faced with these new assemblages that engage in organized violence, the state is looking for means to engage them either constructively or coercively in an effort to remain relevant. Here the partnership between the authority of the state with a surrogate can help the state to provide security for itself and its communities by minimizing the risks of inaction and excessive costs in terms of blood and treasure. These dynamics affect liberal superpowers in the same way as authoritarian regional powers or small states.

The United States, for example, has expanded its portfolio of surrogate warfare in the past two decades from remote airpower platforms to an increased reliance on force partnering on the strategic and operational levels. Thus, President Barack Obama’s doctrine of “leading from behind” encapsulated the growing reliance on surrogates, embodied here by traditional and unconventional US allies fighting to enforce or defend peripheral US interests. Even President Trump’s policy is characterized by US disengagement of American troops in favor of an increase of burden sharing of the United States’ traditional allies as well as different surrogates on the ground. In circumstances similar to those of other Western powers, the political risks of both inaction and unforeseen consequences, as well as of overreaction through major combat operations, have driven US policymakers to rely on surrogates to minimize the costs of wars in conflicts that in the eyes of the public must not be ignored but do not allow for an escalation of US commitment beyond a certain threshold. The US government is called on to provide increased levels of security against intangible threats that do not provide the urgency for the American public to sacrifice blood and treasure.²⁷ Hence, as the case of the war on the Islamic State in Iraq and Syria (ISIS) in Syria and Iraq demonstrates, the US government is asked to contain risks in these localities that could potentially develop into direct threats to the United States but are not perceived as such by the public. In an effort to stabilize these conflicts against locally based transnational actors, thereby arguably providing positive externalities primarily to local communities rather than to the American people, the US cannot expose its own military personnel to high operational risks or invest too many resources on a major combat operation—particularly not when the US has to simultaneously contain the risks to European security in Ukraine or the risks of major escalation on the Korean Peninsula. Consequently, airpower and local rebel groups provide the US with the hard-power lever they require to keep involved in these simmering conflicts.²⁸ The punitive air strikes in response to the Bashar al-Assad regime’s use of chemical weapons in Syria by a coalition of the United States, the United Kingdom, and France in April 2018 are a case in point. After having continuously drawn lines in the sand, new governments in Washington and Paris drove a more assertive agenda whereby inaction in the face of chemical weapons use could no longer stand without losing any remaining lever of deterrence for the future. At the same time, the West could not afford getting drawn into a complex civil war that was arguably already dominated by Russia, Iran, and Turkey. Most importantly, the West could not bear the political costs of military personnel being exposed to the operational risks of sophisticated air-defense systems. The solution: The operation to uphold the international norm prohibiting the use of chemical weapons was solely conducted by standoff weapons fired a safe distance from the target areas.²⁹ What emerges is a neotrinitarian assemblage between the US government, local forces, and technological platforms providing security not primarily as an American public good but more as a regional transnational good. Similarly, the technological surrogate tends to replace US “boots on the ground” as contingent sizes are increasingly becoming smaller.

These dynamics are not unique to liberal Western states. President Vladimir Putin’s Russia increasingly relies on serving or retired Russian soldiers employed as contractors by private military and security companies (PMSCs) owned by businessmen close to the Kremlin.³⁰ Providing combat services, these contractors have become powerful force multipliers for Putin, augmenting Russian troop levels in wars that are unpopular on the home front, such as the war in Syria. In 2016, images surfaced suggesting that contractors working for Russian PMSCs Wagner and the Slavonic Corps had embedded with proregime militias across the Syrian battlespace. Contractors were photographed in full battle gear, and dozens were reportedly killed on the front line, implying that Russian contractors were directly involved in combat.³¹ In fact, as indicated by an episode in February 2018 in which US-supported rebels killed several hundred Russian contractors,³² these surrogates seem to allow Putin to outsource casualties to the market—something that becomes of interest as the Russian public appears to become increasingly sensitive to casualties in what it considers to be a war of choice.³³ The assemblage between the Russian state and nonstate actors generates discrete expeditionary capability to achieve disruption overseas at limited human and political costs.

In Nigeria, an emerging power in West Africa suffering from structural insecurities, security assemblages