Surrogate Warfare. Andreas Krieg

say that auxiliaries, commonly forces with niche capabilities, were hired for pay by the ancient empires to supplement existing skill and capacity with special abilities. Slingers from the Balearic Islands, cavalry forces from North Africa, archers from Crete, and Phoenician seafarers with special naval skills were employed by the empires of ancient Egypt, Alexander the Great, Carthage, and ancient Rome to achieve an operational advantage using skill sets and troop numbers that the empires could not have generated themselves. Strategically the empires of ancient times would rely on traditional proxies to administer their vast territories or lead wars in territories that were either not accessible to them or in which their own troops would be uncomfortable operating. Thucydides describes how during the Peloponnesian War in the fifth century BC the two protagonists, Athens and Sparta, relied on other cities as proxies to support their cause.¹³ Rome would use the Ghassanids in the Levant in its sixth-century war against the Persians to fight the local Persian proxy, the Lakhmids, as both empires lacked the capacity to do so using their own troops—particularly Rome as an empire in decline.¹⁴ To disrupt Persian trade in the Red Sea, Roman emperor Justinian later relied on the Ethiopians to conduct raids against Persian seafarers.¹⁵

In the Middle Ages and during the Renaissance, patrons would substitute operational burdens of warfare almost entirely to mercenaries and private companies that provided military services to their clients in exchange for money. In a time when feudal armies were the cheap and omnipresent solution for putting boots on the ground in Europe, the rich merchant cities of Italy, lacking both the capacity and capability to raise large armed forces from their midst, found new means to transform their commercial wealth into military power. Venice’s use of specialist rowers during the Crusades of the eleventh century and later the large-scale delegation of warfare services to the condottieri demonstrated how professional arms for hire were militarily superior to the unprofessional armed vassals of Northern Europe.¹⁶ By the fourteenth century, Venice, Florence, and Genoa had almost entirely externalized the strategic and operational burden of war to free companies holding thousands of men under arms. These professional mercenaries were very much sought after because they had unique experience and expertise in the conduct of war, making them a powerful tool in the wars between Renaissance Italy and the medieval estate system that prevailed north of the Alps. For instance, Swiss mercenaries had a virtual monopoly on pike-armed military service throughout late medieval Europe. Their unique skill of massing attacks in deep columns with pikes and halberds, as well as the ease of contracting them directly through their local Swiss canton, was very appealing to the foreign rulers of the time.¹⁷ By the Thirty Years’ War, as warfare had become more technologized, requiring more niche capabilities, warfare in Europe had developed into an endeavor dominated by commercial agents acting as the strategic and operational surrogates for the great powers of the time. Albrecht von Wallenstein had become one of the richest men in the world at the beginning of the seventeenth century by offering entire armies to his patron, the Holy Roman emperor Ferdinand II. From his estates in Bohemia, Wallenstein equipped, trained, and led up to a hundred thousand men to victory—his operational and commercial effectiveness was unique at the time.¹⁸ In parallel, the Spanish and English Empires would commission privateers—private individuals commanding ships and crews—to carry out hostilities on sea against their patron’s enemies. Sir Francis Drake, described above, may have just been the most infamous in providing his patron with capacity and niche capability across an increasingly global battlefield where empires clashed.

In the modern age amid the publicization and nationalization of the means of war, surrogate warfare took new forms. In dire need for troops to administer and control large empires spanning the globe, the rather small metropolitan states of France and Britain had no choice but to externalize the burden of colonial warfare to local, indigenous forces.¹⁹ Often following a policy of divide and rule, local militias and minority groups were empowered through Western arms and training to protect colonial interests overseas. The superpower of the time, Britain, had mastered surrogate warfare like no one else: Colonial volunteers were raised locally through companies such as the British East India Company, mercenary auxiliaries were sourced from the state of Hesse during the American War of Independence, and force multipliers were found in the Spanish guerrillas during the Peninsular War in 1808. While the Hessian contract soldiers were embedded with the regular colonial troops in North America, the guerrillas in Spain fighting the French were largely independent from British command and leadership.²⁰ A hundred years later, Britain perfected the use of insurgents as surrogates in the campaign led by T. E. Lawrence in the Arabian Peninsula against the Ottoman Empire. Although operating widely independent from the British regulars in the Levant, the Arab tribes achieved high degrees of strategic synergy with their patrons in uniform.²¹

In the twentieth century, cold warfare was dominated by the reliance on proxies, allowing state and nonstate patrons to achieve military objectives at unprecedented levels of deniability. Ideologically conforming militias and insurgents were trained and equipped to ensure that the ideological adversary would not gain ground in a perceived zero-sum game. The most prominent examples of surrogate wars of the time were the proxy wars of Vietnam and Afghanistan—the former directed by the Soviets using the Vietcong guerrillas (and North Vietnamese regulars) to undermine the US war efforts to preserve the South Vietnamese government and the latter by the Americans employing the mujahedeen as surrogates to wear down Soviet capabilities at the Hindu Kush.²² Apart from these obvious examples of state-on-nonstate surrogacy, the Cold War also gave birth to a more discreet and indirect form of strategic surrogacy: the externalization of the entire strategic and operational burden of warfare through foreign military assistance.²³ The delivery of military aid was the most effective means for the superpowers to allow their allies to fight their wars locally, thereby relieving themselves of the capacity-intense effort to maintain sufficient levels of deterrence everywhere at any given time. The Cold War in the Middle East was almost exclusively fought through surrogates, Israel and later Egypt being the most prominent US surrogates, while most of the other Arab states in North Africa and the Levant were clients of the Soviet Union.

It was also in the Middle East where surrogate warfare through terrorist organizations became a policy of externalizing the burden of warfare, mostly by rogue regimes. Although the definition of a terrorist remains highly controversial and subjective, the systematic sponsoring of “freedom fighters” employing terrorist tactics to achieve ideopolitical goals has developed into an effort to disrupt public law and order in its immediate neighborhood and overseas.²⁴ Arab states have supported Palestinian groups using terrorism against the state of Israel at home and overseas. Starting with its sponsorship of the Palestine Liberation Organization (PLO), Moammar Gadhafi’s Libya expanded its surrogate wars against a variety of declared adversaries in the region, in the West, and in Africa. Since the 1970s, the dictator Gadhafi used his petrodollars to finance leftist and socialist groups across the globe, most famously the Provisional Irish Republican Army.²⁵ It was also during that time that terrorist organizations became each other’s surrogate. The relationship between the Baader-Meinhof clique of the Red Army Faction (RAF) in West Germany and Palestinian terrorist organizations was one of cooperation, allowing particularly the RAF in the 1970s to rely on Palestinian surrogates to exercise pressure on the West German government as the RAF’s main antagonist. The hijacking of the Lufthansa plane Landshut in Mogadishu in 1977 by terrorists from the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine primarily served the objective of pressuring the West German government to release imprisoned RAF leaders.²⁶

In the post–Cold War era, new forms of surrogacy appeared amid the Revolution in Military Affairs (RMA). RMA proponents believe that the new technologies deriving from the computerization of the battlefield in the late twentieth century brought with it an irreversible and fundamental transformation in the conduct of warfare. In addition, the renewed reliance on contractors employed through PMSCs made the battlefields of the 1990s and 2000s look profoundly different from those of the Cold War. The leading powers of the international system have accumulated unprecedented levels of wealth that they could invest in maintaining highly advanced technological armies supported by specialist contract soldiers who assist the trinitarian citizen soldier to achieve operational effectiveness and precision in executing military core functions. High technology, from the latest-generation airpower