Surrogate Warfare. Andreas Krieg

soldier into a highly complex grid of network-centric operations. The uniformed soldier of the twenty-first century is able to externalize tactical and operational burdens of warfare to technological platforms, transforming him from a “shooter” into a mere “spotter”—the arguably most existential change of identity for the infantryman in the history of warfare.²⁷ Though in its infancy, the emerging fusion between soldiers and technology will slowly give rise to a new class of soldiers, cyborgs that might in the future act as stand-alone weapon systems.²⁸

The use of offensive cyber operations against civilian and military targets is the current evolutionary step in the use of technology to substitute for the patron’s boots on ground. It ultimately removes the kinetic military force from the equation of warfare. Regardless of the benignity of the means employed, the effects of offensive cyber operations on the target are just as disruptive as the kinetic effects that have been generated by the traditional use of force for millennia. Despite the absence or because of the absence of uniformed citizen soldiers from the equation, the cyber domain has become the “nonviolent” and nonkinetic force multiplier as it deceptively exerts nonphysical force though some of its effects can very much have physical consequences.²⁹

While the most developed states invest extensively in technology as a surrogate, developing states continue to invest in militia groups to act as their substitute. State-sponsored or government-sponsored militias have become the means for authoritarian regimes in multisectarian states to maintain control over fractured societies—what statutory public security providers refuse to do, sectarian militias might be willing to do. Authoritarians are able to externalize the horrors of ethnic cleansing, war crimes, and genocide against its own citizens to nonstatutory surrogates willingly executing the sectarian agendas of their patrons. During the Rwandan genocide in 1994, the Hutu government relied on the Interahamwe, a Hutu militia, to expel or kill hundreds of thousands of countrymen of the Tutsi ethnic group.³⁰ In the Darfur crisis of 2003, the Sudanese government supported the Janjaweed as an Arab tribal militia to “cleanse” Darfur of black African Sudanese.³¹ In the Middle East, former Iraqi president Nouri al-Maliki externalized the burden of ethnic cleansing of Sunni neighborhoods to Shia death squads since 2006, militias that were informally linked to Iraqi government ministries.³² Also, the Shabiha, an Alawite militia in Syria, has grown into a powerful sectarian surrogate of the Assad regime in the Syrian Civil War since 2011, cleansing, killing, and torturing sectarian outgroups.³³ The use of the Houthis by Ali Abdullah Saleh, the former president of Yemen, was arguably a form of domestic surrogate warfare with the aim of undermining the legitimacy of his successor, Abdrabbuh Mansur Hadi.³⁴

       Categories of Surrogacy

      In addition to the various forms of surrogates employed by patrons, the nature of patron-surrogate relations can be categorized based on the closeness of the interaction between the patron and the surrogate. The variation in the form of surrogacy arises from the degree by which synergy between the strategic or operational command of the patron and the executive forces of the surrogate is direct, indirect, or coincidental. The higher the degree of cooperation between patron and surrogate, the more the former has control over surrogate operations. Conversely, the more the surrogate retains control over his own operations, the less direct patronsurrogate relations are. In some cases neither direct nor indirect links between the patron and the surrogate exist, making the form of surrogacy entirely coincidental.

Before the twentieth century, direct surrogacy has been more common owing to the fact that deniability or discretion have not been main motivating factors for patrons to delegate the burden of warfare to substitutes. The auxiliaries of antiquity that constitute the earliest forms of surrogacy were direct agents of the patron, embedded into their command-and-control system and thereby subject to the strategic guidance and leadership of the patron. Operational surrogates who are not left with the discretion to either design or execute their operations tend to be direct surrogates of the patron. Only retaining degrees of tactical autonomy, direct surrogates are usually employed to enhance the effectiveness of already existing capability in the theater. Thus, direct surrogates act as force multipliers within an already existing strategic and operational framework. The Numidian cavalry employed by Ramses II in the Battle of Kadesh and the employment of local volunteers by the British Empire to augment its colonial troop levels are as much examples of direct surrogacy as Nazi Germany’s creation of the Waffen SS foreign legion during World War II and the externalization of the burden of warfare to manned and unmanned airpower in the twenty-first century. In the latter case—particularly when unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs) are being used as the soldier’s force multiplier—the direct surrogate can be a mere tactical surrogate under complete control of the soldier, enhancing his tactical abilities on the battlefield and providing intelligence, surveillance, reconnaissance, or firepower.³⁵

However, direct surrogacy can also involve strategic surrogates, as in the case of the employment of UAVs for strategic purposes or in cases when the patron creates, trains, and funds a surrogate to act as its substitute. The example here could be the US government’s employment of Cuban volunteers in the Bay of Pigs in 1961, the relationship between Iran and Hezbollah since the 1980s, or the Russian use of private military contractors in Ukraine and Syria. In all these cases, the lines between strategic and operational surrogacy become blurry: The patron retains significant strategic leverage over the surrogate but allows him to plan and execute operations more or less autonomously within the strategic or ideological framework of the patron. In the Bay of Pigs disaster, whereby the CIA had tried to topple Fidel Castro’s communist government in Cuba by training and equipping a paramilitary invasion force consisting of Cuban exiles, the surrogate was provided with all necessary support prior to the invasion but was left with relative autonomy during the operation on Cuban soil itself.³⁶ Hezbollah’s operations since the early 1980s show similar traits: The IRGC helped to build the Shia militia in southern Lebanon but, despite maintaining strategic control, allowed the “Party of God” to operate as it saw fit.³⁷ The same is true for Russia’s surrogate troops on the ground in Ukraine and Syria. While strategic guidance comes from the Kremlin, the private military companies are left with operational freedom.³⁸ In all three cases the patron-surrogate relationship was direct, although cooperation and control was limited to the strategic level, providing the patron with the necessary amount of discretion and deniability and the surrogate with a certain autonomy of movement. As history has shown, the proximity of these patron-surrogate relationships is far from static. They are highly dynamic and can turn upside down. After the duke of Milan, Maximilian Sforza, hired Swiss mercenaries to defend Milan and beat the French army of Louis XII at the battle of Novara in 1513, the Swiss took control of the duchy while maintaining Sforza in power as a puppet.³⁹ The surrogate had become the patron.

Indirect surrogacy has been on the rise since the twentieth century. The traditional proxy war during the East-West conflict after 1945 is a stereotypical example of indirect surrogacy. Unlike direct surrogates, indirect surrogates do not supplement but rather substitute for the patron’s capabilities. Here patrons externalize almost the entire burden of war—political, financial, and military—to a surrogate whose allegiance to the common cause is flexible. The reason is that the more distant the strategic objectives between patron and surrogate, the less likely the patron-surrogate relationship remains mutually beneficial in the long run. Compatibility and complementarity of strategic interests does not equal strategic synergy.⁴⁰

      Although indirect strategic surrogates were used throughout history, it was the nature of the international system in the twentieth century that made indirect forms of surrogacy particularly attractive. The Spartans’ reliance on the oligarchs of Corfu in the fight against the Athenian alliance in the Peloponnesian War, Spain’s support for Irish rebels in the Nine Years’ War with Britain in the late sixteenth century, and Britain’s contracting with the British East India Company to colonize the Indian subcontinent since the early 1600s are historic examples of the indirect externalization of the burden of warfare to surrogates over whom the patron had little control. In the twentieth century, as deniability, legitimacy, and ideology became even more important factors in warfare, indirect surrogate warfare provided a silver