Surrogate Warfare

The Transformation of War in the Twenty-First Century

Andreas Krieg, Jean-Marc Rickli

• Verlag: Georgetown University Press
• Jahr: 2019
• ISBN:
  9781626166790
• Thema: Politics & International Relations
• Thema: National Security

Surrogate Warfare explores the emerging phenomenon of "surrogate warfare" in twenty-first century conflict. The popular notion of war is that it is fought en masse by the people of one side versus the other. But the reality today is that both state and non-state actors are increasingly looking to shift the burdens of war to surrogates. Surrogate warfare describes a patron's outsourcing of the strategic, operational, or tactical burdens of warfare, in whole or in part, to human and/or technological substitutes in order to minimize the costs of war. This phenomenon ranges from arming rebel groups, to the use of armed drones, to cyber propaganda. Krieg and Rickli bring old, related practices such as war by mercenary or proxy under this new overarching concept. Apart from analyzing the underlying sociopolitical drivers that trigger patrons to substitute or supplement military action, this book looks at the intrinsic trade-offs between substitutions and control that shapes the relationship between patron and surrogate. Surrogate Warfare will be essential reading for anyone studying contemporary conflict.

CHAPTER 1

The History of Surrogate Warfare

IT WAS A WARM DAY IN LATE MAY 1294 BC WHEN PHARAOH RAMSES II AND his vanguard reached the Hittite city of Kadesh on the Orontes River in what is today Syria, after a month’s march through Canaan along the Mediterranean Coast. The enemy Hittite forces had taken position behind the city and awaited the Egyptians—spies having informed the Hittite king, Muwatalli II, days before about the pharaoh’s advance. When the Egyptian vanguard surrounding the pharaoh started to erect its camp, the Hittites attacked, knowing that two major components of the Egyptian army had not yet arrived.¹ Encircled by Hittite chariots and taken by surprise, the young pharaoh had to fight for his life, hoping that his reinforcements would arrive before it was too late. He was able to repel the attackers through the help of the N‘rn—mercenaries from Canaan who accompanied the Egyptians. The N‘rn, as Egyptian auxiliaries, saved the day for the pharaoh, who commenced his counterattack as soon as reinforcements arrived the next day.² Thousands of Egyptian chariots supported by Numidian mercenaries on horseback were able to push the Hittites back to the eastern banks of the Orontes River.³ Although Ramses was unable to capture Kadesh after days of fighting, the young pharaoh consolidated his leadership as a military commander on a par with the leader of the other superpower of the time, the Hittite Empire. If it had not been for the force multipliers from the Maghreb and the Levant providing him with niche capabilities and capacity, Ramses might have either not returned to Egypt alive or only as the weak pharaoh who lost the Levant for the Egyptians.

On March 1, 1579, the Golden Hind, the galleon of English privateer Sir Francis Drake, caught up with the Spanish galleon Nuestra Señora de la Concepción, nicknamed the Cacafuego. For more than a month, Drake had chased the Cacafuego up the South American Pacific coast. When the Golden Hind appeared alongside it, the Spanish commander, San Juan de Antón, was determined not to surrender his treasures to the English. It was thus not surprising that when Drake shouted to the Spaniards, “You must strike your sails in the name of the Queen of England!” Antón refused to cooperate.⁴ The Golden Hind opened fire, one of the masts of the Cacafuego was splintered, and the Spanish commander was wounded. Drake’s men swarmed aboard, seizing the greatest prize any Englishman had ever captured: eighty pounds of gold, thirteen chests of silver coins, and twenty-six tons of silver bars, jewels, and other valuables—the whole annual yield of gold and silver from the Spanish colonies in South America.⁵ When Drake returned to Plymouth a year later after circumnavigating the globe, he was able to present Queen Elizabeth I with spoils amounting to half the ordinary annual revenue of the Crown.⁶ Despite the queen’s diplomatic efforts to reconcile with the Spanish Empire, Drake, equipped with a royal letter of marque, had proven to be her most effective weapon to “annoy the King of Spain in his Indies.”⁷ Sir Francis Drake, a licensed pirate preying on Spanish galleons in the colonies, had provided Queen Elizabeth I with a capability otherwise not had and a degree of plausible deniability in the competition for supremacy of the seas. Ultimately it was privateers such as Drake who paved the way for the rise of England, and later Britain, as a colonial superpower amid the demise of the Spanish Empire.

In late November 2009, surveillance cameras in the Iranian enrichment facility of Natanz installed by the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) observed how workers were carrying out, crate by crate, broken centrifuges from an underground laboratory. By late spring of 2010, more than 10 percent of all centrifuges had to be replaced⁸—all that after the Siemens-made industrial controller software had altered, without the operators noticing it, the centrifuges’ rotor speeds, inducing excessive vibrations and distortions that would ultimately destroy them.⁹ At the height of the international community’s dispute with Iran over its nuclear program, Natanz and some other Iranian nuclear facilities had been attacked by a cyber worm, a malware meticulously designed to infect the Windows-based controller systems in use to regulate the physical processes in a nuclear laboratory. The worm, called Stuxnet, was introduced through a USB flash drive and not over the Internet.¹⁰ It was not controlled from overseas but was a stand-alone malware that, instead of stealing digital data, corrupted the command system so as to physically destroy centrifuges that could have well been classified as military targets, most notably by the United States and Israel.¹¹ Stuxnet is believed to be the work of a joint US-Israeli endeavor to slow down the Iranian nuclear program.¹² It arguably allowed both powers to strike right at the heart of Iran’s most protected nuclear facility under the cloak of plausible deniability and without mobilizing military capacity that would have generated immense political and financial costs.

As these examples illustrate, surrogate warfare is far from being exclusively a twenty-first-century phenomenon. The externalization of the burden of warfare is as old as warfare itself and as diverse in character as the surrogates that bear the burden. Surrogates are not just the enemy’s enemy as proxies are, and they are not just some militias or revolutionaries who support the same ideological causes as the patron. The idea of authorizing a substitute to incur the costs of war partially or wholly in the name of a patron is something more fundamental than the Cold War concept of warfare by proxy. In the history of warfare, surrogates were auxiliaries, privateers, mercenaries, rebels, insurgents, or private companies—only later did they include terrorist organizations, militias, other states, and ultimately technological platforms. All three cases give distinct examples of surrogates that within their context have allowed patrons to thrive despite the absence of indigenous, state-owned capacity and capability to sustain the operational burden of warfare. The impact these operational surrogates had, though, was strategic: Pharaoh Ramses II was able to galvanize his power vis-à-vis his main adversary, granting him the kudos required to work toward a peace agreement later on; Queen Elizabeth I was able to disrupt the Spaniards lines of communication, eventually turning the tide in the naval balance of power between England and Spain; and the developers of Stuxnet had a clear objective to disrupt operations within Iran’s nuclear facilities—an objective that was achieved as Iran had to divert time and resources to restoring its facilities.

This chapter is going to give an introduction into the complexity and diversity of surrogate warfare through the ages, discussing how the concept has evolved from early antiquity to the surrogate wars of the twenty-first century. Understanding how patrons have used surrogates in its various forms throughout history provides the historical contextualization of the phenomenon from the operational auxiliaries of ancient Rome to the technological surrogates employed by twenty-first-century powers.

Forms of Surrogates

The earliest form of surrogacy has been the partial delegation of the operational burden of warfare to auxiliaries and force multipliers embedded into the overall strategic framework of the patron. That is to 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 operationa...