Читать книгу Surrogate Warfare - Andreas Krieg - Страница 10

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 look essentially different as the external and internal push-and-pull factors differ entirely from states in the developed world. This country divided along religious and ethnic fault lines and governed by exclusive neopatrimonial elites has witnessed an extensive activity of nonstate contenders challenging the authority of the central government. Militias in the Niger Delta and the jihadist militant group Boko Haram in the northeast represent the most prominent local insurgencies, which the government is trying to address, making use of commercial and noncommercial surrogates. Lacking the capacity and the capability, as well as the legitimacy in the eyes of local communities, the Nigerian state has invested in security assemblages with maritime security companies,³⁴ private military companies,³⁵ and rebel groups.³⁶ Here the state partners with surrogates that supplement the state’s capabilities and legitimacy to provide public security to communities that have withdrawn their support for the central government. In an effort to retain relevance within a complex, multilayered conflict over authority, legitimacy, and access to resources, the ruling elites have discovered that the partial delegation of the burden of warfare of counterinsurgency (COIN) and counterpiracy to surrogates provides the state with a degree of public authority as a manager of a neotrinitarian security complex. Instead of undermining the standing of the state, it brings the state back into the picture despite the fact that the management of violence is partially outsourced to surrogates.

In essence, surrogate warfare transforms the sociopolitical concept of security that has evolved in the late eighteenth century from a trinitarian into a neotrinitarian complex. Rather than characterizing this complex as nontrinitarian as Martin Van Creveld does in his Transformation of War, the new neotrinitarian assemblages are hybrid sociopolitical associations between communities, states, and a range of new security providers, new technologies, and norms. In that way, they retain a resemblance of the fundamental tripolar divide between a patron as an agent of a community delegating security provision through organized violence to a security provider. We argue in this book that externalizing the burden of warfare from the trinitarian complex to surrogates on the outside allows states to continue providing security as an increasingly abstract global good in transnational conflicts against actors disregarding the sovereignty and territoriality of states. By keeping the financial, human, and ultimately political costs for states in war to a minimum, enabling states to operate within a realm of public discretion and international deniability, the neotrinitarian security assemblages between patron and surrogate offer the state ways and means to deal with the risks of twenty-first-century conflict.

However, without the covenantal bonds between the authority strategically directing organized violence and the agent executing violence, the patron-surrogate relationship bears inherent risks that are alien to the trinitarian security assemblages that had come close to monopolizing the means over violence in the Western world in the nineteenth century. Unlike conventional civil-military relations between society, state, and citizen soldier, the relationship between patron and surrogate is often one of a temporary nature. Command and control becomes a fluid concept when surrogates readily advance into conflict with varying degrees of autonomy. The aspect of delegation, supplementation, or substitution intrinsically entails degrees of deputation whereby the deputy is entrusted to achieve tasks autonomously with limited or no patron oversight. This loss of patron control affects both the effectiveness and ethics of surrogate war, as this book intends to show. Thus, although at first appearing to provide the state with almost a silver bullet for its twenty-first-century challenges, the externalization of the burden of warfare to surrogates leads to fundamental issues in the way violence is being used in the century ahead. As much as it might be a response to what Hedley Bull might call a neomedieval anarchy,³⁷ it might also contribute to the unpredictability, uncertainty, unmanageability, and proliferation of postmodern conflict.