Surrogate Warfare. Andreas Krieg

dilemma of surrogate warfare, which is the trade-off between substitution and control. The degree of substitution of the patron’s burden of warfare correlates with an increase of surrogate autonomy and thereby the patron’s loss of control. Therefore, warfare by surrogate might not necessarily be the panacea for the strategic and operational challenges of the twenty-first century. However, in order to be able to make an informed decision about the utility and ethical implications of surrogate warfare, the concept needs to be adequately conceptualized beyond the mere empirical analysis of historical case studies.

       The Concept of War by Surrogate

Etymologically, the term “surrogate” derives from the Latin verb surrogare, meaning “to elect as a substitute,” thereby including references to the feature of proxy, replacement, and supplement.⁸ Although too operational in its focus, a niche in the special operations forces (SOF) literature provides a conceptualization that grasps the semantics of “surrogacy.” As Kelly H. Smith writes, “A surrogate, in its simplest sense, takes the place of something or someone. The surrogate is also a proxy for a particular function or set of functions. The word surrogate is not meant to be pejorative, but rather an expression that conveys substitution of one for another. Generally, it implies that the surrogate is acting on behalf of the interests of another, and is in some way distinct from the source of its authority to act.”⁹ In the context of warfare, the concept of surrogacy provides a broad umbrella for examining a patron’s externalization of the strategic, operational, or tactical burden of warfare, partially or wholly, to a delegate or substitute. The patron does so in an effort to principally minimize the burden of warfare to its taxpayers, policymakers, military personnel, and the country or organization as a whole.¹⁰ Both can be either state or nonstate actors, although patrons tends to be primarily states—both liberal states in the developed world and nonliberal states in the developing world. Therefore, the relationship between patron and surrogate can be intentional and unintentional. Throughout history, surrogates have been auxiliaries, mercenaries, insurgency groups, terrorist organizations, and commercial companies. More recently, states have also externalized the burden of warfare to technological platforms such as unmanned airpower, robotics, or cyber weapons. Cooperation, coordination, or force integration between the delegating patron and the executive delegate can be direct, indirect, or even coincidental. Thus, at the heart of this concept stands a relationship of delegation between an activator (i.e., the patron) and an executive agent (namely, the surrogate). In this relationship, the patron intends to either substitute or supplement its military capability with means that it deems to be more economical, more effective, more clandestine, or even more ethical. As such, the concept acts as an umbrella concept for more established concepts such as proxy, compound, or remote warfare by centering on the aspect of the externalization of the burden of warfare.

This idea of using surrogates to externalize the burden of war is not revolutionary in itself. Since ancient times, empires and states have entrusted auxiliaries, substitutes, and proxies, at least partially, with the execution of military functions on their behalf. As much as irregular, asymmetrical, or unconventional warfare have been part of the norm in the history of warfare, so have surrogates.¹¹ The Romans employed “barbarian” tribes to multiply their forces, relying on their local knowledge and relations with local populations; the most famous example might be that of Arminius, the German chieftain who supplied the Romans with tribal support in the inaccessible terrains east of the Rhine.¹² The wealthy Renaissance city-states of northern Italy employed the condottieri—leading military free companies offering professional armed services—to protect their wealth from greedy neighbors.¹³ In the American Revolution, the British Army multiplied its forces by using thirty-five thousand Hessian mercenaries to fight the hybrid threat of Washington’s Continental Army and colonial militias.¹⁴ The Duke of Wellington owed his success in the Peninsular War against Napoleon Bonaparte’s Grande Armée to the support of the Spanish guerrillas attacking the French occupier’s lines of communication.¹⁵ The relatively small island nation of Britain was able to rule more than a quarter of the world by relying only on colonial surrogates: Twelve political officers, one hundred British soldiers, and eight hundred paramilitary surrogates could control ten million people.¹⁶ In the early stages of World War II, when the United Kingdom was far from ready to engage the Nazi threat directly, Winston Churchill envisaged employing continental resistance movements as surrogates to attack the Wehrmacht from the rear.¹⁷ During the Cold War, with the growing need for deniability, the superpowers often resorted to the use of proxies to achieve strategic objectives overseas, the Soviet support for the Vietcong in Vietnam and the US support for the mujahedeen in Afghanistan being the most famous examples.

The obvious question is how the concept of surrogate warfare departs from existing concepts that deal with delegation, substitution, and supplementation in war. While the concept does not try to complement the already existing range of definitions of war by proxy, compound warfare, or remote warfare, it seeks to offer a holistic conceptual umbrella combining the various aspects of these different forms of delegation. Proxy warfare, a concept that has been lastingly defined by the literature of the Cold War, is limited to a state’s strategic employment of a human surrogate and does not expand to the use of auxiliary force multipliers employed remotely to supplement ongoing operations. Some might even argue that proxy warfare is limited to a state’s reliance on another state’s conventional forces.¹⁸ Moreover, the concept of proxy warfare lacks the capacity to consider the externalization of the burden of warfare to technological surrogates. Compound warfare, however, goes beyond the narrow definition of proxy warfare, which for the most part remains a relic of the Cold War, a context within which the patron was defined as a state actor merely exploiting the strategic proxy to advance external strategic objectives in an international struggle with another external state actor.¹⁹ It is worth noting that the concept of cyber proxy is an attempt to move beyond the legacy of the Cold War. However, the scope of cyber proxy is solely limited to “intermediary that conducts or directly contributes to an offensive action that is enabled knowingly, actively or passively by a beneficiary.”²⁰ Compound warfare, which Thomas M. Huber defines as degrees of strategic and operational synergy between regular and irregular forces,²¹ looks at surrogacy more operationally, whereby two forces complement each other’s efforts by coordinating the planning and execution of military campaigns. Here both parties see cooperation and coordination, even if only marginal, as mutually beneficial since these serve their strategic or operational objectives. In so doing, compound warfare, unlike proxy warfare, does not require the patron-proxy or activator-proxy relationship that by definition puts the proxy at the receiving end of a chain of command controlled by the patron or activator.²² In compound warfare, the regular and the irregular force operate simultaneously, although with varying degrees of direct coordination and integration, with neither side necessarily following the orders of the other. Thus, in contrast to the patron-proxy relationship, the relations between the regular and irregular fighting forces in compound warfare are more egalitarian.

Nonetheless, the concept of compound warfare lacks much of the strategic connotations that are essential for the process of externalization, while again falling short of accounting for new forms of technological surrogacy in the information age. The concept that comes closest to covering the complexity and diversity of surrogate warfare is the idea of remote-controlled or standoff warfare that Jon Moran outlined in a paper for the Remote Control Project. Moran expands the contemporary debate on remote drone warfare to the building of empire and the increased reliance of Western states on remote surrogates in the twenty-first century. The essence of “remoteness” is the delegation to alternative actors or platforms that allow the patron to remotely conduct war without putting its own troops in harm’s way—preferably in low-intensity and low-interests conflicts.²³ Moran neither explicitly analyzes the process of externalization nor develops a model that comprehensively analyzes the autonomy-control relationship between patron and surrogate. Moreover, his approach might be too closely associated with the scholarly niche of drone warfare. To be more all-encompassing in the definition of remote surrogate warfare, we will keep the concept as general as possible, focusing on the aspect of the externalization of the burden of warfare.

Thus,