Dueling Dyads: Conceptualizing Proxy Wars in Strategic Competition

Strategic competition with the Russian Federation and People’s Republic of China has become the new orienting challenge for the U.S. national security community. While many officials and writers envision strategic competition across many domains, the increased likelihood of proxy wars in strategic competition does not gain much purchase in the strategic planning documents of the U.S. government, including the recent Biden administration’s Interim National Strategic Guidance. Both the 2017 National Security Strategy and the supporting 2018 National Defense Strategy acknowledged that the United States faces a re-emergent period of strategic competition from both China and Russia. The Biden administration appears to embrace the competitive nature of the relationship between democratic states and authoritarian rivals, and the necessity of military modernization, but does not address the range of malign methods that the competition could lead to. In response to the strategies, the U.S. military is adapting from protracted counter-terrorism missions to deterring large-scale, conventional wars. This is a natural reflex for the Pentagon, yet strategic competition does not automatically generate symmetric and conventional contests. As Aaron Stein and Ryan Fishel recently observed, “The U.S. military will need to resist the urge to conflate direct, head-to-head conflict with great-power competition. Napoleonic, linear conceptions of war may be less relevant between large, nuclear-armed states in the 21 st century.” Proxy wars, an area of increasing study and rigor in the academic community, represent an indirect and non-Westphalian mode of conflict that is increasingly relevant in future conflict. The purpose of this article is to explore the character of proxy wars in the context of the emerging strategic environment. It offers insights into the array of forms that proxy wars can take, identifies shortfalls in how such conflicts are currently conceptualized, and offers recommendations to update U.S. military doctrine to prepare for this more prevalent and likely form of armed conflict in this century. Types of Relationships in Proxy Wars Proxy wars reflect a wide range of relationships between Principals and their supported Clients. The latter can be state or non-state actor(s). The Principal will select the type of support that it desires to offer based on its assessment of its own strategic interests and the alignment of its interests with those of the Client. A number of other factors will come into consideration as well. Overall, the character of a Principal-Client relationship is based upon an assessment by the Principal of:

• Alignment of Interests. There is often a mismatch between Principal and Client in terms of interests and goals.
• Capabilities of the Client. Usually, the agent is weaker than desired, and thus requires support of some type.
• Degree of Risk Tolerance. The Principal is taking risk in delegating the achievement of an interest to a second party and needs to measure that risk.
• Leverage/Conditionality. Whether or not the Principal can achieve some control over the client is described as leverage or the ability to withhold support assets as a condition of ensuring compliance with the Principal’s agenda and aims.
• Deniability/Covert. The Principal must decide how covert it desires the proxy relationship to be and how much plausible deniability it requires.

These factors are sometimes mutually reinforcing, but they need not be so. For example, as the capabilities of a Client increase, a Principal’s leverage decreases over the supported client. As the Client increases its capabilities, it may expand its objectives and resist a political settlement that satisfies the other parties in the conflict. The interaction between these factors can bring to the fore some of the drawbacks of using proxies dealt with later in this article. Degree of Proxy Relationship or “Proxiness” A number of potential frameworks to examine the range of Principal and Client relationships in proxy wars have been offered. Here, we offer a simpler and linear continuum that incorporates projected aspects of the strategic context that are relevant to U.S. policymakers. For this work, the Principal-Client relationship is conceived as a continuum with various attributes of delegation, risk, and resource application. We offer a continuum of such relationships, ranging from simple materiel assistance to indirect violent support via surrogate forces:

• Security Assistance. Support to the Client is limited to the provision of weapons and materiel. (Ex: U.S. weapons support to Mujahadeen fighters in Afghanistan against the Soviet Union.)
• Advise/Train. Support to the Client extends beyond financial or military equipment, but is limited to strategic advice, intelligence, campaign planning, and training. The latter can be done in the Client state but does not include participation in field operations. (Ex: U.S. training to Cuban counter-revolutionary forces.)
• Advise/Assist. Limited augmentation of the Client by the Principal in an advisory capacity to include observation and guidance during field operations but not active fighting. Could include situations where military officers are actively engaged with the direction of field operations. (Ex: U.S. support to El Salvadoran government against pro-Soviet revolutionary group, Farabundo Martí National Liberation Front (FMLN))
• Limited Partnership. Overt augmentation of the Client by military forces of the Principal in actual field operations, usually limited to air cover, medical evacuation, and indirect fires. (Ex: U.S. special forces conducting operations with Kurdish militias in Syria in the Counter-ISIS campaign.)
• Surrogate. Direct use of, or augmentation of, fighting forces from the Principal that is masked for deniability, usually provided by covert forces, special contingents (Flying Tigers or “Russian volunteers”), or commercial sources such as Private Military Companies (PMC). A surrogate may be used by itself as the primary actor supported by the Principal or as an auxiliary or augmentation to a Client. (Ex: Russian pilots flying combat missions during the Korean War.)

This continuum offers a range of options that have different degrees of sponsorship/affiliation, different levels of opacity and risk, and different costs to the sponsor state. We find the surrogate option to be increasingly likely given that it generally offers a more competent and controllable actor with better alignment/incentives for a Principal than less organized local forces. Given the increased use of PMCs by China and Russia, we believe this continuum captures the range of proxy relationships that can be anticipated or employed. The Russian PMC known as the Wagner Group is only one of several units that appear to operate as a subsidiary of the Kremlin or its intelligence agencies. Likewise, China has expanded its security options with 20 international PMCs employing over 3,000 personnel in Iraq, Sudan, and Pakistan. Some recent scholarship argues that technologies like cyber/computer network attacks or drones represent a new wrinkle to the proxy war arsenal. These analysts have expanded the concept of surrogates to include technologies not actors.