Abstract

In this episode, Dr Andreas Krieg illustrates how private security companies are a response to an emerging global phenomenon: surrogate warfare. Military surrogacy involves not only human stand-in’s such as proxies, local militias and private contractors; but also with machine or technological surrogates as such drones, AI, and cyber-tech.

This podcast series is presented by Dr Alessandro Arduino, Principal Research Fellow and Dr Ameem Lutfi, Research Fellow, at the Middle East Institute, National University of Singapore.

Listen to the full podcast here:

Full Transcript:

[Alessandro Arduino]: Welcome to the 15^th episode of the National University of Singapore–Middle East Institute’s podcast series Boots Off the Ground: Security in Transition in the Middle East and Beyond. In this series, we look at the future of warfare; we will see uniformed soldiers — or “boots on the ground” — being replaced by private military companies, autonomous weapon systems and cyber warfare. My name is Alessandro Arduino and I am the co-host for this series, along with my colleague, Ameem Lutfi.

[Ameem Lutfi]: Thank you everyone for joining us today. We’re very glad to have with us
Dr Andreas Krieg from the King’s College London, UK Defence Academy and the Royal College of Defence Studies. At King’s College, Krieg has been involved in designing and providing professional education for senior strategic members both from the British government and beyond. Dr Krieg is also the co-author of a much-acclaimed recent text that will be at the centre of our discussion today called Surrogate Warfare: The Transformation of War in the 21st Century. Prior to joining King’s College, Dr Krieg worked at Circle Middle East as a contractor of the Qatari armed forces assigned, amongst other things, to set up a joint command and staff college. Drawing on his rich experiences and first-hand knowledge, Dr Krieg also frequently provides his critical insight on geopolitical changes in both global print and television media. Thank you so much for joining us today.

[Andreas Krieg]: Thank you for having me.

[Alessandro Arduino]: Andreas, thank you again and just to kickstart our discussion, I’m wondering if you could give our listeners a very quick introduction to the central idea within your recent book-   the idea of surrogate warfare. You suggest that it is not simply a recording of proxy war but it encapsulates a broader phenomenon. Can you please elaborate a little more on that?  Are there any kind of key theories that have helped you to this idea, like Sun Tzu, Machiavelli, Clausewitz or even von Moltke?

[Andreas Krieg]: Thank you very much, this is a very broad question to begin with.  Obviously, the problem that you have with the literature is that we have a lot of theories already, about delegation and proxy warfare is the concept that’s been most widely used.

The reason why I went beyond using proxy warfare — and kind of framed this as surrogacy — is because they the proxy war for debate was very much stuck in the 20^th century. It’s a debate that comes from the Cold War period mostly – ‘proxy’ refers to the kind of competition whereby one superpower is delegating the burden of warfare to a human surrogate (mostly a state actor; sometimes a non-state actor) for limited wars. But the reasons and motivations behind proxy warfare was entirely different from what I consider to be more widely ‘surrogate warfare’. Surrogacy is supposed to be more of an umbrella concept which looks beyond proxy warfare, encapsulates proxy warfare also but looks at the wider trend that we see in the technological domain as well and when we look at cyber and artificial intelligence robotics and obviously, looks at how technology, more widely, has been used as a surrogate. It goes beyond the proxy debate which is still very much based on kinetic warfare and the delegation to human surrogates; it doesn’t really draw upon technology that much as surrogate warfare does and we kind of thought about surrogate warfare as more of an umbrella concept.  The central idea is the externalisation of the burden of warfare to a surrogate and that surrogate can be both human and technological. Hence, the motivation is not necessarily — as it was in the proxy warfare debate — about deniability and making sure that in that competition between East and West, the Cold War was never supposed to turn hot amid the wider geostrategic context of a looming nuclear war.

Surrogate warfare is entirely motivated by the trends that we’ve seen post-Cold War; a trend where nation states are trying to look for ways to make warfare more economical and not just in terms of minimising the financial cost of war but also minimising the human one.  Finding ways to remain engaged in protracted, everywhere-wars that are never-ending and doing so while finding a way to make war more palatable to the public audiences (domestic audience at home and also for the international global civil society), more sustainable to remain engaged in conflicts that become increasingly messy in comparison to the kind of wars that we’ve seen in the 20^th century.

It’s about externalising the burden of warfare both in terms of the financial cost and human cost of war, but it’s also increasing the political costs; it’s about minimising risks. We look at warfare in the 21^st century as an exercise of risk mitigation and risk management, rather than actually achieving what we would see — in the conventional sense when we look at Clausewitz or von Moltke which are very much stuck in the 19^thth and 20^th-century conventional idea of war — we’re now no longer about concentrated force and achieving quick victories. Instead, it’s about remaining engaged, not necessarily for the end of achieving tangible outcomes very quickly but remaining engaged against enemies that are not tangible; threats that are not tangible such as the global War on Terror, for example, where you don’t know where the enemy is but you know you have to remain engaged.  It’s usually about taking the precautionary principle of making sure that when you know risks are there, you try to mitigate them before they become actual tangible threats and that’s entirely different from the conventional way of war and in that sense, you know surrogate warfare has become an effort of risk management rather than an actual warfare in itself.

How is this different? Clausewitz is the guy who has always been cited by everyone as someone who looks at military theory and in many ways, I think most of his concepts — and I’m probably a minority here because Clausewitz still has quite a lot of supporters and advocates in military theory and among the community of military theorists —in saying that his idea of character as well as nature of war is fundamentally changing.  If you’d asked me 20 years ago, I probably would have told you that the character of war is changing but the nature of war is kind of staying the same. With reference to the cyber domain, when we look into subversion campaigns on social media and AI and robotics increasingly becoming a part of kinetic warfare as well — with this widening debate about warfare, I do think that the nature of war is also fundamentally changing – it’s no longer about coercion or achieving quick victories, it is about risk management in protected everywhere forever-wars.

That’s where ‘surrogacy’ comes in; so Clausewitz, in that sense, doesn’t really provide a good theory and again it’s about concentration of kinetic force. Rather than creating a hierarchical approach to warfare which is discussed by Clausewitz (even von Moltke), the Prussian model of hierarchy – concentrated force and clear chain of command — this is no longer the warfare that we’re seeing when we look at surrogate warfare. Surrogate warfare means delegation to a range of different human and technological surrogates. What you end up with are essentially assemblages of different actors that work together in networks that are heterarchical; they’re not hierarchical and so, control is limited and delegation also means   you kind of disassociate yourself from what the surrogates are doing.  Again, we have to look beyond militias, private military companies and state actors as proper proxies or surrogates. We have to look at bots and trolls on social media as well. For example, again, if you look at the information campaigns of the 21^st century, they are becoming increasingly disruptive.  It’s about delegating to networks that you don’t really control so it’s the exact opposite of what Clausewitz or von Moltke talked about; it’s no longer concentrations but instead, it’s diffusion and deliberately so. Sun Tzu, in many ways I think is probably more adequate as a theorist for warfare in the 21^st century. Obviously Sun Tzu’s expressions and  idioms, if you will, are very vague and ambiguous — you could kind of apply them to pretty much any sort of military context — but you know one element of Sun Tzu which I think is interesting is that he’s not necessarily talking about overwhelming firepower — it’s about smart ways of achieving ends through any means available; taking more or less a whole-of-nations approach, if you will, where the military is one of many components. I think that’s where surrogate warfare comes in because it is also not just about the military domain, it’s much wider; as I said, it’s about the information domain but you can also use surrogates when it’s about influence campaigns — I’m writing a book at the moment, about subversion which is kind of the opposite of coercion. Again, what you need here are surrogates in the information domain; surrogates in academia; surrogates in lobbying firms and PR companies all trying to subvert the enemy’s will and decision-making. You’re relying on a wide array of different actors that you can use so all of this can be summoned up under the umbrella of surrogate warfare and obviously, taking a very broad approach to warfare itself.

[Ameem Lutfi]: Thank you so much for trying to lay out this very sophisticated and complicated idea in simple terms as possible for our listeners. One of the things that really struck me about the book was the argument that this change in warfare is not a result of technological changes or political changes but it is first and foremost a response to social transformations so drones and private military companies, perhaps, should be seen better as a consequence rather than the cause of change in the nature of war.

I’m wondering if you could just lay out some of these bigger sociological changes and social transformations that you say led to this new kind of war? I know you hint at globalisation but could say more about what are some of those logics?

[Andreas Krieg]: The four trends that are kind of the buzzwords that I’m using for the context are: globalisation — I don’t think this requires any introduction. The concept of mediatisation which means everything that happens is an act — even any technical activity can have a strategic impact through social media or through mediatisation of any kind of act domestically and globally – a small local event can become a global event immediately.

Next we have an issue of privatisation, more widely —I wrote my PhD many years ago about the commercialisation of security and private military companies and privatisation was, 10 to 15 years ago, always about commercialisation – it was always limited towards using mercenaries and private monitoring security companies. When I look at privatisation, I’m looking at top-down and bottom-up privatisation of war where the actors are no longer those linked to the state — they might be linked to the state but they’re not state-owned, if you will. So private military and security companies are part of a top-down trend of privatisation but we also have a bottom-up trend of privatisation where states in the developing world — in particular, but not only — are losing monopoly over the use as well as authority over violence and that also leads to very complex security environments where the security sector, which is state-owned, is competing with an informal security sector.  It’s kind of another trend and that’s something which becomes increasingly difficult for states to deal with, including those in the developed world. I mean, if you look at the US and the trend of armed militias in the wake of the end of the Trump presidency, we see a lot of mobilisation of armed groups which again, haven’t really used armed force yet but in a climate of polarisation, we see that the state has, in some instances, already lost ground to non-state actors who are armed and competing with it. That’s a trend that we’re seeing and it might get worse over time.

Then the other element is securitisation and this is something I kind of touched upon before – we don’t have what we had in the 20^th century during the Cold War. This very tangible visible threat — as you know, from a Western point of view, we always looked the Soviet Union coming over the hills and the battlefield somewhere in Central Europe, where we kind of knew where the enemy was [but now], we don’t know where the enemy is and obviously, if we look at the global pandemic as well, where is the enemy? Terrorism is also one of these threats – very intangible; you don’t know what is the threat, really.  That’s how it was initially with the war on terror. We looked at the Taliban, Afghanistan and Al Qaida then realised that once ISIS came —obviously we had that caliphate that we could find physically in Mesopotamia and Syria in Iraq —the threat that emanated from ISIS was the wider global mobilisation that happened, whereby the actors were actually already embedded in our society, making it very difficult to deal with. That is part of the trend of trying to mitigate risks and potential security threats — the latter is very important.

This is difficult because it means that the state always needs to be proactive and pre-empt any potential attack.  It needs to go out against security risks that are not tangible threats yet and that makes it very difficult for it to sell this to its own community – it’s tough for the state to go to its people and say they’re going to war over something that hasn’t happened yet but might potentially happen. Even if you look at the alleged WMD programme of Saddam Hussein in 2003, it’s somewhat the root cause of the intervention — there was a lot of securitisation going on, whereby at that time, the Bush administration was trying to sell the idea of a tangible threat to the American public and that the country needed to do something about it. Obviously, that threat never materialised; the risk was entirely inflated and in the end, drawn into that conflict that was very difficult to get out of. The same thing happens with the ISIS threat – it’s something that needed to be done in 2014 but there was no stomach anywhere in the liberal western world to actually go in with boots on the ground and eradicate ISIS so we needed to find other ways but still, it was a highly securitised threat and rightly so, I think.

These are the four trends — globalisation, securitisation, privatisation and mediatisation and so, to talk about the social-political element of it, I think what is interesting here is that we see the people at home being increasingly dissociated from the military activities of the state.  — The ISIS situation is a good case in point — if you look at the US for example, it was not really targeted by ISIS as much as for example, other European countries were so we had very limited, if any, real ISIS terrorist attacks within the US. Nonetheless, we saw, through sleeper cells, lone wolves and all these networks that ISIS had built indirectly through radicalisation and self-radicalisation, that in the western world — especially in France and Belgium — these threats could become home-born eventually. Again, the Obama administration needed to do something about it but for the domestic audience in the country, the war against ISIS was very far away and people were asking why we needed to go to war over something that hasn’t really materialised yet.  That created a problematic dilemma for the Obama administration — on one hand they said we need to do something about it but on the other, the public will not allow mobilisation of troops on a large scale and they won’t give us the funds to do that as well so we need to find a cheap and economical way to do something about that risk.

Cyber warfare is kind of the panacea, if you will, for this dilemma.  You’re unable to do something overseas but you can kind of get involved in these conflicts and you can get involved against a particular risk while being off the public radar with a very low financial and political cost because the public doesn’t really ask you what you’re doing. Afghanistan is another great case study for the most part, considering we still have Germany, the UK and US still having troops in Afghanistan. Nobody knows why we’re still in Afghanistan and it hasn’t been well-communicated. The threat that came out of Afghanistan right after the 9/11 attacks is not something that is still visible and understandable for the Generation Z, for example because most of them weren’t even born then or even if they were, they don’t remember what really happened so why are we still there? However, people are not asking any questions because we found ways to stay under the radar in Afghanistan and fight a protracted conflict that we will never win.and again, the public has been dissociated — they don’t ask questions, don’t care where their soldiers are going and don’t know that there are a couple of thousand US, German and British still stationed and Kabul and in other areas of Afghanistan.  You create shadow stealth wars under the public radar and what you’re creating and breaking is essentially the Clausewitz trinity of society, state and soldier.  The idea here is that society is kind of empowering the agent, the state, to raise the military to provide for its security. When, however, the public no longer thinks that they’re exposed to a security threat, what they’re doing is to say  they don’t want you to use the military that they raised to protect them to fight threats overseas and most of the threats today are overseas — a humanitarian intervention, for example, is about doing something overseas to help other people – you’re not helping the public at home so the risk that the society is willing to take is fairly limited.  Again, the state is in that weird situation where it cannot use the military that it has raised to protect society because society says you can’t use it – casualty aversion: you can’t use our funds which come from our tax money to again, fight wars overseas against something that is not really concerned with our security.  Hence, the state is now trying to find ways to cut off society and the military and that’s where surrogate warfare comes in.  In the book I have a nice way of illustrating this because you’re kind of cutting the trinity — the state is fighting a war using a surrogate which obviously isn’t raised through the local communities and is not attached to local society and that’s why the local society doesn’t care.  What you end up with is something very similar to pre-modern or early- modern cabinet wars where you know the cabinet, the executive, is fighting wars without having to ask the legislature, parliament, congress and without essentially having to ask public opinion whether they can fight this war or not because you’re muting them by dissociating them and not using the military aka citizens in uniform. That’s something most people are fine with because they’re saying you’re fighting a war that doesn’t concern them and you’re using their funds but not using their human capital, in other words, citizens, to fight this war so they don’t really care if you go on and do it.

We can see this same phenomenon  happening with private security companies (PMCs) also despite the fact that those who’re fighting  are often citizens of that state –  in the US for example, PMCs  are contractors and most of them are Americans –  the public says it’s fine because they’re volunteers  who’re happy to  be engaging in this war and they’re  getting well-paid for it so again, the public is fine with them  doing it.  What we end up with is cabinet wars that are run by the executive cabinet — in the case of the US it’s the president and for the UK, it’s the prime minister — fighting a war without parliament’s approval or oversight, without congressional oversight in the instance of the US. and that creates a situation whereby the state can stay engaged in a conflict indefinitely.

[Alessandro Arduino]: Andreas, I find it especially intriguing when you were talking about how you’re in the minority as you don’t look at Clausewitz — I’m not asking you if you’re a fan of Jomini but definitely, Tsun’s [concept] in the Art of War underlined how risk management and resource management is at the core of an effort. Of course, there was a time in which China was in a warring state so it was not a fight between two powers but it was a fight between several states at the same time. Now you mentioned that the nature and character of war is also changing and you just mentioned cabinet war or pre-modern war so if I can summarise: Surrogate warfare is risk management and you are right that it’s not a new phenomenon and in many ways, it’s a return to a pre-Westphalian model. In the past one or more year that we’ve been running this podcast, several of our guests’ predictions and analysis underlined how, in their opinion, we are looking to a pre-Wetsphalian time.

You just mentioned that in the past, the state outsourced defence to compensate for its own limited capabilities and today, it’s mainly an attempt to limit state accountability. While this, in some way, may be true for a lot of the large countries with massive standing armies but with a deficit in capacity to continue to be a measure motivator for military outsourcing — in places for example, like the Gulf where they don’t have enough of resources. You have very specific first-hand knowledge working in the Gulf and with their military. I’m wondering if you could reflect on your experience in Qatar – [tell us] how did surrogacy play out there and how did Qatar basically help you with shaping your book?

[Andreas Krieg]: Thank you very much.  Yes, you’re absolutely right so the motivations — there are a variety of them as to why you engage in surrogate warfare, why states do so — they obviously vary depending on the size of the country as well as a country that is not liberal and doesn’t have a civil society doesn’t really need to answer to the public who most of the time don’t really care where the country sends its military to.  While you’re right, I think, about most Western states finding a discreet way of conducting war and trying to conduct war with plausible deniability, for the smaller states I think surrogate warfare is a way of translating financial power into military power and also military reach, if you will.

I think Qatar might not be the greatest of case studies here but you know, it is a good one.
It’s a country of 350,000 or 330,000 indigenous Qataris — a very small pool of people who could actually join the military — so they are very much based on having loaned service officers in their ranks and as a small country with a very small pool of human capital, they obviously need to find ways to delegate the burden of warfare to other entities. Qatar hasn’t really been at war directly, in the way that other Gulf countries have but Qatar was involved in the Arab Spring.   What we saw then is countries being very good at using a small pool of special forces and augmenting them with local militias; we saw that in Syria in particular, the country’s special forces were engaging with local opposition rebels and militia groups to fight the regime and so, that’s a way of how a small state would go about doing this.

I think a better case study in the Gulf is the UAE because it has a much more ambitious agenda than Qatar and when it comes to military, Qatar has kind of withdrawn after the Arab Spring and has become more of a quietist diplomatic actor because of the very small size of its military. If you look at the UAE though, they are  a lot more ambitious and  assertive in the way they use the military and the way  they do so  —  you know they’re engaged in Yemen, Libya and Somalia among other areas — in all these conflict zones, they were looking to find ways to augment — again, they have a pool of one million locals,  indigenous and Emiratis, obviously somewhat bigger than Qatar but it’s still very small in comparison to their ambitions.   For them, surrogate warfare was very important in the way of engaging in Yemen, for example so they built up a surrogate force of the southern transitional council in Yemen, they set up a surrogate force of the Libyan National Army in Libya and they work extensively through mercenaries. I don’t want to call them PMCs because they’re not really companies in the Western sense of the word and I don’t want to compare them to the PMCs that we’ve seen in the US or UK as they’re a lot less formalised and they’re hiring Latin Americans for the most part who are trained in Abu Dhabi and then sent off to fight in Yemen.  They’ve used Israeli and American contractors as well as hitmen to take out what they call terrorists in Yemen – it’s kind of like death squads running around killing people — again, nothing to do with Emiratis though they are delegating this to mercenaries. In Somalia, for example, they even set up with Erik Prince, a counter-piracy operation entirely built out of mercenaries — again, nothing to do with Emirati boots on the ground. If we look at the motivating factor for the UAE to do this, it has a lot to do with their experience in Yemen.  Initially in Yemen, they had quite a lot of boots on the ground but in 2015 an Emirati military camp was hit by a missile and around 52 or 54 Emiratis were killed in one day — that’s always the single biggest loss of life and as an authoritarian, autocratic country you’d think the public doesn’t really care about these kind of casualties but they actually did care quite a lot.  There was a lot of pressure to minimise and keep casualties low so in this respect, the UAE — despite the fact that they’re non-liberal —worked on keeping the casualties to a very small number.

It’s the same we see in Russia — it’s a country very big in size, also not a liberal or democratic country but  their initial engagement in Syria  in 2015 was very much led by having to bear the burden of human casualties.  In Russia as well, a lot of people were asking questions about why  their fellow Russian comrades are falling in Syria and  the Russians were trying to find ways to minimise their casualties — again, that’s where surrogates come in.  Despite the fact that smaller states might be more driven by capacity and augmenting capability, often, even the smallest states that might not even be liberal, have an issue of finding discreet and deniable means of warfare.  The UAE is a great case study in that respect.

[Ameem Lutfi]: Thank you Dr Krieg. One of the other things that can set your book apart from some of the other texts out there is that you take the role of technology in shaping the idea of surrogacy very seriously. You mentioned that AI, in particular, can perhaps take the logic of surrogacy to its fullest extent by removing the human control and the human agency out of the question and minimising it to a great extent.  Can you give our listeners some insight into the kinds of arenas and military activity we are likely to see an increasing role for AI, perhaps in the near future?  What kind of questions will this generate for us politically and socially?

[Andreas Krieg]: That’s a very speculative question here because we obviously see AI already playing a very important role in targeting many of the new weaponry that’s being built. Even if you look at the F-35, F-22 fighter aircrafts, there’re a lot of AI in there but there are different degrees of automation —as we talked about in the book and automation has been a part of the revolution of military affairs, ever since the 90s and even earlier than that.

What we’re getting to now is having algorithms that are self-learning and they’re not just programmes or just automation – the latter basically means you set a weapon or you set an AI that follows a path depending on what you tell it to do. Algorithms and self-learning algorithms, in particular, enable us to create   more aware (I don’t want to say conscious) weapon systems that are making decisions without the human in the loop and that’s the potential. I think we can already develop these kinds of weapons if we wanted to. Obviously there’s a lot of ethical questions that need to be to be answered and I think for the most part, the global consensus is that we do want the human always in the loop as a means of supervising what these machine-led machines are actually doing. The problem is, though, you increasingly have more sensors that are collecting data and that they go into the decision-making process of the weapons systems itself. Hence they become ever more autonomous and by becoming more autonomous — despite the fact that you do have a human in the loop that could potentially interfere — the fact is that the human doesn’t have the ability to actually control all these sensors or data and then interfere when he or she thinks that the computer system is making the wrong decision because we’re just simply overwhelmed by all the decision-making processes that are taking place in very sophisticated AI.

One of the major issues is that despite us [humans] being in the loop or on the loop, we are increasingly unable to control all these systems especially when we have more than just one system [to manage].  So when we have swarms of drones, for example, or even a squadron of drones flying,  potentially gathering data and making its own decision of what and where to strike —  again, this is absolutely not a futuristic scenario because the technology exists —  you might say we have a human on the loop who makes sure that no mistakes are made but  the problem is that the human cannot control all these different systems so we might return to creating an AI that controls  other AIs.However, that would delegate it even further  so what we’re increasingly seeing  is an outsourcing of the human element in it –  despite the fact that nominally they are still on the loop or in the loop, there is so much decision-making going on that we already delegated [them] to machines such that we are increasingly losing the ability to control it effectively. The ability to control also means you need to have the cognitive ability to actually control that and I feel we don’t have that much cognitive ability anymore.

There’s obviously a lot of issues that come with it and as I say, there is a global consensus of how far automation as well as AI is supposed to go and how much we want algorithms to be autonomous.  I feel that we’ve broken that consensus in recent years or at least some people have.  I think 20 years ago, or even 10 years ago, the US was very much leading on all these AI questions -; in global forums within the United Nations, for example, you would see that the US would take a very liberal normative approach of saying there needs to be red lines of what we can and cannot do and what we let machines do or not do. The emergence and resurgence of China as the leader in AI has really broken that consensus. I think China has found a way of not only surpassing technology and development of AI in terms of anything that’s been done in the Western world — China is definitely the leading country in that respect— but it also has an entirely different normative approach to it and they don’t have the same inhibitions.  I think the problem that we see here is that without the Western liberal limitations that we put on the Western world or those we have traditionally put on the research and development of AIs, China can really leap ahead and I think automation and AI is not just in the kinetic sense but also in terms of how AI can control a whole set of different levers of power especially in the wider information domain.  What we can see here is that if we, in the West, are imposing our liberal normative constraints on the development of such machines and autonomous systems, we will be left behind and I think that has led to this consensus being broken. The US is now saying  we can’t really stick to the same guidelines that we wanted to send out a decade ago because then we’d be left behind so we need to invest as well. Nonetheless, the liberal laws — privacy laws, data-collection laws — are still never going to be what they are in China. We don’t have all the sensors since we’re not allowed to store all that data so in that respect, I think we’re being left behind and it’s kind of a race to the bottom of getting rid of all these constraints and making sure  we keep an edge. This kind of arms race that is being set off over the last decade or so, I think, is not only disruptive but very destructive as well. I think that’s where we sort of see the trend and again, the trend is more delegation to the machine, taking the human out of the loop as much as you can and I think that’s a trend which I find very problematic not just in the kinetic realm but beyond that in terms of how we engineer social computation and social life more widely with AI in the loop.

[Alessandro Arduino]: Yes, what you just mentioned, especially regarding China, I think is well-summarised in a book that now I think is quite old — when translated to English I think the name of the book is Unrestricted Warfare by Colonel Qiao Liang and Colonel Wang Xiangsui. In this respect, I think we can go on talking for hours. Here at MEI(NUS) we   had one webinar on how AI competition and the US-China superpower competition is going to play [out] in the Middle East.

Now, looking back at the Middle East — I would like to look a little bit at Iran. In your publication, you suggest that Iran has been ahead of the curve when it comes to surrogate warfare on account of having worked with various militia non-state actors since the early days of the revolution. Iran, you further argue, also has a better control of what is, let’s say, a central tension between control and autonomy. Can you elaborate on what allowed them to have a great control over a surrogate without additional transactional costs?

[Andreas Krieg]: There’s one trade-off that we talked about essentially in the book, which is the kind of trade-off between control and autonomy.  You do want a degree of autonomy for your surrogate because that creates dissociation — if you have too much control, obviously whatever the surrogate does kind of reflects back on you which means you can’t avoid accountability.  At the same time, you want to control the surrogate because you want the surrogate to do what was asked of him or her. and so, what the surrogate is always striving to do is creating and maximising autonomy because they want to get your support but they also want to achieve their own ends.  If the ends of the surrogate and the ends of the patron don’t overlap too much, then you’re you’re kind of left with a race where finally, the surrogate will end up doing whatever he or she or it is trying to achieve.  You’re kind of trying to find a perfect equilibrium where you have a degree of effective control but also enough dissociation from the surrogate, allowing the patron to kind of get away with murder, if that makes sense.

Iran, I think, has its entire military complex built upon surrogacy – it’s one that’s built up on delegation based on giving the burden of warfare to local actors across the region who can, again, not win wars but can hurt the enemy. The approach is one of death by a thousand cuts. It’s basically doing a lot of little pincer movements that can hurt and disrupt the activities of your enemy and — you know the enemy, being the Gulf states, the US and other Western powers engaged in the Middle East — can over time, create a so much disruption leading to an overwhelming burden on your enemy and the enemy withdraws.  I think we’ve seen some of this with the US withdrawal from the Middle East where I think the Iranians, have now  achieved a situation or created a situation where the burden put upon the US — especially in Iraq through its militia network — has been overwhelming for the US and is unsustainable and the US is now asking itself  if this is still a burden that its willing to carry and for what end. What the Iranians have achieved is creating a very complex and  wide-reaching network of mostly 99 percent human surrogates across the region, especially in Yemen, Iraq, Syria and Lebanon but also more widely in Africa and South America  with some that we would call terrorist organisations  because there are these kind of non-state actors in South America — cells that are linked to the Quds force (some of them are also in Southeast Asia actually).  Its networks of just individuals sometimes who can be activated by Iran to perpetrate an attack against the whatever the target might be at any given time.  What the Iranians have done is they’ve created a network that is held together, if you will, not just by transactional means (i.e not just through means of accommodation, support and coercion on the other side) so it’s not just carrot-and-stick, which is what we do in the West most of the time but instead, creating a community which is almost genuinely and authentically buying into the overall grand strategic narrative of the Islamic Republic and the Islamic Revolution – the idea of being the kind of reactive anti-Western, anti-colonialist movement against the so-called Zionist threat, against the US archenemy.  Many of these surrogates that are buying into that are not necessarily driven by Shia Islamism — as Iran is kind of the leader of the Shia Muslim world — but it’s also groups like Hamas for example (which are not Shia), who are buying into the overall narrative of being against Israel and US presence in the region.  Iran has, over many decades, created an umbrella which is very attractive – obviously it comes with financial and material support as well which are important and again, I think the Iranians have developed great technology on their own, sometimes with the help of China and Russia but quite good technology when it comes to ballistic missile systems and also in the cyber domain, they’re getting increasingly better.  They have technology that they can transfer as a way of inducing surrogates to work with them and the Houthis in Yemen are a great case study, in this respect. The Houthis are obviously an autonomous actor – they have their own strategic ends that they’re fighting for in Yemen and Iran has limited control over the Houthis but it’s a win-win situation for the time being as they both have the same enemy in Saudi Arabia for the most part and Israel as well although it doesn’t really play a major role in this at the moment. The Houthis have existed before Iranian support and will exist without Iranian support so even if the Iranians were withdrawing from Yemen now, the Houthis would continue fighting because they have overlapping interests. The Iranians have invested quite heavily in material support, training and equipping forces and making the Houthis a much better fighting force, particularly when they’re engaging Saudi Arabia.

The great thing about this from an Iranian standpoint is that the transformational control that they have developed over these surrogates means that you have a degree of holding them accountable because the surrogate and the patrons all seem to be fighting for the same thing
so having an overall grand strategic narrative that your surrogate can buy into helps in streamlining and creating synergies across your surrogate network. I think that’s why Iran is a lot better than the West because when we, as the West, go and engage with surrogates anywhere in the world, it’s mostly based on transactional control and that is only short-term; it will not last because eventually, when the surrogate  finds his interests are diverting from the patron’s interest,  the surrogate will try to find ways to bypass the patron’s control and they will do that. I think transformational buy-in, if you can create this, is a lot more long-lasting and sustainable.  I think that’s probably the greatest lesson to be learned from the Iranians.

[Ameem Lutfi]: Thank you. Now moving the conversation to the part of the world we’re sitting in right now: Singapore. You mentioned the global change that’s happening – within this, perhaps no state will remain unaffected so even small states like Singapore cannot have this bunker mentality — you build a fort with big enough walls and that’s fine — because the nature of war itself is changing.  Within this changing nature of war, perhaps very quickly, what do you think are some of the basic practical steps a state like Singapore can take to move from war to risk management, with perhaps a light touch?

[Andreas Krieg]: That’s a broad question. I think the most important thing in the 21^st century is, again, not relying on one lever of power. I think, having a whole-of-government approach means developing other levers of power and Singapore has effectively done this, I think. You know, Singapore is a great case study of a small state that, through hedging, has created a relative security that is not relying entirely on his military because its military is very small in size.  I think economic, financial levers of power, as well as political, diplomatic levers of power are equally important and a whole-of-government approach means you have to be prepared to go into competition with your neighbours or your antagonists with the ability to win in every single domain, or at least in order to be resilient in that domain.  Singapore has that resilience in the economic and financial sector, which is very important and trade as well — it has created a network of international partners.

When it comes to the information domain, I do think that the information domain is one of these areas where small states can probably equalise or overcome their smallest in the quickest way. I think a country that doesn’t have a vast military but is good in AI is developing systems that allow it to compensate for its human capacity shortages as well as finding ways to use financial power; again, having a lot of money to spend. I think the information domain allows you to spend that money and get a power projection in return and so, I think in the information domain you can make up for a lot of things that you can’t make up for as quickly in the military domain.  Subversion, I think, is a very interesting way in messaging positive as well as negative ways for a country to create itself and build a certain reputation for itself in the world.  The UAE is a great case study for that as well — first of all, creating a solid positive reputation of itself and then using that information power and networks.  I’m not just talking about social media bots and PR companies – I’m talking about surrogates of academic think tanks, universities that they fund and creating networks of business leaders in the Western world that all, in the end, will come and do their bidding when asked.

I think Singapore is another case where they can learn from the UAE, in that respect. Information power is not just using cyber technology or operating in the cyberspace – it’s everything that uses information to maximise your impact in the world and potentially even changing the behaviour of actors elsewhere.  I think influence operations can be a very important tool to get your partners as well, to change policy in your favour without using coercion at all and I think Singapore is probably one of the countries that could maximise in that domain, while obviously keeping all the networks that it has everywhere else.

[Alessandro Arduino]: You just mentioned information power and I think we can discuss about that for many hours but considering that we need to wrap up our podcast, I think we’ll leave it as an open invitation for your next book.  What I’m going to do now is to ask the question that we ask all our guests and it’s quite a broad, long and difficult question which you have just a couple of minutes to answer — In your opinion, what will be the future of war and risk management in a complex environment in the next 30 years?  If you could elaborate especially, as to whether you think PMCs or other modes of surrogate warfare are here to stay or if they are just a temporary solution to the vacuum left behind by the collapse of the Cold War world order.

[Andreas Krieg]: Thank you. This  draws upon a lot of the things that have been said already and one thing is that I think the global trend is a return to pre-modern times – I think we will see more of what some people were calling  ‘neo-medievalisation of the world’ where you don’t have a bipolar order but an apolar order — I wouldn’t even call it a multipolar order — I think we’ll have a lot of different regional and international actors competing and local actors as well. I mean, local, regional and international actors competing and making it into a very, very complex world where all the realist state-centric ideas of how the world works don’t really hold. In that kind of messy competitive environment where state and non-state actors interact with one another; where non-state actors at times have more power than state actors and are obviously kind of weighing in on that competition; as well as actors in their own right — among them multinational companies, for example — I do think that it becomes very very difficult for the state to manage that and the global apolar order.  I do think as well that the United Nations system which is built up as a state-centric system of just around 198 states is impotent and incapable to actually be managing that mess.  What we will see is obviously that, in order to sustain and maintain yourself  in that kind of unstable apolar order, I think states will increasingly rely  on outsourcing,  delegation and working with non-state actors because that’s the only way you can compete because while the regular military is obviously important for that very niche activity of major combat operations, I think major combat operations will be — not a thing of the past — but it will be very much a not usual, non-conventional way of engaging in war, if you will and the conventional way of war will be the new surrogate method which is messy and difficult to control.  PMCs will play as much a role as executive agents of the state and executive agents of multinational companies as well because those companies accumulating more power and wealth than some states means that they are also competitors in this increasingly apolar world.

It’s definitely a bit of a gloomy outlook into the future rather than an optimistic one but I think on the positive side, we’re not seeing major combat operations and prolonged wars. That means we may have to live in a state of constant unpeace, but we are still not in a state of complete war. I don’t think we will return to a world order of peace, unfortunately —that is peace in the conventional understanding of it.

[Ameem Lutfi]: Thank you so much for joining us today.  We’re ending on somewhat of a grim note but I really do recommend those who are interested to know more, to read Surrogate Warfare: The Transformation of War in the 21^st Century. Thank you everyone for joining us today. I hope that you can all join us again in our upcoming podcast.

[Andreas Krieg]: Thank you.