Irregular Warfare Podcast - Proxy Warfare, Theory and Practice

Episode Date: June 30, 2023

Why do states engage in proxy warfare? How does what scholars call principal-agent theory explain the way proxy warfare actually plays out—particularly the challenges that arise when the interests of a principal and a proxy diverge? And as the US military continues to prepare for large-scale combat operations, how should the ability to leverage proxies factor into planning? This episode addresses these questions and more in wide-ranging discussing featuring three guests. Dr. Nakissa Jahanbani is an assistant professor in West Point's Department of Social Sciences and a researcher at the Combating Terrorism Center at West Point. Dr. Vladimir Rauta is a lecturer in politics and international relations at the University of Reading and the editor of the forthcoming Routledge Handbook of Proxy Wars. And retired Lieutenant General Ken Tovo served for almost forty years in the Army, including as commanding general of US Army Special Operations Command. Note: This episode was originally recorded and released by the Social Science of War podcast, a coproduction between the Modern War Institute at West Point and West Point's Department of Social Sciences.

Today, the Irregular Warfare Initiative is cross-promoting the Social Science of War podcast from West Point's Department of Social Sciences. This episode is an in-depth discussion on proxy warfare's role in strategic competition with Dr. Nakeesa Jahanbani, Dr. Vladimir Rauta, and retired Lieutenant General Ken Tovo, with Kyle Atwell hosting. Our next episode will be on the issue of elite capture and security assistance efforts abroad with Ambassador Anne Patterson, Ambassador Carl Eikenberry, and Dr. Alex Berg. Welcome to The Social Science of War, a podcast for land warfare scholars and practitioners.

My name is Kyle Atwell. I'm an Army officer instructing international affairs at the Social Sciences Department at West Point. And in today's episode, I'm joined by two scholars and a retired senior military officer to discuss what role proxy warfare will play in strategic competition. to engage in it and the challenges that come with delegating security objectives to proxy forces. A good portion of the conversation explores proxy warfare through the framework of the Principal-Agent Dilemma to include a discussion on the role of interest alignment between principals and proxies and how and whether principals can overcome interest misalignment. We conclude with a discussion on how the Army specifically can expect to employ proxy warfare both in strategic competition

and during large-scale combat operations. My first guest is Dr. Nakhisa Jahanbani, an assistant professor here in the Department of Social Sciences at West Point and a researcher at the Combating Terrorism Center. She studies political violence, focusing on questions of state-proxy relationships, and today's episode is motivated by her co-authored article, which is titled, Entangled, Iran and Hezbollah's Support to Proxies Operating in Syria. My second guest is Dr. Vladimir Rauta. He is a lecturer in politics and international relations at the University of Reading and

a fellow at the Irregular Warfare Initiative. He is widely published on proxy warfare, to include as co-editor of the forthcoming Rutlich Handbook of Proxy Wars, a book which both Nikisa and myself have contributed chapters to. Our third guest is Lieutenant General Ken Tovo. He retired as a career special forces officer with almost 40 years of experience within the Army, culminating as commanding general of U.S. Army Special Operations Command, the Army organization which arguably is most responsible for the U.S. government's military contribution to proxy warfare. The Social Science of War podcast is brought to you by the Department of Social Sciences at West Point. Our goal is to bring together

experienced soldiers and scholars to better understand land warfare, the Army, and national security strategy. We hope you enjoy today's conversation with Nakisa, Vlad, and Ken. hope you enjoy today's conversation with Nikesa, Vlad, and Ken. Dr. Nikesa Jhanbani, Dr. Vladimir Rauta, and Lieutenant General Ken Tovo, welcome to Episode 6 of the Social Science of War podcast. I'm very excited for today's conversation. Thanks for having us. Thank you very much for the invitation. Yeah, I'm really looking forward to it. Thanks for inviting me on. Today, we're going to talk about the role of proxy warfare in recent and future conflict,

and specifically how the army and military at large needs to prepare for this unique form of conflict while balancing it with other national security threats. I'd like to start by motivating the conversation a little. This question is for all of you, but let's start with Vlad. What is proxy warfare and will it be relevant in great power competition? I'll answer your second question first. And I think it will be relevant

for sort of present and future warfare. And then we can unpack this further. And when it comes to definitions, I don't think that the discussion can be as quick or as neat. I'll give you sort of my own definition, which sort of my own definition, which sort of equates a proxy war with an indirect military intervention.

And then I'd like to see what everyone else sort of thinks about this. But in short, proxy wars sort of are conflicts between two or more actors in which at least one of them entrusts another party to fight on their behalf. So we have an external party, commonly referred to as a sponsor or the principal, delegating combat action to an agent, our proxy, and provide some form of military, economic, diplomatic assistance to the proxy to fight. So that's how I would sort of define it as an opening conversation. I generally agree with Vlad's sentiments. In most of my work, like in my dissertation and the work I've done at CTC, I've typically defined proxy warfare as a state supporting a violent non-state actor, but I think we can expand that to also include

non-violent ones as well. And in some of the work I've done, there's been instances of actors like Iran supporting political parties, educational and religious institutions too. And I think that that's probably a more understudied area in general. And I'm happy to share some of the sentiments and some of the research that I found about that. In the context of if it's going to matter for great power competition, I want to expand that to include strategic competition more generally to also include near-peer competition. And I think it definitely will because generally speaking, fighting through a proxy, whether it's providing support in the battlefield or outside of it, it makes a lot of sense. It's usually more cost-effective for states. It provides a lot of other opportunities for them to have plausible

deniability to be able to push off some of the responsibility of that action. And so as conflict becomes much more costly, I think it is something we're going to see more and more. I concur with both of those definitions. VLADS, I think, is kind of a traditional, very focused on the violent action, but I do like Nikisa's idea of expanding it to support of other groups that can exert leverage. I think it's important to remember that proxy war is still war. While it may seem like a limited involvement to the sponsor, the participants are often engaged in what may be an existential conflict. I mean, you could argue that what we're watching right now in the Ukraine and Russia has been turned into somewhat of a proxy war by the West. But for the Ukrainians,

it's clearly existential. And, you know, the Russians believe it's existential for them as well. And so I think to try and remove it from the class of war, which some people do, as it's somehow something different than war, it ought to be avoided because it's got a lot of the same challenges, right? It can escalate beyond what we wanted it to be. Our involvement can get deeper, et cetera. And then the other thing I'd say is to differentiate it from what I would call use of surrogates. And that is the fact that I think for a sponsor to truly enable a proxy in a positive relationship for both, it's really important that objectives are closely aligned.

There may be some differences of objectives, but there's got to be some common ground. Whereas I classify use of surrogates much more as a transactional agreement. They're almost a force for hire when you use surrogates. Whereas a proxy has their own objectives, their own goals that are in some ways consistent with what the sponsor is trying to accomplish. Such an interesting observation. I somehow tend to sort of collapse everything under a proxy label, but I'm quite appreciative of the variation, right, in the relationship. And some are decades long, almost partnership, informal alliances almost, whereas some are, as Ken put it,

quite transactional relations. And I think an example to that that came to mind was sort of the pro-governmental militias that sort of emerge out of nothing and immediately sort of collaborate for very discrete goals and for very short periods of time, in some cases with governments, both within sort of states and sort of outside of states but i think if our audience wants to pick something up is that there is no such thing as a sort of a standard typical sort of proxy relationship nor there's ample space to sort of conceptualize it and think of different types and just one sort of final observation picking up from what ken mentioned earlier on we should not forget that this is all. I think that is super important. And there are so many different layers basically to

unpack there. And in some of the work that's forthcoming, and in the handbook to which Nikesan and Kyle, you've contributed, the Routledge Handbook of Proxy Wars, my co-editors and I took a step back and sort of thought how best to capture this extraordinary variety. So we sort of, instead of imposing a definition, we sort of thought about, well, we should think about proxy wars as a logic, the fact that when do states substitute their own direct use of force? We can also think about proxy wars as a relationship. And this is precisely this, what relationships matter, which are longer, which are shorter, but then also as a process, who gets to control things and who gets to sort of decide. And I think that's equally important.

So instead of asking for a sort of a simple definition, perhaps we should sort of think about them on a spectrum, I guess. How prominent has proxy war been historically? And do you anticipate more or fewer proxy conflicts as we shift into a more multipolar world? And kind of the motivation for this question is I've heard a lot of people argue that, you know, if you look at the last era of strategic or great power competition, it was the Cold War, and that was primarily fought between the Soviet Union and the United States through proxies. Is that something we can use to anticipate how conflict might look in the new era of strategic competition? I think we can. Not sure how useful it might be or whether it will apply entirely. Proxy wars, I think we sort of know that they're neither sort of new nor rare, right?

Historically, we can think of very sort of famous examples from the 30 years war to the American War of Independence, the Russian Civil War, Spanish Civil War, and then we move into the sort of the Cold War period. So the latest sort of data on external support tells us that since the 70s all the way to today, 80% of civil wars and more than 70% of interstate wars have experienced some sort of external meddling. So it's been around, and the trends are sort of on the rise, pretty much sort of dropping or peaking with standard trends on violence. We've seen recent evidence of this with the Syrian civil war. Ken mentioned the conflict in Ukraine. And I think part of it is also, sure, in a multipolar world and having regional powers

and what that means is one side of it. But also, I think it depends on how we define a proxy, right? How are we defining what constitutes a violent actor? So for instance, I remember in the IWI CTC proxy warfare panel, we talked about this. This is from last year. But one of the speakers, Ben Dalton from New America, mentioned that considering the Wagner Group, soldiers, conscripts, and far-right volunteer regiments should all be considered proxies. And I don't disagree with that, right? I think then it just depends on how you're defining, as researchers and as analysts, as practitioners within this space, what constitutes both sides of it, but particularly what constitutes a proxy.

Yeah, I think that history should be a guide here. When we look at previous eras of either multipolarity or just great power competition, however you want to frame it, I think the reality as we look at history is that particularly great powers do not want to engage in traditional conventional warfare against each other because it is far too costly. It is unpredictable. And in essence, often both sides come out losers. I always like to give the example of World War I and World War II, primarily a clash over empire and whose writ would run the world, determining competing with Britain in the world of empires. on the world, determined to compete with Britain in the world of empires. And in the end, neither one won, arguably, right? I mean, ostensibly, Britain won both World War I and World War II, or is on the winning side, and yet they still lost their empire, the very reason they were

fighting for, and a significant amount of treasure, people, etc. So nations want to avoid that, but they still want to achieve objectives. And I think that's what we're seeing here, whether it's how Iran acts across the Middle East and the globe in order to achieve its objectives, which is to influence its neighbors in a certain way. We're watching China and Russia do the same. They want to achieve objectives, and they don't want to confront US power directly. And conversely, we don't want to confront their power directly because of, in this nuclear age, the costs are even more astronomical than they were before the nuclear age, when great powers clash. So I think we are going to see more

of this. I do agree with Ladna Kisa. I mean, the range of what we could classify as proxy war is pretty wide, but I do think we're going to see nations leverage everything at their disposal to achieve their objectives short of conventional war whenever possible. Part of the reason that we'll see more of it, which I touched on earlier, in addition to offering states plausible deniability, if they're trying to engage in something that they don't want others to find out, I think it also makes sense. And, you know, building off what Ken and Vlad said, conventional conflict is too costly, right? It's so much easier to work with a proxy unit, whatever that might look like. But particularly in a battlefield context, it's, you know, less expensive than sending your own personnel, your own tanks, your own material.

And, you know, in a lot of ways, proxies are more efficient. It's less expensive than sending your own personnel, your own tanks, your own material. And in a lot of ways, proxies are more efficient. They already have the local terrain, whether that's social or physical, already nailed down. And if you're thinking of it from a U.S. military context, we'd have to train a unit, help them understand, have them have some sort of language competency, some sort of other social social cultural terrain competency, and then physical terrain competency, and then send them out. And while that's what special forces do, at the same time, thinking about at what point is it useful for us to put our units and the extreme amount of training and how much it has gone into training them at risk and their lives at risk versus another entities. And also it's an opportunity for a costly signaling tool. There's a lot of instances where states have worked through a proxy

just for a very short period of time to be able to up the costs or the perceived costs on something. I think like he said, it's such a great job of outlying sort of perhaps why states want to pursue proxy wars. But I think going back said, it's such a great job of outlying sort of perhaps why states want to pursue proxy wars. But I think going back to the original question of like, will we see a bit more of this in the context of sort of great power competition or near power competition? The same logic appeals in the same way to great powers, middle powers, weak powers, right? So I think the whole idea of doing something deniably cost efficiently, by benefiting from sort of local expertise and sort of competence is the driving sort of force

behind why proxy wars is a sort of a bad policy option, but yet such a seductive policy option for everyone. And we know this, we had a Cold War period with sort of great power competition, the 90s were pretty much a sort of a shift. Who was waging sort of proxy wars where we sort of had the Iran, Pakistan, India sort of middle powers and sometimes weaker powers. And now we see a shift again by looking at sort of data. However, we might want to define a proxy actor here again, shifting towards the P5s or the great powers embracing this in tandem or in parallel with

other types of powers doing the same thing. Yeah, that's an interesting point. One of my research projects, I do kind of try to quantify a number of proxy conflicts. And if you look at the data between 1975 and 2000, for example, and you looked at kind of, you know, who were the two third parties kind of hurting each other with, you know, some actor in the middle. So for example, in the 1980s, the United States provided military equipment to the Mujahideen who were able to then kill Russians with it. It's only like something like five to 6% of all dyads that engage in proxy warfare were actually both members of the United Nations Security Council. So these kind of great powers and actually something like over 50% of proxy conflicts take place in Africa between African countries, which are not nuclear powers or not great powers at a national scale. So I think that point that proxy warfare is not just a tool of great powers, it's a tool of states and actors in general is an important point. And I think it also makes sense building off of what both of you mentioned, because of its cost efficiency, it would seem like a good policy option for a state that may not necessarily be the most military or economically strong for a lot of reasons.

which is, in your experience over the last 35 years of your career, how has proxy warfare impacted your career as an army officer and at what levels? Because a lot of this sounds very strategic in nature, like why would a state use another state to accomplish some great power objective? But did this impact you as an army officer at various points of your career and how so? Proxy warfare is the reason for existence, if you will, of Green Berets. A couple of examples, opening days of the invasion of Iraq. My unit, the 10th Special Forces Group, I was battalion commander at the time, but we were charged with trying to keep two-thirds of the Iraqi army in the north, about 13 divisions, and keep them from interfering with the invasion coming out of Kuwait.

And to do that, we leveraged upwards of 50,000 Kurdish paramilitary, the Peshmerga, to achieve the effect that we were tasked with achieving. And so to me, that's an example of use of a proxy force in support of a conventional campaign. Sometimes we use proxy forces within a conventional campaign. Sometimes they're used in isolation. But as a special forces officer, that's what we trained for, was how to take our capabilities and enhance that of an indigenous partner

to achieve their objectives and U.S. objectives as well. And then, of course, the rest of our time in Iraq, and I got to go back four more times after the invasion, was largely dealing with the other side of proxy warfare. All of the U.S. Army that served in Iraq for those counterinsurgency years got some taste and flavor of what it was like to deal with proxy warfare, largely from the defensive side, as we watched the Iranians use Shia militias, the special groups, et cetera, to try and undermine U.S. strategy inside Iraq and exert their own influence. And so I guess my short answer to, is this matter to future army

officers, would be yes, because no matter what you're asked to do in the future, I would bet that you're going to see some element of proxy warfare in the mix. And it may look like a conventional conflict, but there'll be parts of the battlefield where either we're trying to leverage proxies or where our adversary is trying to leverage proxy forces against us. We've talked about some of the benefits, right, of why states would engage with proxies. Can we talk a little bit about some of the drawbacks for states that might exist? And Ken, I'm interested to hear if you had to deal with this as well, if you're able to speak about it. Because there's always, you know, you might come across a group that's difficult to manage. There might be some issues if you're supporting a group and they use

their weapons for something else, for instance. And also, we tend to have international repercussions for other states that are engaging with proxies, right? I think that's kind of sidelined the U.S. more generally. But just more holistically speaking, what are some of the drawbacks for states to support proxies? And what does that mean, I guess, in the context of strategic competition? That's a great question. I think we always look at the advantages and people talk about, you know, lower costs, et cetera. But sure, there are discrete disadvantages to this as well.

And probably first and foremost is control. You're giving over to another force the ability to use violence on their behalf, on your behalf to achieve objectives. And so when you outsource your work, on your behalf to achieve objectives. And so when you outsource your work, you lose an element of control. And it's everything from, are they maintaining focus on the objectives that you want to achieve? Or are they diverting to something else? And people's objectives change over conflict. And so sometimes you get divergence late, or as things progress, the commonalities disappear and the divergence increases.

I kind of experienced this with my Kurdish partners in the invasion. As long as Saddam's army was in the field, they were very focused on what we wanted them to focus on, which was defeating the Iraqi army. army. Once the Iraqi army disappeared, then they were much more focused on regaining lands that they felt were traditionally theirs, Kirkuk, Diyala province, etc., which somewhat conflicted with what the U.S. wanted or saw as the right outcome, balancing the sectarian influences in the country. So yeah, there's definitely a downside. And then the other challenge of proxy warfare is, and we're kind of seeing this today, is that the proxy force, who, as I said before, may see this as an existential conflict, wants everything you can provide in order to achieve the results on the ground. And yet, as a wielder of proxy warfare, the U.S. always places limits on it due to strategic considerations, economical considerations, et cetera. And so at the tactical level, you've got a partner who wants more,

but from a strategic perspective, there are limits on what we're willing to give. And so you're kind of caught in the middle of this challenge. And that's also one of the downsides to me is that reconciling how far the sponsor is willing to commit to how much the proxy actually needs. Once again, seeing this kind of in spades right now in the Ukraine, where the Ukrainians in an existential fight want tanks, long-shooting artillery, and jets, and the Western sponsors are putting constraints on that because of their own calculations and interests. because of their own calculations and interests.

I also had a sort of a question, but you answered it, Ken, as you were talking just now in terms of sort of perhaps drawbacks along the lines of a sort of goal differences between sort of the state and the proxy. And I think the other thing that's interesting in terms of understanding and assessing problems with sort of the state proxy relationship

goes back to the very thing that Ken mentioned at the start when he was drawing the distinction between proxy and a surrogate. I would presume that the relationship with the Kurds benefited from cooperating throughout the 90s in various capacities, and that sort of facilitated the great sort of cooperation between the US and sort of the Kurds. But like, Ken, you are the one who was there. So please correct me if I'm wrong. Whereas if we put it in the context of some sort of collection of fighters who are trying to sort of make sense of an ongoing civil war, right, like sort of Syria, then perhaps

the problems there could be explained quite differently. You know, what we're talking about is the challenges of engaging with a proxy strategy. And it sounds like what we're kind of describing is what in scholarship we call the principal agent dilemma. Vlad, can you talk through a little bit about what the basic assumptions of the principal agent dilemma is and whether there is kind of robust support or not within scholarship that this is a good framework through which to view proxy relationships? Well, given that I just wrote an article applying principal agent theory, I cannot disavow it. So I think it is the best way to think about the problem. I teed that one up for you really well. I love it. I love it. I mean, I think it is one of the ways in which we can think about this and

definitely one of the sort of the standard mainstream theoretical lenses through which we have understood conflict delegation, right? Because the language and the sort of the assumptions and the claims behind principal agent theory, which comes from sort of economics and has been applied left, right and center on all of these problems involving a range of actors, do lend themselves up to a certain degree to assess problems that might concern the principal, right? Which is when will an agent not act in its interests? Under what circumstances will it deviate from sort of the stated goals? How to sort of provide support, perhaps also in a costly fashion? And of course, it comes with the language to

capture the very problems that we were describing, sort of agency, slack, moral hazard. It comes as a sort of a complete package to study this. And it has been the dominant way to think about a sort of conflict delegation or sponsorship of rebels, especially if the research is of a quantitative flavor. But it's most certainly not the only one, the only sort of perspective around this. And literature has pushed back a bit or proposed sort of alternative angles

sort of looking at the strategic interaction between states and sort of sponsors to understand a bit more about the relationship or even things like securitization theory. But so far, my vote goes for principal agent theory. It's important to understand that when you engage in this, you have to understand these pitfalls, control divergent objectives, and then figure out mitigating strategies to try and minimize the risk of some of the diversion. That's why it's so important to really understand

the partner that we're working with. What are their goals and objectives and where might there be divergences with U.S. goals and objectives if we're the ones as the sponsor? make sure we really understand kind of this human domain at a micro context, if you will, so we can war game through when in time and space might our objectives diverge? And then how will we mitigate that when that comes to pass? And to some extent, this is a conversation with partners. I had conversations with my partner in northern Iraq, Jalal Talabani, about their goals and interests and where ours were. And we worked through where there might be some divergences and how we were going to try and deal with them. Just to follow up on that really quickly, what compounds the problem that Ken just described

is also the fact that proxies, rebels, if you may, in that way, are the strategically minded actors, right? So they're very capable at misrepresenting what they want to gain and sort of present themselves as being on the right side of history and how to phrase their sort of position and profile. And that has been the case for a long time. I think the sponsoring state

is caught in a bit of a double bind, not just to try to understand exactly what they want, but also to read between the lines and behind sort of the message that some rebels might say, might put forward in order to attract support, right? Because proxies are very astute at misrepresenting who they are in order to maximize resources. Yeah, I would just say it's kind of like dating. Everybody puts on their best face. But once you're involved in the execution of this relationship, it's more like dating. Everybody puts on their best face. But once you're involved in the execution of this relationship, it's more like marriage. And some of those other flaws and faults come out,

and you have to figure out how to work through them. I mean, I don't know if the Kurds would agree because they've been dumped so many times by the US. So this is not a very good relationship for them. I'm so struck by Ken describing a relationship with Talavani because it's just really fascinating to hear the interpersonal element that goes into proxy relationships. It's just really interesting as someone who studies this to hear that it sounds like at some level there's a negotiation that has to happen. I mean, I study

this using open source research. So it's news reports, think tank reports. We sometimes get the opportunity to interview different scholars and practitioners, but at the end of the day, it's about a relationship and a conversation and a negotiation is just, it's really fascinating to hear. Well, you know, a dominant theme in a lot of the academic discourse right now on security force assistance, for example, which is providing assistance to partner forces, which is essentially, per the definitions earlier, might be included as proxy warfare in some instances, is that interest alignment between the agent and the principal is the key to success. And I've heard this in the operational force as well

as, hey, with this country, do we share interests with them or not? That'll determine whether we continue to partner. I guess this leads to the question that we're dancing around, which is it possible to leverage a proxy whose interests do not align or maybe somewhat misaligned? And what tools do we have to influence them? You know, we've talked about relationships might influence, sticks might influence them. Do we have carrots to incentivize? And I'd be curious to know what academic literature says about the essential or non-essential role of interest alignment and whether we can influence that, but also based on your own practical experience.

I think there's got to be some level of interest alignment. I think you've got to figure out how to emphasize and accentuate where you're aligned and de-emphasize where we have differences. But I think there's always going to be some level of difference between where different parties, between the proxy and the sponsor. And then if there are wide, wide differences and the sponsor really wants to use the proxy or have a partnership, I think you've got to then look at more transactional things. The proxy needs something. It needs some kind of support. And the sponsor has the ability to provide it, whether it's material, money, et cetera. Those are means to get the proxy to act on behalf of the sponsor, even when there might be differences that are hard to work past. This might just be reiterating what Ken said, but his point about interest alignment is

really significant. And what are short-term and long-term interests that you can pull on, right? And I think that if you want to get someone to do something they don't want to do or might be slow to pick up, perhaps incentivizing with thinking about what their short-term goals are and incentivizing with more tactical or other material support might be better. Because if you think about a long-term investment or trying to enact some sort of more strategic policy goal that they may have, it's just going to take more time. It just makes a little bit more sense to focus on what some short-term interest could be. Just to follow up on that really quickly,

I think at least if we think of a proxy as a rebel, they're rebels that also refuse to be part of someone else's game. But the one thing that sort of comes to mind, or at least two things, we tend to think of proxy wars as a sort of a state to rebel affair, when in fact, I don't think it is. I think in between the principal and the agent, there are a couple of other actors, a couple of states who do perhaps a lot of the work in various different capacities. So one way in which a more powerful state could leverage and influence a proxy that would otherwise not be so forthcoming in cooperating would be by sort of collaborating with a sort of a regional

partner state in longer chains of delegation, right? And then they might have the ability of sort of shaping the proxy's behavior. And again, historically, we know that these longer chains of delegation actually do exist. And in the absence of such a state partner in the waging of more complex proxy wars, a state could also try and look at the group not as a unitary actor, right? There's sort of different leaders, different factions, different camps, and one could sort of try and approach it from that point of view. As we're talking about this, I am thinking about the Iran Entangled Report, where we looked at Iran's support to different groups operating in the Syrian conflict. And, you know, Iran and LH both sent forces into the

conflict from the beginning, from 2011, 2012, but they both faced considerable losses in 15 and 16. And at that time, it correlates with an increase of recruitment support to militias operating there, as well as increased recruitment of IRGC brigades like the Fatimiyoun and the Zainabiyoun, the Afghan and Pakistani, respectively, brigades that Iran recruited to fight on behalf of the IRGC brigades like the Fatimiyoun and the Zainabiyoun, the Afghan and Pakistani respectively brigades that Iran recruited to fight on behalf of the IRGC in Syria. So talking about this makes me want to dig into that data again and look at the cases and see if there are examples of perhaps not the Fatimiyoun and Zainabiyoun, but of the local militias and how Iran may have incentivized that relationship in the short term to either up recruitment

or if they just got more militias on their payroll. It's hard to ascertain in open source research, but now I'm curious. I think another Iranian example might be their support of the Houthis in Yemen. I had this conversation with some folks in the State Department back in 2012, 2013, when we were first beginning to see a relationship building between the Iranians and the Houthis. And there was a lot of dialogue that, hey, look, they are not aligned. They've got a different form of Shiism. There's more differences than there are commonalities in what they're trying to achieve. Yet we've seen over the years that

that relationship has grown very tight. And essentially, the Houthis have been a proxy for Iranian interests in the region. And a lot of that may just be transactional. There have been significant arms transfers. Most of this is an open source. All of it's an open source. I mean, the U.S. Navy just picked up another boat heading to Yemen and the Houthis a week or so ago. So the transactional provision of things over time can help build

a longer term relationship and get past some of those differences. One of the things that I think Vlad mentioned, kind of the US experience with the Kurds over time, but in many ways, we had positive experiences with the Kurds over time. One of the things that helped me with my relationship in 2003 was our unit, the 10th group, and I specifically had been involved in helping the Kurds at the end of the Gulf War when they were forced out of northern Iraq and into Turkey, Iran, etc. We had helped run refugee camps for them. And it was one of the first things that Jalal Talabani talked to me about when I came into northern Iraq was, you know, how this relationship went back to those days, and all the things that had transpired since. So the best relationships are built over time. And they can

turn what starts out as transactional into a more human dynamic where there's actually a good, strong relationship. And i think that's kind of what the iranians have been able to do with the houthis over the years in yemen they've turned a transactional relationship into something more like a partnership as you mentioned the case of the houthis i'm also reminded of iran's relationship with al-qaeda and the taliban which on various instances, by most of their researches in the open source, is much more tactical. Asaf Malqatam, actually Vlad's co-author on that proxy handbook volume, wrote a really great piece that takes a look at this in the

context of Iran and al-Qaeda specifically. The article is called Marriage of Convenience. I can't recommend it enough, but there are a few instances with the overwhelming focus on Iran. There are a few instances of Iran being a very skillful operator in leveraging tactical relationships with a number of actors. together with Michel Wyss. And then one thing that jumps to me in this conversation is that we think of these sort of transactional relationships precisely in the context of the state, but proxy wars are also waged by non-state actors. And non-state actors are also so capable at building and sort of holding together networks of proxy alliances

or various different proxies. And of course, Asaf and Michel have written about this precisely. And what stands out in their research and from their sort of empirical analysis is precisely this fact that non-state actors will invest and will use other sort of armed non-state actors as proxies for legitimacy reasons, right? So I think they have a totally different, or at least sort of a different way of understanding the purposes of proxy war strategies than states themselves, especially because they think about these proxies as political ancillaries which they want to gain legitimacy. So I think that's the other side of this conversation,

which I think is very interesting and sort of stands in contrast to the problems that states might have in terms of managing or finding proxies or sort of getting them to do their own thing. We have defined proxy warfare and discussed the key actors in it. We've discussed why states use proxy strategies and identified the challenges of proxy strategies, especially when there's a lack of interest alignment. And this leads me to the question, how does the military at large and specifically the Army need to organize, train, equip, and be employed to address proxy warfare threats in the future of strategic competition? I'll pass this question to Ken first, but open it up to all of you. Well, I would say from my personal background, this is what Green Berets exists for.

We exist to be able to work with a partner force to help leverage U.S. capabilities on their behalf and kind of mitigate some of the risks of proxy warfare, if you will. In many ways, I think when you talk about the broader army, I would say that the Security Force Assistance Brigade creation that started about five or six years ago is potentially a tool for the Army in how to aid a partner with training, advice, assistance, etc. And I think to some extent the Army has said, we're going to have to live in this aiding partners business, whether you call it proxy warfare or security force assistance. And so they created structure to do that with. There was some feeling that maybe they were trying to, quote, take Green Beret work,

but the reality is, you know, the Green Beret mission is very focused on one aspect of this. You know, you don't need Green Berets or even want Green Berets teaching a partner's artillery units how to work or some of the things that the SFABs can do now. So I think the Army has realized that they've got to organize for this. And I think the SFABs or the SLAPs are a big step towards doing that. I would say the next piece of this at the higher level has got to be, once you get past the tactics of this, is a recognition from both the military establishment, but also the national security establishment, that we're going to either be in a position to do this on behalf of the nation or have to fight against it as our adversaries use it. And it's wrapped up in this increased focus on irregular warfare that I think has got some movement and momentum inside the defense establishment, but sometimes gets crowded out by the focus on conventional warfare, conventional systems, etc. et cetera. But it really comes down to a recognition that while we like to see the state of the world as binary, we're either at peace or war, the reality is there's always some kind of conflict going on. Our adversaries are always waging some level of campaign. Sometimes it's violent, sometimes it's less than violent, and we've got to be more attuned to it. We can't

just be a break glass and move out when the war starts kind of force. We've got to, as a military, break glass and move out when the war starts kind of force we've got to as a military be ready to do our bit in the dime approach if you will even if it's a small m and sometimes that's just assisting partners developing capability but we've got to be engaged we can't just wait for the call to say war starts now the war's on already ken i was wondering if i could follow up with a really quick question because you mentioned sort of structure and you spoke a bit about what the Green Berets do. But the one thing that was sort of jumping to me was how important is interagency cooperation in this case, especially when you have so many different sort of actors, part of the sort of national security defense establishment, working in the same theater, working in the same context. To me, it's relevant to the conversation. So I was wondering if you could unpack that from your experience a bit.

Yeah, of course. It's crucial. This is not open field running for the Title X force, for the military services, right? Most of these campaigns, if you will, take place in essentially a Title 22 environment, right? We've got State Department, the ambassador is the lead. They're charged with pulling together the interagency effort. It's the Title 50 crowd, it's the intel community, it's the Title 10 crowd from the military, and all of the other agencies, and they all play and have to form some kind of coherent unity of effort, if you will, since there's ostensibly not unity of command. But really, if you look at of coherent unity of effort, if you will, since there's ostensibly not unity of command.

But really, if you look at it, there is unity of command in a non-combat zone, and it's embodied in the ambassador. And so a big part of this is, we talked before about the importance of alignment of goals. It starts with alignment of goals and objectives inside the U.S. government space and the interagency community. of goals and objectives inside the U.S. government space and the interagency community, and then talk about multinational efforts, add in alignment of goals with other partners. You know, we have traditional Western partners that we are also involved with. Once again, I keep coming back to the Ukraine as a case in point, but it's topical and it's a phenomenal example of this.

You know, look how much effort goes in right now on the Western effort with meetings of the allies to try and align objectives and agree to levels of support, types of support and objectives in how we help the Ukrainians. So I think it's crucial at the tactical, operational and strategic level. Do you think we've gotten that right in the past or is there much to be desired in your experience? Because different agencies have their own interests as well, right? And you talked about interest alignment. If you have an illustration, I'd love to hear it. How do you align those interests and how is that negotiated? And is that different

in a combative setting versus non? My experience tells me that the further you get away from the Washington, D.C. and closer to the point of action, the better alignment you achieve. There's something about the team of practitioners being on the ground in the situation, in the situation, living the same shared pain and hardship of a hard, complex problem together that forces people to work together. And it's often almost at cross purposes with what an organizational agenda might be as seen back in Washington, D.C. But, you know, that's why you'll see when the military goes forward on one of these operations, Iraq is a great example. We're trying to pull in significant representation from the intelligence community, from the State Department, et cetera, to share experiences, get everybody in a room. I mean,

it's all about the human dynamic. How do you build a team? Put them all in the room and give them the same problem to solve and get their commitment to solving the problem. If you're trying to do it by VTC to folks sitting back in Washington, D.C., who wants the VTCs over, they go back to their day job. You don't get the same level of common objective and common focus. But it is a challenge. I mean, our interagency environment really only comes to a point where there is unity of command in the office of the president. Everything below that is stovepipes.

And so it's how do you achieve unity of effort? And it's this human dynamic of you've got to get focused on task. And Nakhisa, I'm just going to ask another question because I like where this discussion is going. What happens in the context of Iran, Nakhisa, given that we sort of just have a unidimensional image here of the IRGC doing absolutely everything, does it also encounter interagency bickering, to put it lightly?

So it's really great that you asked that question, Vlad, because I think that you're absolutely right. We tend to think of Iran as a black box or the IRGC more generally. But national security decision-making in Iran is a little bit more complicated. And I'm paraphrasing from a really good RAND report. This was by Ariana Tabataboyi. But this talks about how the IRGC and the executive branch have specific sway over specific national security issues. largely dominates decision-making on regional aspects, while the executive branch has a little bit more pull in terms of relationships with European nations, Russia and China and others. The Majlis, the Iranian parliament, also is able to check the executive branch to a certain extent,

but doesn't have the authority to overrule the supreme leader. But it does help shape public opinion and bring those into the decision-making process. And so I think that it's important for us to keep that in mind, not just in the context of Iran, but other actors more generally to think about where the divergences might exist below the national level, because there may be opportunities for things that we can pull on, right, for potential, not just necessarily disruption, but just ways to look a little bit more closely at what's under the black box. It's a great question. So we kind of opened the conversation by framing that in an era of strategic competition, states might engage in proxy warfare to essentially avoid direct warfare with each other. warfare with each other. We said Ukraine might be an example where the United States is providing lots of military assistance to Ukraine, but is avoiding direct engagement to avoid essentially

nuclear escalation potentially. However, this relationship between army special forces and conventional forces in large-scale combat operations is very interesting. Ken, your story about Iraq earlier, where you talked about how your mission was essentially to work through a Kurdish partner force as a shaping operation for the main effort during the initial invasion of Iraq. I think there's a pretty important story about how conventional forces and conventional commanders might need to be thinking about how to leverage proxies as part of their broader planning, not just for proxy conflicts between states, but also as a component of conventional operations. And I think we see other examples of this throughout history. For example, Lawrence of Arabia during World War I was essentially a shaping operation for the British Empire against the Ottoman Empire. The British didn't have the resources to engage large conventional forces in the Middle East,

and so they kind of sent an individual to work with local partner forces to tie down the Ottoman Empire. And then we see the Jedbergs in France prior to the US invasion in World War II as well. And I'm sure there's many more examples. So I thought that was an interesting observation. And my kind of final question is, as we shift focus from wars like Iraq and Afghanistan in the post 9-11 era to strategic competition, and we're looking at changes not just in geopolitics, but also technology, do the army special operations forces need to change their organization given this changing security environment?

And given what we just said about conventional forces, do they need to change how they prepare for large-scale combat operations or strategic competition given future contingencies? I'll start out with Ken on that and then leave it to each of you to close out. Yeah, your historical examples, I think, will still be important going forward. And really, a major aspect of warfare is how do I create dilemmas for my adversary faster than they can resolve them? And so when you look at, you know, great power competition and potentially great power conflict, it's how do we use a variety of different tools and capabilities to create other challenges for the adversary to deal with? Let's look at China and potentially taking Taiwan.

They're very focused and have been preparing for years on the operational art that they'll need to execute that. How do we add other complications to the calculation should they ever try and make that decision? And it may not be at the point of action. And while part of the military may be engaged at that point, the direct conflict, kind of create indigenous mass in places that we don't have our own capability to deploy mass or precision effects at the right place in time that have operational and strategic effects against the adversary's capability to wage war. And so from a perspective of the conventional military and really soft, I mean, this is a two-way street. It's incumbent upon the Special Operations Force to help educate the conventional force commander face? And then how can I leverage soft capabilities and partnerships to help affect those? partnerships to help affect those. As far as organizational structure, I know there's a lot of look right now on how to, you know, do we need to reshape the force for the future? How do we incorporate new technologies? TOVO's view of the world, and this may not be the commonly held

opinion today, is at least my community brought to bear is our ability to work inside the human domain and connect with indigenous partners, indigenous communities, and provide the human element and the understanding of what all those people are thinking and motivated by. And while we use technology, technology isn't the center of what we do. We don't man equipment, we equip the man. And our problem solver, our weapon system is a man or a woman's intellect in a complex situation. And so to me, we reorganize and focus too much on technology at our risk of our strategic value proposition, which is this ability to kind of help the military tap into the human domain. is a bit beyond my pay grade, but I'm an academic, so I'll have an opinion. I would invite everyone to sort of exercise a bit of caution in terms of immediately trying to sort of shift or embrace new trends. I think for the last 30 odd years, it was all about chasing the headlines and the buzzwords and technology. And it's all about the drone. It's all about quantum computers or

something like that. Surprisingly, it ended up being, at least recently, all about trenches. So I think there's something there. And what informs my thinking here is the often sort of search for lesson learning. And I don't understand why great power competition automatically makes two decades of counterterrorism and counterinsurgency irrelevant. It won't be just state to state, right? It will be all of these, perhaps simultaneously. And this is something that I think Russia is understanding, that it will be employing various different forms of competing in the same theater or separately where it needs. Whereas I'm quite surprised to sort of hear conversations in the transatlantic community that all of a sudden we have to sort of shift gears towards just in state-to-state conflict. So I would say there's great scope of trying to adapt and maintain

capabilities, lessons already learned, and sort of existing thinking, because it doesn't sort of automatically go away. Nikisa, Vlad, and Ken, thank you for joining the Social Science of War podcast today. This has been an excellent conversation. Thanks for having us. Thank you very much. Enjoy. Thank you.

Thank you for listening to Season 1, Episode 6 of the Social Science of War podcast, brought to you by the Social Sciences Department at West Point. We release a new episode every two weeks. Future episodes will examine implications of the politicization of the Army, operational lessons from the war in Ukraine for the Army, what role terrorism will play in strategic competition, and more.

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