Irregular Warfare Podcast - Russia’s Wagner Group and the Rise of Mercenary Warfare

Episode Date: December 4, 2020

What role do private military companies such as Russia’s Wagner Group play on the modern battlefield? How should US policymakers and US and allied troops in conflict zones manage threats from armed groups when Russia denies their existence? Is war by private armies a rising trend in modern conflict? The guests featured in this episode explore those questions and more.

How I think we can manage this situation where we're on the ground in a conflict zone with the Russian armed forces is by clear communication, by establishing red lines. You know, I think if you talk to all the people who directed the deconfliction cell, they'll tell you that when we establish clear red lines and when we said, if this doesn't stop, we will defend our forces, always the Russians or their proxies back down. You know, we've always sort of had this sort of sense that proxy wars and plausible deniability can have advantages for both sides. As long as everybody kind of tacitly agrees this farce can go on, then escalation risks can be controlled. I would argue that more exposure, even if it's kinetic, but more exposure of what the Russians are doing makes it much harder for the Russians to do business. Welcome to episode 15 of the Irregular Warfare podcast. Your hosts today are myself, Kyle Atwell, and I'm pleased to be joined for the first time by a new addition to the team, Daphne McCurdy. In today's episode, we discuss Russia's use of private military companies, or PMCs, on the modern battlefield. Our two guests argue that

Wagner Group plays an important role in Russian military strategy. Russia's use of PMCs has both operational implications for U.S. troops on the ground, as well as U.S. foreign policy more broadly. We discuss at length a February 2018 incident where the Wagner Group, alongside partner forces, engaged in a multi-hour firefight with U.S. special operations forces in Syria, which allegedly resulted in hundreds killed. The conversation concludes with recommendations for both policymakers and practitioners on how to address Russia's use of PMCs without escalating conflicts further. Dr. Robert Hamilton is an associate professor at the U.S. Army War College and a Black Sea Fellow at the Foreign Policy Research Institute.

Over a 30-year career in the U.S. Army, spent primarily as a Eurasian foreign area officer, he served overseas in nine countries. Dr. Hamilton also ran the cell for ground deconfliction with Russia in Syria in 2017. Candice Rondeau is a professor of practice in the School of Politics and Global Studies at Arizona State University and a senior fellow with the Center on the Future of War, a joint initiative of ASU and New America. Her current research focuses on Russian PMCs. You are listening to the Irregular Warfare Podcast, a joint production of the Princeton Empirical Studies of Conflict Project and the

Modern War Institute at West Point, dedicated to bridging the gap between scholars and practitioners to support the community of irregular warfare professionals. Here is our conversation with Bob Hamilton and Candice Rondeau. Candice and Bob, welcome to the Irregular Warfare podcast, and thank you for joining us today. Good to be here. Kyle, thanks for having us. I appreciate the invitation from you and Daphne both. So I'd like to start by asking why this conversation matters. Why is Wagner Group something that national security practitioners and policymakers should be thinking about? I think there are three reasons why understanding private military security contractors in the context of Russia's strategy is so important right now. One, we know that great power competition is going to shape at least the

next five years, if not next decade. We anticipate that competition with Russia, competition with China is going to be part of the national security enterprise for the United States for some time to come. And, you know, in the case of Russia, we know that private military security contractors like the Wagner Group have emerged as a kind of a new pivot point in how Russia conducts warfare. And we need to understand, you know, what it is they're doing, how they're doing what they're doing, so we can better understand what kind of threat they may or may not represent in a given theater. In the context of Syria, I think what the Wagner Group has done for Russia is give it limited attribution or non-attribution.

There are certain things that it can have the Wagner Group do that the Russian government then can be not connected with. But it's unclear to me exactly to what extent the Wagner Group does the direct bidding of the Kremlin and to what extent it sort of ad libs. But non-attribution is certainly one of the reasons that it's useful to Russia, at least in Syria. I think it's been used in some cases to test the resolve of Russia's enemies without the Russian government having to be involved. In other words, to escalate in certain areas against certain adversaries in Syria. And then I think there's the third reason is it's always useful to enrich some of the people well-connected to the Kremlin,

right? So the Wagner Group often is able to keep the spoils of war. And so a lot of people in Wagner and other Russian PMCs are connected to the Kremlin. So I think there's a financial incentive as well. Yeah, I would say all three of those certainly apply. And I think, you know, in the context of non-attribution, there are kind of two pillars that we want to look at, right? So, you know, as Bob mentioned, in Syria, you have Russian PMCs operating on the ground, you don't know exactly what the command and control structure is. So when they, you know, light up an area or try and take over territory, it's difficult to understand what kind of response, say, US forces might get if they were to try and corral and or confront those forces on the ground, as we saw in February 2018

in Deir ez-Zor, where we had this huge blow up between US forces and Russian forces on the ground that were working for the Wagner Group. So there's the kind of operational context of non-attribution, but then there's a kind of a sort of a policy non-attribution context or pillar. And that really speaks to Russia's clear commitment to sanctions avoidance. This whole business model of having unattributable action and operations on the ground is also about delivering weapons and goods and services oftentimes to countries and regimes that are laboring under a UN sanctions embargo, as is the case with Syria, as has been the case in Libya and in Central African Republic. Those are three examples where

you have existing UN resolutions prohibiting the flow of weapons into those countries, and Russia has made a commitment to continue delivery notwithstanding those prohibitions. to continue delivery, notwithstanding those prohibitions. And so the non-attribution piece here is making sure that it's not the Russian military that's seen to be going in and delivering weapons and goods and services to these prohibited areas. And you can have an arm's length relationship with the delivery boys on the ground. So you both noted the non-attribution aspect of these groups. And I think more broadly, these groups are shrouded in a level of ambiguity that makes it difficult for policymakers to fully understand the threat. At the same time, we are seeing these groups pop up increasingly, Candace, you noted, in Syria, in Mozambique, in Libya. And so while there seems to be increasing focus on them,

it's not clear what it is we do know and what we don't know about these groups. Could you delve deeper into what the known knowns are of these groups, what the known unknowns are, and then what are the unknown unknowns of these groups? Those are three very good questions. So the known knowns are that the primary procurement arm of the Ministry of Defense, which is called Oborono Service, has nine different subsidiaries. One of them is called Voluntorg. That service for decades upon decades has been primarily responsible for catering, laundry, just sort of the basic logistics stuff that is the backbone of line of communication supply for forward operating troops. That changed in 2012 and new services were provided as a result of reorganization

within the Ministry of Defense and also across the Russian military itself. This new business model essentially means you have a middleman or a series of shell company firms that act as kind of contracting vehicles for particular services. So the delivery of tanks, the delivery of ammunition, the delivery of helicopters, all this is done through this contracting process. And the primary middleman or middlemen to sit at this kind of financier level, the firms themselves, basically hire the bodies, recruit them, and deploy them out. So in some ways, that does resemble kind of the US or even British model, where you have just sort of body shops, contracting out military experienced service providers. Those are the known knowns. What we don't know is the degree to which there

is direct command and control coming from the Ministry of Defense and the Kremlin. I think we have a pretty strong understanding of that in the sense that we know that there's an overarching strategy that Russia has, certainly in the context of Syria, in the context of Libya, Ukraine. is to deploy these forces to protect and or seize energy infrastructure, which they see as, you know, strategic not only to the enterprise and the operations on the ground, but also for Russia's economy, right? So the other known here is Russia cannot survive, its economy is not diverse enough to survive without access to markets where it can do business in the trade of weapons and the trade of oil and gas infrastructure and expertise. The unknown unknowns are the degree to which the other parts of the packages that we've seen. So we've seen in the case of the Wagner Group, not only soldiers deploying, but sociologists, anthropologists, political scientists. We don't know exactly how this packaging and pairing of social media campaigns and propaganda campaigns

serves alongside the operations of Russian mercenaries. We know it's happening, but we don't know necessarily what those relationships look like. Well, yeah, I was just going to add, when you're dealing with the Russian government, even the concept of known knowns is contested because the Russian government will deny things that are objectively true and can be proven with evidence. And they'll deny them consistently. And then what they engage in is sort of obfuscation and counter-accusation. And, you know, they're very good at making us chase our tail. They're very good at in any interaction where we come to them with an accusation of a war crime or something, they'll respond with a dozen accusations against the U.S. or its partners, whether it's in Syria, Libya or anywhere, and then cause us to have to determine which of those we want to refute, which of those are so preposterous that we can let them go unchallenged. They're good at changing the terms of the discussion. And that really limits our ability to understand exactly what the Wagner Group and other PMCs do for the Russian government. Sometimes it can make you even question what you know,

because their propaganda effort is so relentless and it's so much more sophisticated than it was 20 years ago or 40 years ago during the Soviet Union, that it's been effective, I think, in challenging even this idea of what do we actually know, what don't we know, right? Okay, so it sounds like there are a lot of advantages for the Russians in keeping these PMCs at arm's length and plausibly denying the relationship. But I wonder, could there also be risks involved, given that, as you both noted, Russia might not have sufficient command and control over these groups? Candace, you brought up earlier probably the best known failure of the Wagner Group,

which was the February 2018 attack east of the Euphrates and just south of Deir ez-Zor toward American forces, toward Syrian Democratic forces, with which there were US special forces embedded. And the US ground deconfliction cell got a hold of the Russian headquarters at Hmeymim and said, we see these people, we see them coming. If they're yours, you need to call them off because you should know we have forces there and we will protect our forces. And the Russian headquarters at Hmeymim disavowed them and said, they're not ours or we have no knowledge of this. And so the response killed, you know, the numbers are almost impossible to pin down, but the best numbers I can find is two to 300 Syrian militias and Wagner

Group forces. No matter how you look at it, it was a major failure of Russian military strategy in Syria and a failure, I think, for the Kremlin. No matter what, how the Russian government framed it, there were bodies coming home to Russia. You know, I wonder, Candace, what's your specific, your opinion of that incident is? To what extent was the Wagner Group acting on behalf of the Russian headquarters in Hmeymim? And to what extent was the Kremlin aware of what was going on or was just a freelance attempt to grab some oil infrastructure and maybe enrich themselves? Yeah, well, listen, we've been researching this for a while, this particular event, because it has been, it's just so pivotal and so emblematic, really, of the dangers and the risks of potential

escalation when plausible deniability is no longer plausible. And the things we learned from talking to Syrians on the ground who were in and around Deir ez-Zor at the time, here's what we know. The objective, obviously, for the Russians on the ground working with, I think it was the 5th and 4th Assault Corps divisions, which were these sort of tiger forces, these mixed forces of militias on the ground, were seeking to seize this ConocoPhillips plant, which the Russians rightly viewed as strategically important for the Syrian government's economy. 25% of Syria's economy is represented by its oil and gas industry. It really can't survive without those revenues. And so that Conoco plant had been, of course, the scene of this huge set of battles on and off over a number of years, actually, throughout the revolution and the civil war. And so seizing it back was critical for the Syrian regime. So we know that the objective was clear, but there were some disagreements on the ground between Russian PMC forces and then their Syrian allies in the region. They worked with sort of local tribal elders to try and develop a plan to seize the plant. And it seemed like they felt they had a

green light to go for it, but they had not necessarily communicated that to their counterparts in the official Russian military. There was some confusion there. And there was also, I think, a fundamental disagreement in the background, probably in the Kremlin. I think there is some discussion about whether or not Yevgeny Prigozhin, this kind of Russian oligarch who everybody seems to ascribe to have responsibility for the Wagner Group, whether or not somebody was trying to send a message to him that he needed to rein it in, that people in the Kremlin were tired of seeing him appear on the news. And there's something to that, I think. But real deal, what this particular incident, I think, points up is the Russians were very clear from the outset, even before they officially entered the war in Syria in 2015, that oil and gas infrastructure was what they were there for. They wanted to be able to maintain their lines of communication from the center of the country to Latakia, which is where their main military base is. The Eastern Mediterranean is extremely important for Russia for all kinds of reasons, for the transport of goods and services, not the least of which is oil and gas and weapons. And so this incident was really, I think, definitely indicative of a major failure,

but also a really important lesson for the United States. Because, you know, we've always sort of had this sort of sense that proxy wars and plausible deniability can have advantages for both sides, right? As long as everybody kind of tacitly agrees that this kind of farce can go on, then escalation risks can be controlled. I would argue that what this case points up is more exposure, even if it's kinetic. It doesn't always have to be kinetic, but more exposure of what the Russians are doing makes it much harder for the Russians to do business. And there's something to be said for transparency and really focusing in on the nuts and bolts of these operations. Yeah, I found it incredible that there was an extended firefight that involved Russian citizens and American special operations

forces in Syria. Not just that it happened, but it seems like very few people realize that it happened, even within the military and national security community. And so, you know, I think the first question we like to go to is, you know, were the Russians commanding and controlling these units? Were these units an extension of the Russian state? But listening to the conversations, it might be distinct talking about whether they were commanded and controlled and whether they were part of a broader strategy. Because command and control is one thing, but the strategy may itself be the plausible deniability and obfuscation that is allowed from this. Whether or not they were commanded and controlled, if the Russian state did not have control of them,

in fact, which is something we don't really know, that may be part of their strategy in the first place, just the fact that they can deny these. Does that make sense? Yeah, that makes absolute sense, Kyle. I think that's exactly right. I mean, I've sort of had been thinking about it in similar terms in that the Kremlin has operated for a long time on this concept of curators, who are people who are sort of loosely connected to the Kremlin. They may be oligarchs, businessmen in industries that the state has a large share in, or the state exercises sort of strategic direction over. Some of them are media figures that are connected to the Kremlin, but they operate on, I guess the military terminology would be mission type orders, right? The Germans call it Aufstags-Taktik. You get general guidance and

direction from the headquarters. You understand the end state that they want. You understand the sort of intent, and then you're free to ad lib. You're free to achieve that intent using your own devices, right? And I think the Wagner Group in Syria and in Prigozhin more generally is an example of this. The problem is sometimes the military headquarters is cut out of the loop. My sense of the February 2018 incident in Syria is that the Russian headquarters in Hmeimim was either out of the loop completely or had been told there's an operation ongoing in eastern Syria that you're not involved in. Because again, the U.S. ground de-confliction cell asked specifically, that was the time for the headquarters in Hmeimim to say, hey, this is a mistake. These guys didn't get the word. We'll

call them off. And they didn't. The answer back was, we don't know what you're talking about. If there are people out there moving, they're not ours. And so it does seem like if there was direction, if the direction sort of went from the Kremlin through these curator channels and bypass the headquarters at Hmeymim. And then that gives the military headquarters the deniability. And then the Russians, if it turned out badly like it did, it isn't framed as a military defeat. It's framed as an aberration or a mistake or an operation that went awry in some way that the military wasn't involved in. Bob, obviously the February 2018 incident was the most catastrophic in terms of casualties.

But I'm curious, prior to that incident, when you were overseeing the deconfliction cell in 2017, how much did PMCs really factor into your discussions with the Russians? Were there ever instances in which you were deconflicting specifically about PMC operations or where their presence complicated your ability to deconflict? Yeah, I don't remember us ever deconflicting directly with them a PMC operation. Now, sometimes there were PMCs probably mixed in. For instance, they came across the Euphrates south of Deir ez-Zor in September of 2017. They had an operation to liberate Deir ez-Zor, which had been under ISIS control for several years. And as part of that operation,

they came across the river south of Deir ez-Zor and they established this little foothold. We knew there were Russian military forces involved in that because the bridging assets were clearly from Russia and Russian. There were also, and Candace, you mentioned some Tiger forces. There were probably Tiger forces there. There may have been Wagner PMCs involved in that operation. But the important thing about that operation is that was the little cutout east of the river that they launched the February 2018 operation from. So we agreed to let them stay in that little box east of the Euphrates River. But the deal was, the deconfliction agreement said they couldn't come out of that box. Well, they came out of that box in 2018. But by that time, it appeared that

there were, well, certainly there were no Russian military forces involved in the attack that attacked out of that box toward the Conoco oil field. So we know there were Russians involved crossing the river. We know there weren't Russian military involved, but there were Wagner Group involved when they attacked out of that box. And so there's all sorts of people running around the battlefield with weapons integrated into Russian formations and in Syrian formations that sometimes it was unclear to us exactly who they were. it was unclear to us exactly who they were. The Russians' use of PMCs are garnering headlines, but they're obviously not alone in using them. The U.S. also uses private military contractors. I think at one point, or even still today, there are more PMCs in Afghanistan than there are regular military. So could you just expand upon what is it about Russia's use of PMCs and Wagner Group in particular that pushes this beyond the norms and

laws dictating the use of these sorts of groups? laws dictating the use of these sorts of groups. Daphne, what I understood your question to be sort of along the lines of how are Russian PMCs different from US PMCs and from, for instance, the Turks now have PMCs, right? Turkey has been very active in using private military corporations or contractors to advance its security interest. My sense is, Candice, I want to hear your opinion on this, is that the Wagner Group sort of rolls up the capabilities and activities of three different sort of subsets of U.S. actors. One is the Halliburton, Kellogg, Brown, and Root log cap contract. In other words, the Wagner Group does life support and things like that in combat zones the way Kellogg, Brown and Root does for the US military.

The second is the Blackwater personnel security details slash training of foreign forces missions. The Wagner group does that as well. And then the third is the special operations community and some of the, also the training of foreign military forces and then direct action that the Wagner group participates in that as well. We have very different sort of sets of laws and regulations governing what Kellogg, Brown and Root can do, what Blackwater can do and what the special operations community can do. My sense is the Wagner Group transcends

all those roles and missions inside of a single PMC. Is that your sense as well? Yeah, absolutely. So we should make clear that the Wagner Group does not exist on paper, right? It's not a legal entity in the kind of common sense. It's not a firm, it's not an organization. This is shorthand for referencing a group of curators, I think is the best way Bob put it, who deploy their resources on behalf of the Ministry of Defense on a contractual basis. The Wagner Group is a fiction essentially created in large part to kind of continue this plausible deniability veneer. The reality is there are distinctive organizations, real firms. I just came across one the other day called PMSC Convoy. It's literally a contingent that's responsible for being deployed

in the context of the CAR, right, in Central African Republic. So yeah, that's right. I mean, essentially, when we talk about the Wagner Group, what we're really talking about is the industry, right? And the industry has been consolidated into this kind of singular package of, you know, logistics, operations, you know, infrastructure protection, but then also forward operations for the seizure of territory and control of territory. And that's really important. I guess maybe the fourth being this messaging, strategic communications around that, that's being built out by the political technologists that kind of accompany them, either in advance or sometimes alongside operations on the ground.

Okay, so although Russia and the U.S. both use PMCs, they oftentimes use them in very different ways. What would you say that implies about U.S. and Russia's approach to war and conflict more broadly? The difference between the United States and Russia is once those hostilities are over, the United States, by virtue of the structure of a democracy, has to have a public discussion, a public debate about how to wind down the war. In the case of Russia, because of this sort of autocratic or authoritarian structure of its government, that conversation is going to be pretty limited. And it's going to be even more limited if the public doesn't really know, can't be certain, right, of exactly what's happening with its own, you know, sons and

daughters who are being deployed out into the field. The problem with this as a kind of conflict management challenge is that this means that these conflicts stay alive. If there's no closure on them, if there's no means of dealing with the reality, which often happens in war, you got collateral damage, you got civilian casualties, you got infrastructure damage, you got lives shattered, you got, you know, institutions destroyed. Somebody needs to put these things back in place in order for countries to stabilize. And that's the flaw here with Russian policy, not only as regards, obviously, PMSEs, but I think its overall strategy has completely kind of abandoned the idea that stabilization is important or necessary. And in fact, I know that a lot of folks in the Pentagon kind of look at that with envy. They

wish they didn't have to deal with the reconstruction problem. They wish they didn't have to deal with the stabilization problem. But the reality is- Because it's really hard, right? Because it's really hard. But they do. The reality is that's the expectation from the United States and its NATO partners, is that if you go in there, you break it, you build it back up. Russia has no expectation. But it is for that reason it has been unable to join, I think, the community of nations as an equal partner at the table. It's now G7, not G8. And that is precisely because Russia

has been fixated on this kind of strategy of frozen conflict as the only way forward. So one of the reasons we're talking about PMCs and Wagner Group is we have, you know, civilians on the battlefield, essentially. These are actors that are being used by state to obfuscate their actions. They're able to take military action occasionally directly against the U.S. and its allies and then deny it. So my question is, is this a kind of one-off that Russia is pursuing? Or you kind of already mentioned that, you know, Turkey has started using its own PMCs in maybe more offensive actions. Can we expect to see this as a trend that's going to expand to other conflicts and other states in the future? I think it this as a trend that's going to expand to other conflicts in other states in the future? I think it's clearly a trend that's going to expand.

You know, look, there was very recently, there was another discussion with the UN Working Group on mercenary activity, which has been going for a long time. But, you know, only recently have people actually paid attention to what that working group does. And it's very clear. Look, Turkey just recently sent Syrian recruited mercenaries to Azerbaijan and Armenia to fight over Nagorno-Karabakh. We think we may have seen some Russian PMSCs who were supporting forward operating forces in that same region at the same time. We know that there is a

procurement process in place in Turkey for Syrians in particular to be deployed to other places. We've seen Yemen as another example where you saw the UAE recruiting Sudanese fighters to go and fight against the Houthis. So the question is really like, why is this happening? Not will it happen? Is it a trend? It's going to be a continuing trend. It's going to escalate. A couple of reasons why this is going to happen. As other militaries in other countries, particularly in the Middle East, become a little bit more adept, a little bit more secure, a little bit more agile in their contracting process, in their force management processes, in large part because of U.S. assistance, not singularly, but mostly, you're going to see that they're going to start

using the same methods to kind of reduce their own exposure, reduce their risks on the battlefield. Frankly, as somebody pointed out to me, I mean, we saw this in Iran as well, where you had Afghans recruited to go to Syria. The middle class in these countries is actually now substantial enough that it's very risky for political leaders to then engage in warfare, open warfare with another state, and then kind of have some sort of draft or conscription process. They're not on firm ground politically, domestically, where they can then say, rah, rah, let's go to war with, you know, state X or Y. And so these plausibly deniable operations make it easier for politically weak regimes with a strong overarching security architecture to deploy when they need to, when they perceive a threat without escalating the domestic costs politically at home.

So that's interesting. So they're not just obfuscating their actions to their rivals, they're obfuscating their actions to their rivals or obfuscating their actions to their own populations. That's the primary goal. I mean, you know, at the end of the day, in these strongman states where the security apparatus generally controls most of the day to day, everything from the economics to the kind of communications, you name it, and Russia is one of these places, obviously. But, you know, the UAE is similar. You have a kind of very strictly controlled political elite that also controls the security apparatus. In those instances, they cannot afford to be seen as taking adventurous risks abroad when, you know, their population at home is not served, you know, in an equal way, right? There's always a question in these

environments of inequality of access to the economy, inequality of access to government services, inequality of access to security and justice. All those things are going on in the background. And elite regimes, you know, that operate under kind of a semi-authoritarian or fully authoritarian structure cannot be seen by their own populations to be taking adventures with people who at home are considered disadvantaged and vulnerable, right? Those would be the conscripts essentially. They don't want to do that, right? And everybody kind of, I think, understands that the risk for the economy in these strongman environments when there's an open warfare situation can be extreme.

Yeah, and I'll jump in here. I think the Wagner Group deployment to Syria is a great example of exactly what you're talking about, Candace. The Russian strategy in Syria has been described as lean and emergent. In other words, they were always very concerned with keeping the number of troops deployed low and not losing leverage, not being more invested in the conflict than the Assad regime was, and not losing their leverage over their partners, primarily the Assad regime. So the Wagner Group helps them because it keeps the number of acknowledged Russian forces on the ground low. It also helps sell the war back home because we sometimes forget that the deployment to

Syria in September 2015 was the third Russian foreign military adventure in seven years, right? There was the invasion of Georgia in August of 2008. There was the Ukraine crisis in spring of 2014. And then there was the intervention in Syria in September of 2015. And if you talk to people, some of these, you mentioned political technologists and the people who run campaigns for Russian politicians, a lot of them will say that the Russian public is getting increasingly tired of foreign adventures in an era where since 2008, essentially Russian per capita GDP is flat. So for 12 years, Russian per capita GDP has essentially been flat. It's the combined effects of the 2008 financial crisis and then Western sanctions that were levied in 2014 over Ukraine. So the Russian government's narrative, the social contract for a

long time was, you stay out of politics, we'll help you get rich. For the last 12 years, that narrative doesn't really work because people aren't getting rich in Russia. So from 2014, the narrative was, hey, the West is at the gates, the fascists are coming over the wall, you're going to need to deal, you're going to need to accept some of these foreign deployments, you know, to protect you from the threat from the West. But nevertheless, you know, we're now at 2020, people, I think, are getting tired of the foreign deployments. And so to the extent the Russian government can keep the cost of those low, keep them out of the news and use units like Wagner Group to do that,

it's very useful to them. Yeah, I just want to pick up on that last point, actually, an excellent point about the domestic environment in Russia. As Bob pointed out, when you look at 2008, Russia was obviously very hard hit like the rest of the world by the recession. But by 2011, 2012, you know, while the rest of the world is starting to emerge, Russia is also still laboring under sanctions. People forget that before the Ukraine engagement, there were a number of different actors who were involved in unsavory behaviors that came under scrutiny by the U.S. and were sanctioned individuals. When that sanctions regime started to expand after the Ukraine incursion is when Russia had to really make a hard decision.

How was it going to continue to get hard currency dollars into its coffers while laboring under these restrictions? And the way to do that was to create almost a kind of new black market for sanctioned activity. So what we now know as the Wagner Group kind of represents the fruition of that new black market. So it kind of served two purposes, right? As Bob pointed out, it lowers the political temperature domestically in terms of the public scrutinizing military adventurism or at least becoming resistant to it, but also opens the spigot just a little bit wider for Russian oligarchs who are willing to get into the game to drive more currency, more hard revenue back into Russian coffers at a time when it is really struggling under these sanctions. But it's

doing so under this kind of black ops imprimatur that we see with the Wagner Group. That's really fascinating. And I wanted to pick up on this point about the financial aspects of relying on PMCs. So the advantage of using them is that the state does not have to fund these wars itself, right? The PMCs are responsible for financing their own military adventures. But I guess a potential risk there is that if these groups are motivated by profit, does that bring new complications to relying them on the battlefield than say, if you're relying on other sorts of proxies that may align with you for ideological reasons or other strategic reasons? Great question. Under the Geneva Protocols Article 1,

there is a distinction to be made between, you know, what is a mercenary and what is a private military contractor. You know, technically, an individual who acts as a military operator on contract outside of their own borders, you know, may be categorized as a mercenary if there is implied motive for financial gain. This is a completely antiquated definition that no longer pertains. We're not in the 1980s, 1970s, in kind of Southern and Western Africa, where you have civil wars going on and you have swashbuckling mercenaries jumping in as freelancers anymore. To do the kind of successful operations that you see in places like Syria and Libya, Ukraine,

you have to be organized as a firm. And at the end of the day, these firms represent that financial interest. Is there a conflict? Well, we certainly saw it. I think what we saw in February 2018 is a result of a miscommunication and an internal conflict between the firm that was responsible for overseeing Wagner's operations on the ground in Deir ez-Zor and the local contracting parties that were seeking to gain financially from the capture of the ConocoPhillips plant. I'd like to think there was a little bit of swashbuckling going on in that incident. Well, there probably was, but maybe not very successful swashbuckling. I'm actually, I'm really excited, Bob, that you mentioned that Russia may have its own end-to-endless wars movement going on because we get so wrapped up in U.S. domestic politics that it's easy to forget that other states feel these same types of domestic pressures when they're

trying to, you know, influence beyond their borders. Yeah, I mean, you know, Russia is not a democracy, but that does not mean that the Russian government is not sensitive to Russian public opinion. It is very sensitive to Russian public opinion. It cares a lot about what the Russian people think. And so I think it, you know, it has to respond not as directly to public opinion as legitimately elected democratic regimes do, but nevertheless, it has to take public opinion into account. Daphne, to hear what the PMCs do in terms of the sponsor and how is Wagner different in the relationship. But one way to look at PMCs is they're just another flavor of proxy group, right? Our proxy in Syria has been the Syrian Democratic Forces. And like all proxy groups, the PMC government relationship sort of suffers from

the principal agent problem, right? The government is the principal, the PMC is the agent. But, you know, you've got these asymmetries in any relationship. You've got information asymmetry where the Wagner Group knows more about what's going on in Syria than the Kremlin does, and therefore it can curate the information that goes back to the Kremlin to its advantage. And then you've got potentially interest asymmetry, right? That the interest of the agent, in this case the Wagner Group, don't always align with the interest of the government that sent them there. I guess what a PMC does for you is it's probably easier to manage the information and interest

asymmetry than it is with a foreign proxy group. The downside to that is there's less deniability, right? I mean, it's harder to cut that relationship than it is with a foreign proxy group. So we have seen Russia is using PMCs like Wagner Group to fight wars abroad, to include in direct conflict with the U.S. and its allies, at least with their interests. We've seen other states start to do this more, for example, Turkey and Russia on opposite sides of the conflict in Nagorno-Karabakh. You know, as this becomes a more prominent or common form of warfare in the world, what are the implications for U.S. policymakers and practitioners, given what we know about Wagner and similar groups? Well, I mean, I would say this, you know, policy implications for US long term are, I think, maybe two or threefold. First, the US has to decide how it can get ahead of Russia's strategy. You need to be looking at governments that have high levels of debt, deep dependency on external providers of military services, and large amounts of natural resources. Those three factors are always going to put those countries at the top of Russia's list for

cultivation and for the deployment of private military security contractors in these packages of political technologists in a forward operating situation. And you have to decide, secondly, whether those countries, you know, fall within what we would call the national interests of the United States. You know, does it matter that, you know, the Democratic Republic of Congo has Russian PMCs on the ground or Mozambique to U.S. national security? It depends on how you see the future of Africa. I think what we really mean here, and this is the third point, is looking long-term at what you want a given continent to look like for U.S. trade and U.S. political engagement a decade or a generation out.

If your answer is, we want to be able to operate in that area, we want to be able to safely move around to do business in a given part of Africa or in a given part of Asia or given part of Latin America, then you've got to then look at those three threat factors of debt load, external dependency for military security assistance, and lastly, natural resources. And you've got to make a plan for how you're going to deal with that because Russia will be there. If it can be there, it will insert itself. Yeah. And I would say, so we need to get used to the idea that PMCs are here to stay, right? And they're here to stay not only from the Russians, but as we've talked about a little on this podcast, we've seen them from Turkey, we've seen them from other countries. They're

here to stay because they're a low cost, lower attribution way for a state to pursue its interests in places where it doesn't have vital national interests at stake. If vital interests are at stake, that's probably a job. If it's an armed conflict, it's a job for the military forces of that state. But if it has important or peripheral interests at stake in a place like Syria, where Russia has very important interests, but probably not vital interests at stake, the Wagner Group can augment the military footprint. In a place like places in Africa, where Russia believes it has peripheral interests at state, then maybe the PMC is the only force that's there. But what I think we should do is make it clear that we regard PMCs as agents of the Russian

state and that the Russian government is responsible for their actions wherever they're deployed and sort of name and shame where it's appropriate when they do things that are patently illegal or that are clearly destabilizing, then we should publicize them. We should know that the Russian government will deny it, but we should be prepared for that and have evidence at hand to show that these people are deployed to this place, certainly with the knowledge of the Kremlin, if not on the orders of the Kremlin, they're doing the bidding of the Russian government. And so what they do when they're there is the responsibility of the Russian government. But they're here to stay. I don't, you know, we're not going to put this back into the box, I don't think.

Totally agree. And I also think, look, the more the U.S. can invest in transparency, exposure, enabling, you know, external actors that are credible to, you know, examine and investigate what's going on on the ground in places where they think they have, where the United States might have a vital interest, the more that can be done, that's sort of a use of soft power, information to shape the narrative of exactly what's going on with Russia's intent and its strategic operations, the greater the chance you have of reducing any kind of risks of escalation, should there be some sort of military confrontation later. I also want to say the other soft power piece here that is really overlooked is understanding those key factors that lead

governments like Sudan or lead governments like Libya to either be confused or split or debating whether or not to engage Russia economically. And we haven't done a good job. There's no organization I can point to at the State Department or the Pentagon, frankly, that takes seriously this question of analyzing all of the risks, all of the financial interests at work when we're dealing with a question of Russia's insertion in a place like Sudan or a place like Syria. It may be time for the United States to really think about standing up a task force, interdisciplinary task force, you know, the Treasury, Pentagon, State Department, maybe other intel agencies, to really tackle the problem of good threat analysis

and understanding who's doing what to whom on the ground so that internally decisions can be taken to act, but also that externally, the messaging, the transparency around what Russia is doing can be transmitted out there to the public and transmitted out there to our allies in NATO and elsewhere. Okay, so if I'm understanding you both correctly, it seems like currently there's this false choice in the public debate between calling out the Russians for what they're doing on the one hand and risking the escalation of war on the other. But what you are both arguing is that actually holding the Russians accountable for the actions of PMCs might actually help curb their nefarious behavior. I think you can decide. Right. That's right. I think it allows the United States to have a more considered approach to deciding what is vital and what is not vital.

Because there's a real risk here that everything turns into Russia is a threat everywhere. That's just not the case. There's a reason why we're talking about Russia and Africa, Russia in the threat everywhere. That's just not the case. There's a reason why we're talking about Russia in Africa, Russia in the Middle East. We're not talking about Russia in the Philippines. It's a contained box, and it mostly has to do with the littoral areas that are important for Russia to be able to transit so that it can deliver its goods and services abroad. That makes the problem simpler, and it makes it easier to contain, and it makes it easier to anticipate what's going to come next, right? And to decide what you're going to do about it. Yeah, I would agree. And the first part,

how should we handle PMCs and attribution and escalation? I think part of what we should do is make it clear to the Russian government as part of our messaging that we regard Wagner Group and other PMCs as agents of the Russian state. If they attack U.S. forces in any theater, in any way, the response will be devastating and overwhelming. And Russia will be held accountable as the party that attacked U.S. forces. And really, I think we do have credibility in that discussion because we've shown in Syria multiple times that we will defend our forces and defend our partner forces there. So there's some credibility to that deterrent threat. So I'd like to take a step below the policy and strategic level. And Bob, lean on your military experience a little bit.

How can U.S. forces and their allies fight and diplomats engage when working in these environments? I'm thinking, you know, de-confliction, but also implications for units on the ground. How I think we can manage this situation where we're on the ground in a conflict zone with the Russian armed forces is by clear communication, by establishing red lines. You know, and I think if you talk to all the people who directed the deconfliction cell, the ground deconfliction cell, as well as the air deconfliction cell, they'll tell you that when we establish clear red lines and when we said, if this doesn't stop, we will defend our forces, always the Russians or their proxies back down. Or if it was in some cases when their proxies didn't back down, then the U.S. defended its forces and shot down the aircraft or destroyed the vehicle on the ground or whatever. I mean, we forget that we're still much more capable as a military than the Russians are, much more capable. Part of it has been good communication, and part of it has just been luck, frankly, that we have not had a direct conflict with the Russian armed

forces. We have not shot at them, and they have not shot at us. Neither side wants that. But the deconfliction lines and very clear communication, I think, is a good way to make sure it stays that way. One thing I really want to drive home to people, you know, there's a real risk right now. We're kind of at a fork in the road with policy vis-a-vis Russia's malign activities in the realm of disinformation and then, you know, kinetic operations where you have PMSCs like the Wagner Group linked to that messaging, that disinformation campaign. The real risk here is that policy that the United States adopts personalizes the entire enterprise. You know, we got pending legislation introduced in Congress that expressly names, you know,

Gedi Prigozhin, you know, the oligarch who's ostensibly responsible for financing and managing the Wagner Group and then these political technologists who are out there running these disinformation campaigns. All well and good, but what happens when Yevgeny Prokhozhin is no longer the bad guy? What happens when he is no longer the Kremlin insider?

I think one of the things that we saw with the Mueller investigation into the Internet Research Agency, which is another branch of Yevgeny Prokhorov's ostensible activities, that was a case where a very highly personalized approach, the naming, the shaming, the indictments, all centered on people and personalities, not activities and organizations. That case was dropped by the Department of Justice in large part because it could not get its arms around the organizational factors here. So I really want to drive home to policymakers sitting in Congress, to people sitting in the State Department, Pentagon, Treasury,

who are thinking about this. It's about the organizations. It's not about the individuals. And you've got to design policies that really box those organizations in on the financial level and the operational level. Otherwise, this is going to be a perennial problem that we can't get our arms around. Yeah, that's a great point that I hadn't really thought of. And I'm glad you brought it up, Candace, because another thing I would add is take the emotion out of it. We tend to respond so emotionally to some of the things the Russian do.

it. We tend to respond so emotionally to some of the things the Russian do. We become so indignant when they lie, or we become, you know, we're offended by the fact that they would use the Wagner Group to pursue the interests of the Russian government in a place like Syria, because it's this sort of quasi non-attributional military force that we think sort of transcends the rules of the game, right? And rather than get emotional about it, I think we just need to accept that it's going to happen. The reason they do the things they do is because they think it's in their interest. It's a way for them to compete with us in areas where they have comparative advantage and we don't. We will never do what they do. In other words, we will never lie like the Russian government lies. We'll never make things up out of whole cloth. We'll never engage in that type of behavior. But, you know, we also need not get so emotional about

the fact that they tell lies about what we're doing or what they're doing that we allow it to cloud our response. And we allow it to, you know, to make us respond in a way that is exactly how they want us to respond, right? This is reflective control, right? This has been in Soviet and Russian thinking for generations. You do things to get the adversary to do things that are not in his interest. And I think when we respond emotionally, when we lose our composure in the way we deal with the Russian government, we're sort of playing right into what they want us to do. Bob and Candace, I hate to end it, but I really appreciate you coming on today.

This has been a great conversation on irregular warfare. It's been my pleasure. Thanks for your invitation. Thank you. Thank you for listening to Episode 15 of the Irregular Warfare Podcast. podcast. We release a new episode every two weeks. In our next episode, Shana and another new co-host, Andy Milburn, will discuss the irregular warfare annex to the 2018 National Defense Strategy with Deke Rowe from the Pentagon's Special Operations and Low Intensity Conflict Bureau and David Maxwell from the Foundation for the Defense of Democracies. After that, Kyle and Nick are talking with Dr. Anshu Roy, founder and chief

executive of Rhombus Power, and retired General Stan McChrystal about the role of artificial intelligence in counterinsurgency. Please be sure to subscribe to the Irregular Warfare podcast so you don't miss an episode. You can also follow and engage with us on Twitter, Facebook, or LinkedIn. One last note, what you hear on this episode are the views of the participants and do not represent those of West Point or any other agency of the U.S. government. Thanks again. We will see you next time.