 Our next panel is What is the Future of Proxy War? It will be moderated by Matt Spence, who is a professor of practice at the Sandra Day O'Connor College of Law and the Thunderbird School of Global Management, both at Arizona State University. He was formerly the Deputy Assistant Secretary of Defense for Middle East Policy, and he was on the National Security Council as Special Assistant to the President and Senior Director for International Economic Affairs. He is one of the co-founders of the Truman National Security Project and was both a Truman scholar and a Marshall scholar. Great, Daniel, thanks very much, and this is a great topic to follow on the last excellent panel. We're looking at what proxy warfare is as a central element of next generation warfare. There's an excellent report by New America on 21st Century Proxy Warfare by Candice Rondeau, who is on our panel, and David Sturman. What we're gonna do in this panel is dig in to what some of the general changes in the landscape are, specific examples, what are common elements across, and frankly, what are the implications, both for U.S. policymakers and what we can expect in the future. But before we dig in with this great panel, we're gonna begin with a poll for this, and the questions for the poll will be displayed on the two TV screens, flanking the stage like we've had before. So as the poll comes up, turn your attention to the television screens, and I wanna begin with our question, is who will be the biggest sponsor of proxy warfare in 2030? To join the polling, please text the same text that you've used before and answer your questions. We'll go through from there. So the question of proxy warfare, among its many dimensions, remains relevant for us right now from personal experience at the Defense Department. Working with proxies was really a central part of our strategic approach, except we rarely, if ever, called it proxy warfare. Instead, it was building local capacity or working by, with, and through local partners. Likewise, at the National Security Council in 2009, when the president directed the team to revise and look at our strategy towards Afghanistan, it was not just clear, build, and hold, but clear, build, hold, and transfer. Transfer to local players, and what those local players would do was a central element. And if you read the range of reports that come out of Washington, be it think tanks or others, a central conclusion is how can the US address conflict in the Middle East without being sucked into complex and costly civil wars? And proxy warfare is often either the explicit or implicit part of a solution. So proxy warfare is a central part of our strategy today, but it is changing. It's changing with technological changes, with changes in conflicts, and changes in US policy, and changes with other powers in the region around we're doing and responding. So that's what I'm excited to dive into today. We have a really terrific panel of experts who both are experts in the academic area about this, but I think nearly every single one of them has recently returned back from the field. So we're getting a firsthand view of what's happening and the regions we're talking about. We have Candace Rondo. Candace is a senior fellow at New America. Also professor of the practice at Arizona State. She previously was a journalist with the US Institute of Peace and the International Crisis Group, but also has a background in speaking Russian, so speaks not only to the Russian Ukraine piece, but also deeply in the Middle East. We have Erica Gaston. She's a non-resident fellow and researcher at the Global Policy Institute in Berlin. She's also is receiving her PhD at the University of Cambridge and was previously at the US Institute of Peace. We have Adam Barron, who's a fellow at New America's International Security Program. He's been a writer and political analyst fokking on the Middle East with an emphasis on Yemen and has recently returned from Yemen has been reporting. And then Inna Rudoff is a research fellow at the International Study for the Study of Riticalization. She's pursuing her PhD in war studies at King's College and has spent time working with Iran and Iraq. It's a great panel, thanks for joining us. Let me begin by trying to set the stage. So all of us have thought deeply about proxy warfare. We've read about it, but Candice, could you start us on thinking about what is proxy warfare now and how is the meaning of it changed in the last few years? Well, obviously a good question to be asking now. You know, when you think about the fact that the National Security Council and the National Security Strategy now calls for deeper consideration of great power competition, it's an important time to be thinking about this. You know, it's tempting to sort of make all kinds of analogies with the Game of Thrones or Star Wars or Star Trek. I think I won't do that. I will say that today's proxy wars are not yesterday's. The Cold War had some very distinctive features that make today's proxy war quite different. One of them was just bipolarity and the fact that you had the primary competitors were Russia and the United States and the Soviet Union and the United States at that time, you know, pre-1991. The other feature that has changed dramatically is the proliferation of capabilities. So you have not only small arms, more widely distributed, but you also have more people who know how to use different types of platforms and they may or may not be associated with principal sponsors who are actually in states. So that's the third feature I would say has changed is that now where you had, I think a kind of conception of proxy warfare where it was sort of, you know, the United States backs its folks and Russia backs its folks, you know, let's say Angola is a good example of that. Some other places, Afghanistan is of course the classic example in the pre-Cold War era today, you have corporations that are highly militarized that sponsor proxies. You have proxies like Hezbollah who sponsors proxies. You have different actors now sponsoring each other at the sub-state level. I think, you know, Erica can speak to that a great deal in the Iraq case. And I think those are really big changes in terms of how we conceptualize it. There are other pieces and I'll be brief on this that are really important to consider. And we talk a little bit about this in the report. The normative changes that result from all of those feature changes. What it means to have more actors in the mix who can sponsor armed groups means that control becomes much more attenuated. It also means that accountability and attribution also becomes much more difficult. And we've seen that for instance in the case of, I'm sure you all know, Wagner Group will talk about that a little bit more probably during this panel. If you're familiar with the emergence of Russian mercenaries on the field in Syria and now Libya, then you'll understand that there is a challenge with attributing actions to actors. And that is one of the other features that I think has changed normatively. So what that means definitionally is that we have to kind of rethink our approach to how we characterize and grapple with this on a policy level, right? It's sort of normal to think, well, Russia has proxies, but we don't, we have partnered operations, right? But in actual fact, what carries through across all proxies and principal relationships is this balance of control and sort of normative boundaries. So that's an interesting point that I wanna hit on. I think you're right. One country's building local capacities, the other illegitimate proxy warfare. You talked about the huge proliferation of new actors, accountability. It raises an interesting question as we just start off. So what's the legal framework that we have here? Because traditionally we think a proxy warfare is operating outside of our traditional state to state relations, but as we've looked at the changing definition and creating a new approach, as you said, how should we think about how the legal framework governs what those are doing? I don't know if anyone on the panel wants to jump in on this question. Do you wanna jump in? Sure, as the other lawyer on the panel. We should have expected that you would throw one out there. So I think this connects actually to the point that you were starting to reference about sub-state actors. So I think increasingly not only are you going to see proxy warfare perhaps happening more often and spreading into different spaces, whether it's sort of economic or political or cyber, but I think that what you're seeing a lot more in this is true in Iraq, which I've been looking up, but it's true also I think in Afghanistan is a lot more of clear examples of what I would call sub-state proxy competition. And what do you mean by that? By that I mean after domestic stakeholders, some of them are within the state and have a visual state position. Some of them are power brokers that have their own level of political writ or military power outside of the state and that they are the ones that are acting much more like we would classically call a proxy patron in the sense of they're funding an armed group, they're influencing it to carry out their agenda and that's happening at a very local sub-state level. And back to your legal point now because I did not forget about it. So I think one thing that that means in terms of the legal definition is that some of our associations of who is a proxy or not, which were before vested in this idea of an external state working with perhaps a non-state actor like a militia in another state are no longer valid. You have actors that are behaving as proxies either for another sub-state domestic actor or for a foreign actor who may in fact hold a position within the state. So I think making that litmus test purely based on their sort of state position or not is no longer a sort of way to characterize proxy. And to push you on that, and this is maybe an outside the ball question is do we have enough of a legal framework now internationally to even govern modern proxy warfare as your studies found? Do we think about it? Or are we in a little bit of uncharted territory where it just happens as it happens? I don't know if there ever was an international legal framework governing proxy warfare. I mean it's always sort of tripped that line between things that you should legally be doing and things that you're not, which is why some of the name games about calling in a proxy or a partner are so important. Immediately there can be proxy relationships that are not illicit, but there are many that are. So I don't know if the legal framework has always been the most central to. Right, it's still today. So Adam, you just came back from Yemen and you spent some time there. As we think about proxy warfare, I think Yemen is at the top of a lot of what we think about what's happening. Can you talk about sort of what you've seen and how some of these new approaches play out and one of the most devastating conflicts we're seeing right now? Sure, I mean I should start by saying that I'm increasingly hesitant to offer a unified framework on proxy war in Yemen because I'm increasingly skeptical that such a thing is even useful or perhaps exists. So I think what you've seen in Yemen overall is the fragmenting of a state, which in a way facilitates the fragmenting of proxy strategy. So you have different powers, very large, using different strategies based off of different areas. To take one example, the Emiratis are very close with hardline former, excuse me, secular former socialist militias in Aden. If we speak about some of the people they're backing in say the city of Taiz, we're dealing with hardline Salafis and by and large this is a pattern that I would say most key groups are using in Yemen up to if we're speaking regardless of falling on either side. The Iranians are playing quite a similar and interesting game in their attempts to build some degree of influence in the South, although largely unsuccessful. So what does this come into if we're speaking as policymakers or people trying to engage in security? The fact remains is it's got to be embracing this complexity which I think is why when you kind of distance yourself from these conversations that you're having on the ground which are nuanced, not just I would say for intellectual purposes but nuanced because they have to be nuanced and then I'm coming to DC or European capitals speaking of explain to me this Iran versus Saudi Arabia war in Yemen. And I would love it if we were talking about just an Iran versus Saudi Arabia proxy war in Yemen because it would make my job of analyzing Yemen a hell of a lot easier. But the fact remains is it's deeply complicated. We have a profusion of actors with different interest agendas, et cetera, even within the coalition itself and for better or for worse, unless we embrace this complexity, I think you do have a huge risk of having policies whether here with our partners in Europe that will only serve to exacerbate some of the underlying issues that have brought this conflict to the point in the first place. So that's an interesting and discouraging point in the sense that we have not just traditional actors in Yemen we think about but far more, far complex in different relationships than just outside external intervention. It's a similar theme in Iraq and Syria, right? If we talk about not just a proxy war between Iran and Saudi when you add the United States to the mix very much, it gets very complicated. I guess for Erika and Inna where you spent a lot of time in Iraq, could you both talk a little bit about how Iraq is an example of this new form of proxy warfare that we've been talking about and how it might be different from what we've seen in the past? I mean to tie this back also like to the conceptual discussion that we have about the definition. One would presume that a sub-state proxy actor would operate outside of the constitutional framework of a certain country. Now in a lot of these post-conflict environments as Adam, Erika, Candace have pointed out, the constitutional framework is what political elites and their cronies make of it. There are a lot of ambiguities. So for example, to take on highly heterogeneous actors such as the popular mobilization units, analyzing them through a black and white prism of a conventional Iranian proxy warfare would obscure their homegrown agency. So drawing on my interviews from Iraq, I would say that the motives, the drivers are increasingly of a socioeconomic nature and also tied very much to locally entrenched interests. And this also affects the strategy of the principal who is actually less reluctant to keep an eye shut on the multiple ways an agent is trying to self-cater. So I think this is a very good illustration on how the nature of proxy warfare is changing but also on how the principal tends to revisit its choices and approaches on the ground. Yeah, and I would add on to that. I agree with, in his analysis as well, in looking at this sort of discussion of a US-Iranian proxy warfare, does it exist in Iraq? And it's funny because they're almost sort of negative or polar opposite images. So if you're in DC, there's a lot of discussion about the sort of overwhelming Iranian proxy agenda, particularly in Iraq. And if you're in Baghdad and someone's talking about proxy war, they're probably talking about the US. And so it's very different perspectives. But I think overall when we look at what's happening, there's certainly a lot of tensions both sides have a lot of partners and a lot of interest in trying to influence those partners to satisfy their objectives. But a lot more of what you see going on is, I would argue that it's not a classic proxy warfare situation despite that. One, because most of the external actors don't have control, but also because as I pointed out, there's a significant amount of local agency. So if you take particular incidents or what one group, such as what you example, the popular mobilization force, which territory they're taking or their recent efforts to or success, one should say of getting greater institutionalization, greater political control following the last Iraqi elections. If you look at what was motivating them to do that, more often it's the domestic interests and it's sort of the domestic food fights that are driving the situation rather than external interest. And that's true whether you're looking at sort of small fry, local militias or forces, whether it's sort of Sunni tribal leaders or other minority groups up to some of these larger pro-Iran Shia PMF forces who are seizing power definitely benefits Iran because they're a close ally, but they're trying to seize power because they would like to be more powerful actors in Iraq in many cases. Two, whether you look at some of the state actors that are described as either US partners or make deals with Iran and are sort of playing both sides. If you try and look at what is actually driving those conflicts and interests, it's more often these domestic actors' calculations about their own advancement or what they need to do for political survival than the external interests, who they're happy to turn to for backing or support but don't necessarily control what they're doing in most cases. So Erica, you raised a really interesting point about this relationship between the local and the external and the question of control. So in this new way of many more proxy actors, how does states control proxies or how do those supporters of states control proxies and what tools do they use and how are they actually able to do that for anyone on the panel? I mean, just to continue the example in Iraq, I would argue that they lack the control and that more often where you're seeing it go an external partner's way, it's because of a sort of convergence of interest where they're often ideologically or sometimes strategically aligned with their partner on the ground or it's sort of opportunistic and in that moment it's useful for the domestic actor to rely on that local support. But I think to the point of control, one thing I would add is that I think the reason that you've got this happening in Iraq but I think in other places is that control is a lot more difficult and I think that's in part because it's sort of fragmentation in the security sector but also in sort of the political and governance sector. And I think that's true in Iraq but also in a lot of places in the Middle East certainly. Yeah, absolutely. I would say that's something that definitely holds for Yemen and you see external actors almost using a sort of a carrot and stick approach. The usefulness and the ultimate strength of that kind of varies from sponsor to sponsor. But I think Yemen has always been a country where people tend, has the reputation of being a country where people tend to particularly power players will flip sides repeated times. So it is that sense of different convergences. The most notable of course being how the network of former president Ali Abdullah Saleh quite, well abruptly is a strong term, it ended abruptly for him. After a bit has suddenly converged from going a key partner with the Houthis to now being a decent part of the network is split but the closest people around Saleh at the end are now largely working quite closely with the Emiratis and indeed you have specific military figures who were firing at pro coalition forces from Houthi held territory two or three years ago that are now literally leading the fight against the Houthis with the support of the Emiratis some three years later. So in a way that also testifies to the extent that internal political dynamics in this sense, what 20 year old conflicts between two actors can end up causing dramatic after effects on proxy relationships. Well Adam you said you're right about dramatic after effects is interesting. I mean at least at the Pentagon, the line between building local capacity is great but funding individual groups that you don't know what can happen is a big divide and building local capacity is an advantage but when you're funding groups through either arming them or otherwise they are not your agents. They're individual groups that have their interests, different ideas and one thing that at least we struggled with at least when there was a DOD title 10 program to arm and train Syrians who would fight ISIS finding those individuals who you could both trust and vet we were comfortable with but they had agendas on their own right and that is a very small part of the Venn diagram sometimes who can be veteran and be approved and actually do what you want to find. And so as you all look at the conflicts that you've looked at, are there strategies for control that you thought about or useful for thinking about from US policy maker perspective? We would like to engage maybe proxies but there are human rights violations, there are concerns about international norms of conflict. Are they contracting mechanisms, foreign aid? Have you seen any tools that work to try to help control to some degree what proxies can do and is control even a reasonable question to be asking about? I would almost say it's a matter of embracing what you can control and knowing what you can't control. This may be an odd form to say this but I think that's one of the ways that Iran has been particularly successful in their relationship with the Houthis and Yemen. They recognize that they can't necessarily and they don't necessarily want to even control this group but it's sort of that alignment of strategic interests and take advantage of that. Where we have strategic interests, make sure they're there, set a few red lines and otherwise sit back and watch the show which is a bit of an exaggeration but yeah. I think there is kind of an example of negative control. So like in the Ukraine case where you have all kinds of different actors in Luhansk and Donetsk. In the last year and a half, we've seen the assassination of most of the upper core of the political leadership in both places. Some have ascribed Russian hit teams the blame for those assassinations. That's an example of negative control. There's the withdrawal of funds, weapons, political support in the case of Ukraine also in the case of Syria. Where for instance, we had very recently in February of 2018 the hit, the strike on what was a sensibly Wagner group near Derezor by U.S. Air Force and other forces in Syria. There was a situation, again, there's a lot of supposition around what happened there but I think kind of there's a universal conclusion that Russia did not support adequately its own proxies in that situation. In large part to punish them for some other political unknown that we don't yet understand of course. So I think Russia's a very good example of a principle that actually exerts negative control in order to kind of explicitly divide to some degree its agents against each other. Similar to Adam, I think that the notion of control is a highly contested one. So for example, if we want to achieve considerable advantage on the ground, we should also realize that Iran has capitalized a lot on the idea of plausible deniability. So for example, for an actor that's as pragmatic and domestically as overstrained as Iran, we can sort of anticipate that they would seek to bet on a new set of actors outside of the traditional spheres of influence, outside of the realm of usual suspects. So for example, having an occasionally critical counterpart as Moktadzadar, who has recently published a detailed statement for the deproxification of Iraq, with a substantial local support base is more lucrative an option from an Iranian perspective than limiting one's options and support to groups more traditionally perceived as Hezbollah-i-Wana base or Iranian satellites, Saray-al-Hurasani, Haraqat, Hezbollah and Nujaba and those sorts of groups. So that's interesting. You mentioned beyond the usual suspects and to return to something, Candice, you said at the beginning about who the other suspects are, there's a role of technology here. Technology, driving change, we heard some of this on the previous panel. So as we think about the role of what I think your report usually called conflict entrepreneurs, which is very interesting, so how do we think about what technology's done with this and to put it more pointed, are Facebook and Google engaging in proxy warfare? Great question. I mean, I think actually the Russian example, of course, creams all other examples. I don't know if anybody's geeking out on Ukraine, but I am. And recently I've sort of been looking at the work, the writings, the blogosphere of a character by the name of Igor Strokov, which is Igor the shooter. His real name is Girkin. He was a big player in the Crimean context. He was one of the first to join up and then sort of march into Luhansk and Donetsk. He has now returned to Moscow, where he writes long screeds on Vkontakte. When that incident I just mentioned happened with the strike on Wagner Group in Syria in February of 2018, when that occurred, his entire blogosphere blew up and he really kept flipping the rumors, right? The 100 dead, 200 dead. It was remarkable how much what we call roulette lit up as a response to that event. I think we don't pay attention to what's actually happening in the blogosphere of our so-called competitors, I think at our great peril as well. It's an extremely important tool for whipping up ideology and whipping up sort of this means to mobilization, particularly I think in the case of Iran and Russia. Yeah and I think that because he spoke also of Facebook, Twitter, they offer us as researchers a very suitable tool to kind of like track their narrative and also like to compare how they try to accumulate moral and symbolic legitimacy on the ground. So for example, following the social media presence of the popular mobilization units, they have tried to coin this image of not just an auxiliary military force, but also as an actor who is there where a vacuum exists or where the state likes the resources to respond like to the legitimate demands of citizens, be it rebuilding hospitals or providing emergency relief in fluid areas. This also like plays into the ground strategy of these individuals, these groups that institutionalize that the certain moments have developed a real interest of their own. We're gonna, I'm gonna turn to questions from all of you in just a few moments so I wanted to think about what you wanna ask. We'll have microphones out here. But before we go into that, and as something you said was interesting about, the role that proxies are playing often to provide basic state services. When you have state breakdown, we think of a traditional model of there's a civil war of a conflict, we're supporting our army on the other sides. But if you have the breakdown of a state system, a lot of the proxy groups are providing some of the basic services that we might think of a state which we often fail at trying to build state capacity. So taking that and pulling back a little bit, proxies when we call it that a very negative context, again in the government when we talked about what we were doing the United States is doing in Iraq, it was funding the Kurds, the popular mobilization front, Iran was engaging in illegitimate attacks on us by arming those, you know. And they would think about different ways. To take a step back, are there good and bad proxies? I mean, can we think of sort of like a norm of level of about what's happening in that respect? Taliban, good proxy, bad proxy? Are former neighbors? What do you say? Not going to comment on the Taliban. Maybe the framework is effective versus ineffective. I feel like good and bad friends are more elements of it. It's a normative sort of judgment that, yeah. And it's a very dynamic notion. So for example, even the efficiency of a certain proxy or agent or a commissioned actor can change over time depending on their local support base which they can also forfeit. If they're being perceived by the local audience as too near or like too ideologically tight down to a foreign agent or a foreign state. So this is something where they have already tried like to be more cautious in the way they are being seen by grassroots, by social networks on the ground. Yeah, because it's that tension, right? If you're the local force on the ground, you want to seem like you're legitimate at all points. But if you're the sponsor, you want to have as much control as possible. So it's always going to be that balance where one is trying to make it look even regardless of any funding, et cetera, that they're a group that's local with popular support, et cetera. But obviously that makes it harder to place constraints in many cases. Both the support of a foreign state and legality bestowed upon a certain group by the hosting state can be a double-edged sort. Yeah, right, we thought a lot about. This ties, I'm just really quickly too. I think some ways this ties back into your earlier question about trying to find a proxy or find a partner that sort of didn't cause as many human rights abuses or maybe representative form of local empowerment. So back to your question about control. And I think actually, I mean, I think the US has sort of tried to experiment with this idea of could you fund these local forces or militias or what have you, you get the benefits of having local forces without some of the costs of them. Maybe the US has experimented with that more than others. And I think, obviously, you can hit on actors that are sort of better than others, have better conduct, have less human rights abuses, maybe represent a certain political group that's been undermined or marginalized. But I'm not sure, and fundamentally, I'm not sure how much you can regulate the conduct of a regular actor. So it does, as you say, sort of limit the groups that you're going to be able to work with. And it's not always entirely effective, although it's certainly worthwhile in terms of other US commitments. But then how much does that affect your ability to actually achieve strategic objectives versus making it simply groups that are almost transactional in nature and sort of check a box and kind of losing that. And I think we see that a lot in Iraq in terms of the groups that are working now with the US, often see them as sort of a short-term transactional partner as opposed to the sort of enduring strategic partnership that groups that work more with Iran. Right, I mean, that's the dilemma that you identified, Erica, right? When you say local partners has two parts. The local part, they have their own agendas, they have low legitimacy. The partner is related to what we, the US, or other outside players are doing, and there's an enormous tension because if they are not truly local, they don't have much local legitimacy under our control, but we want there to be a partner element of local that it's not just putting resources in that they may do what they want without us knowing. With that, why don't we open up to some questions from the audience? We'll go to Peter Bergen right now first. One of the problems about proxies is if it escalates so the principles get involved. And so one of the more likely scenarios the next year or two is that one of these Iranian supplied missiles of which 200 have already been fired by the Houthis into Saudi Arabia, lands in downtown Riyadh and kills dozens of people. So if that happens, which seems not unlikely, what will, how will Saudi respond? That's a great question. Let's take it up. You add it. And then it's interesting because you've seen true forms of responses to the missiles landing in Riyadh. The first one, and I actually happened to be in Yemen at the time when it happened, ironically. During the first one, you had Saudi Arabia respond quite substantially. You can say shutting down the border, really stopping flights in the sense that this obviously represented a major security breach. And I think that's one thing is you have to realize that Saudi Arabia, of course, has significant national security concerns. And for them, as I think for any country, having missiles from their southern border, landing in Riyadh is absolutely unacceptable. What you saw after this, and the next one you saw Saudi Arabia taking a much more restrained approach, I think in part because there was an awareness that kind of going over the top in the response almost hands the Houthis a bit of a PRCOO. So when I spoke with certain officials there, they were saying, I mean, there is an idea, kind of a nuance take in the sense that we need to do everything we can to stop these missiles from coming. We need to take anti-smuggling actions, et cetera. But at the same time, you know, make sure we do this in a way that it doesn't look like we're engaging in collective punishment. I think it's an X factor. I mean, the question remains whether the technology is there from the Houthis side to really direct something quite directly. You have seen an increasing proliferation of technology that appears, and in many cases has been proven to have originated from Iran. Particularly, I mean, most notably, you've had this increase in drone attacks. The most notable occurred earlier this year and led to the deaths of a senior Yemeni government military official. So the real question, I mean, it really remains quite unforeseen, but obviously it's something that could have quite a destabilizing effect. And I've heard that that could, you know, let's face it. I live in Beirut, the region is a tinderbox. And that's one of those things that could really set things alight. Very much so. I mean, even not just in the example Peter you gave, but in Syria, when you have multiple proxy wars, do you get that into a conflict between the United States and Russia? And at what point did the escalation spread and draw you in further than you'd want? Kevin Barron from Defense One. Thanks, thanks Matt for the intro. I wonder if you could talk a little bit about the political constituencies for proxy war, meaning political support back home. Because I think of it in this sense, the Syria war, which we cover is considered, the by-with and through part of it is considered a huge success if you're a special operator. It's something that's worked, it was unique. It's not a success if you're one of the half a million Syrians who died waiting for some sort of ending to that war because the Americans didn't want to send divisions and kept it, chose to do it like that. But it's an American success because there are a few American troop deaths. But then the Niger happens and four Americans are killed there, suddenly the public knows about it. Or in the case of Yemen, and I'd ask one of what Adam thinks, I don't think the American public knew anything about Yemen until after Khashoggi, then there became a, there was a constituency against the Saudis against the war eventually. Now we see Somalia happening, more and more in the news, more and more airstrikes this year about a significant level. And we might be one Black Hawk down away from another total rejection by the American public of all of these kinds of military interventions which are at a low level part of the even presidential campaign to come. What's the purpose of US global leadership abroad in the world of military intervention? So do you have thoughts on the political constituencies? How much does it matter what the publics think of all these activities? Interesting. I want us to take that. Candace? I'll jump in. I've been reflecting on this a little bit because one of the issues that was raised here was plausible deniability. And one has to wonder today whether or not any state sponsor really has plausible deniability for any of their actions or for how long, right? So in the US case, because now for 18 years there have been these engagements using drones in particular and there's been so much public I think outcry or at least debate about the efficacy of using drones. That certainly has kind of exploded the bubble on plausible deniability for sure. And it drove the Obama administration ultimately to begin to adopt a much more transparent approach to their reporting on it, to their documentation and so forth. Will you see that in other cases? In the Saudi case, it seems like we might have an example here where both plausible deniability erodes and then also the risk therefore for blowback, political blowback raises the stakes from a domestic point of view. And so then you want to restrain your proxies or at least look to be restraining your proxies on some level. Great. I would just add to you just on that. I think it's a little bit more mixed even within some of the communities that you're constituencies talking about. So I spent a lot of time talking to not just the actors on the ground who were working for the proxies, but also a lot of the special forces community or US defense or state department officials who were working with like the FSA or the SDF in Syria or with different tribal forces in Iraq. And a lot of them why they might take pride in the success of a certain mission though that a by within three partner was working well and was achieving the objectives. A lot of them expressed a lot of frustration with sort of the short-term nature that there wasn't necessarily an in-state of what to do with this partnership at the end. And a lot of them who had been standing this up as you pointed out in many different countries and had seen these sort of cycles where you can have success for a short term with these partnerships. And then there's one Black Hawk down incident or they flip sides and it blows up in your face. And I think sort of wanted a more enduring strategy or didn't necessarily view it as success in that way. So I think that's an important thing that you to think about in the next part of US policy. Great, any more questions? Yes, here. Thank you for taking my question and thank you for the panelists for sharing your knowledge on that topic. My question is what will be your advice to a government that is about to engage a proxy? What kind of criteria you want to use to discriminate between what you call a good and a bad proxy? That's a great question. So what's the advice to governments as we're doing this, engaging in a strategy? Look, I mean the advice I have is one, look at your competitors before you begin engaging so you understand and know that you do have competitors. Whether they're states or private companies or some other consortium of interests, do know that you have other competitors and you need to understand what you're purposing your proxies for if you're choosing them. So let's say Syria is I think probably the best test bed for all kinds of different experiments in proxy warfare from the Iranian case to the US case, the Russian case and so forth. There you see I think a real misunderstanding about what each proxy was capable of doing and a little bit of a lack of analysis on sort of where each proxy might end up. So as Erica alluded to, there was no end game necessarily that was sort of gamed out and I think in the US case. That would be one thing. Another very important policy prescription I would have would be don't think of this as simply a kinetic theater. This is really a situation in which as was alluded to, social media of course is important, technology is important, but what's really important, what enables most proxies today is illicit finance and anonymous companies and smuggling routes. If we don't get that piece of it together, so you can pick your proxy, hopefully based on the capability of your competitors and whatever operating theater you're in, but do know that if you really want to be competitive and empower your proxy, you have to have an end game. You have to assume that they're going to have a political cause and a political drive and that you need to end up somewhere with that, but you also need to understand that there are others on the other side who have the exact same scenario. So if you want to be competitive, I'm not advocating for sponsoring proxies, but if you do, you have to really think about then how to contain and cut off the means of escalation. And the way you do that is to make sure that they cannot be financed and that they cannot obtain the weapons that then become the pointy end of the spear where your proxy is concerned. Right. Anyone else want anything? Yeah, and I think also like to be more realistic and to have a sober assessment of your own competitiveness on the ground. For example, adopting a zero sum approach on either or strategy with a certain proxy can be counterproductive, especially if your preferred proxies being approached also by other like more lucrative principles. So there I reckon that it's essential to look also at semi-Clandestine networks that profit extremely as Candace said from underground economy, from local cronism, and this we have to sort of embed within our own strategy. Well, look, as we wrap up, I think this has been a wide-ranging and fascinating discussion. Thank you very much for the panel. I think there are a few takeaways, at least I see we think about this, is that the proxy warfare universe and approaches expand dramatically with new actors, new complexities. So it's hard to get our hands around in the same way and think about who are the actors and they're much, much more. You know, second when that has happened, the questions of control are much more difficult. There may not be the same control that we face, if at all. And then third, if proxy warfare here's a strategy to stay, regardless of what name we might call it, whether it's more politically popular compared to larger intervention options or it's seen as something that states can really do, these questions for how has governments think about working with proxies continue to exist and what advice we have for going forward to what proxies to fund or support, how to control that, and how to align that with your overall strategies, both strategic and military main with them. So thank you very much for everything and thank you for the panel. Thank you.