 Well, thank you for coming out and welcome. I'm David Sturman, I'm a senior policy analyst here with New America's International Security Program. We're here today to discuss 21st Century Proxy Warfare and a recent paper by Candace Rondeau and myself by that name that we put out a few weeks ago. To discuss this paper today, we have a panel of Candace Rondeau who is an addition to the author of this paper, is a senior fellow at New America and a professor of practice at Arizona State University. We also have Tony Fapp, who is a research professor at the U.S. Army War Colleges Strategic Studies Institute and is a former director for Iraq on the National Security Council. Before I turn it over to them, I'm going to talk a little bit about one of the key findings of our paper, which is this question of what is proxy warfare? We do in the paper a survey of literature on proxy warfare recently as well as some older material and related topics. One of the core things we found is that there is no universal or shared understanding of what constitutes proxy warfare. One of the primary problems with the discussion and definition is politicization of proxy warfare and the use of the term to describe other's actions, but not one's own. It's sort of good for me, but not for the problem. The one area that we did find that was relatively shared across the various people writing on this is the vision of proxy warfare as involving a principal agent problem, that there needs to be someone who sponsors and someone who is carrying out the conflict. That's relatively shared. Our contribution, I think, is this paper and we'll discuss aspects of it. It's a vision of proxy warfare that foregrounds the constitutional order. We define it as sponsorship of either conventional or irregular forces outside of the constitutional order of states. That sort of separates proxy warfare from traditional partnered operations or coalition warfare from alliances but focuses on some of the characteristic features of it that we'll discuss. With that, I'm going to turn it over to Candace Rondeau to talk a bit about what is new about proxy warfare today and also to give a little bit of information from a recent research trip she took to Ukraine to discuss how that relates to the concepts of proxy warfare we put out. Thanks, David, and I want to thank you all for coming. I know it's kind of a crappy weather day in D.C., which usually means that people don't like to come out and they like to watch webcast, but I appreciate you all being here. And also, I want to thank the team at New America, particularly in the comms team, for helping us put this together. If you haven't seen the paper online, do take a look because we've got a lot of data there on proxy warfare is past and present that's worth kind of looking at. We're going to have more updates to that data as the project continues. As David mentioned, this is the first in a series of papers on proxy warfare that we're going to be doing over the next couple of years. We're looking specifically at conflicts in Ukraine, Afghanistan, Yemen, Syria, Iraq, and Libya as well. Why now, I guess, is the question who cares about this topic? Clearly, I think one of the reasons we care is because of this sort of larger question around the stability of the liberal world order. We're now beginning to wrestle with this, certainly in the United States and the body politic and in the national security apparatus. What does it mean to have a collapsing liberal world order? Well, what it means is one of the symptoms, of course, is a move to proxy warfare, a move to greater interstate competition between great powers, particularly Russia, which is now, of course, as we all know, resurgent and perhaps increasingly China, particularly in the South China Sea. We don't really focus on that in this report, but certainly an argument can be made that China is a factor in Asia. We focused on the greater Middle East in large part because that seems to be where the most conflicts have erupted over the last couple of years. In large part, of course, the precipitating events around the Arab Spring were responsible for that, but there are other factors and that's what we talk about in the paper that I think are worth mentioning. I think there are sort of three sort of strategic takeaways worth mentioning and then maybe three tactical takeaways from the paper that are worth mentioning. The first is, on the strategic level, what's changed about 21st century proxy warfare in general is we've moved from the Cold War bipolarity that used to order relations between states for most of, you know, the post World War II period up until the 1990s. And we've also moved out of the Unipole period in which the United States is the primary actor on the world stage. And the reason for that is in large part because we have a greater proliferation of standoff remote targeting capabilities, particularly in the greater Middle East region. Then we used to have certainly in the 1950s and the 1960s. So the dependency, that kind of polar dependency between Russia and the United States and regional states in the center is now much less orderly. Iran obviously has standoff capacity. Saudi Arabia increasingly has standoff capacity and other states in the region have standoff capacity, which means that this frame of limited war has expanded well beyond the great powers. More states are incentivized to limit their engagements, their direct engagements, their direct confrontations than they were in the past. So that's one big feature. A second feature, of course, is the rise of transnational movements and the weakening to some degree of nation states as a political entity, as a mover, as a shaker, as a sort of dynamic ordering principle in the world. But most importantly, I think, and I don't know how much this comes through in the report, but I think as I've been reflecting over the last couple weeks on how we got here, the disintegration of multilateral institutions and their power to exert influence over a conflict such as the United Nations and increasingly NATO is something that is worth remarking on. It's arguable whether we would be in the situation where we are today in Syria if we didn't have the log jam that we do in the permanent members of the Security Council. Between Russia, obviously, always either abstaining or objecting to resolutions around containing conflict, particularly in the Greater Middle East. So those three factors, the multiplicity, the greater proliferation of standoff capacity at the regional level and I think the erosion of influence and the weakness of the United Nations and increasingly the challenges that NATO faces are precipitating factors at the strategic level. At the tactical level, there's kind of this other challenge which is nation states that are struggling internally with their own domestic order often look to conflict beyond their borders as a means to signal greater cohesion at the national level than there really is. And we see that in Iran I think where support for Afghan and Pakistani proxy militias support for Hezbollah is a means of containing domestic challenges or at least changing the national dialogue around what's happening internally and distracting in some ways with this commitment to use of force outside the borders. And it also obviously raises the temperature on nationalism which is something that we're now grappling with quite a bit. But the second tactical sort of concern or takeaway is an increasing appetite within autocracies Russia being probably one of the best examples for this sort of as we say military sugar rush of instant victory on the battlefield that ultimately has led to a diplomatic crash. We see that the Minsk agreements can't be enforced in Ukraine. We see that there's challenges now in the sea of Azov. And I think that Moscow is beginning to reconsider whether that sugar rush was really worth it in the Ukraine case. They may think it's paid off in the Syrian case and perhaps it has but I think in the balance of comparison Russia really I think is beginning to reconsider its position vis-a-vis Ukraine. It may seem stuck in now but you'll see after the elections I think you'll see some shifts in their positioning particularly vis-a-vis the sea of Azov and also possibly even on the boss depending on who actually wins the election. The last tactical concern here is just the ways in which communications technologies in particular have bounded together social networks in ways that we've never seen before. So much more tightly. The rapid transit of ideas about national identity, ethnic identity, political identity period and what that means in places like Ukraine and Syria Yemen for that matter has been an enormously transformative factor in the availability of proxies and proxy forces. So I think those are things that also Dr. Faf has remarked about as well as sort of the proliferation and the availability of people who have the means and the will to take up arms. I think we'll turn it over to Dr. Faf. If we can bring down the volume a little bit. I think we have a bit of an echo. But Dr. Faf will provide some remarks on both the paper and his vision of proxy warfare. Well thank you. First I'd certainly like to thank New America for allowing me to participate. And also for what I think is not just an excellent but very important report because in my own work and I'll confess up front most of I tend to focus on the normative side of things so that's going to be the direction or the orientation in which I'll engage most of this. Proxy wars while they've been with us for thousands of years and as well as proxy relationships I think not only they're not well understood they're certainly under regulated. So with that when I first started working on proxy wars myself I got two kinds of reactions that weren't entirely consistent. One was that normally they're nothing special. That if a proxy's war is just or causes just then any kind of support for it any kind of relationship you establish is going to be permitted. Then the other reaction is all proxy relationships are bad all the time which I attribute as the report does to the Cold War hangover where those kinds of relationships which were certainly prolific didn't always work out very well for either benefactor or proxy. And the other thing that I think is worth highlighting that the report makes a comment on is it's a lot more complicated than that. Not only do you have a multi-polar world where there's a proliferation of state actors who can provide these kinds of, who can serve as benefactors as well as proxies. There's a proliferation of non-state actors. Not only the proxies of non-state actors they can serve both as well. I'll talk a little bit about that in a second. And as a result and it's accompanied with increasingly fragmented and contested sovereignty changes the security calculations from all kinds of actors as well as the options they have for pursuing their security goals. Now when it comes to report I do have one quibble that I'll tee up here because I think it will provoke hopefully a good discussion. That is on the definition. So in the report defines proxy warfare as the sponsorship of conventional or regular forces that lie outside the constitutional order of states. I think it's absolutely right to focus on the constitutional order of states. I also think that one of the strengths of the definition and one of the troubles and those who studied it typically have is how do you come up with something that captures all the phenomena. I think this definition probably does that. My concern is while in the report acknowledges the importance of surrogacy and symbiosis as part of the relationship I don't know that the definition is going to be as stable as intended simply because how you define proxy war is depends on what you want to get out of it. So if you're looking at it normatively including an idea of surrogacy is going to be kind of important. So because it's in that surrogate relationship that the ethical and the normative problems arise because what differentiates the ethics of proxy war from the traditional ethics of wars is the additional considerations that a benefactor has to take into account when engaging in such a relationship as well as the management of the moral hazards which the report does discuss that are going to arise. Since proxy wars are wars they are, if you look at the traditional way a moral framework for wars under the use of Belem and Just War theory that include just cause, proportionality, right intention, right authority, last resort and those kinds of conditions. And what you'll see is while the inclusion of a benefactor won't make an unjust cause just or an illegitimate authority legitimate or a wrong intention right but the benefactor's involvement can make the disproportionate proportionate make alternatives to fighting less appealing and also affect the proxy's calculations for reasonable chance of success which are all conditions for the justice of the war. When that's the case you encourage these kinds of conflicts you encourage conflict rather than discourage it which sort of undermines the whole point of a normal framework to begin with. So I think in that sense the report I think there's more to discuss in terms of how this level of surrogacy particularly this complicated over the variety of networks and relationships, some of which can be sort of self-reinforcing and existing for their own sake thus perpetuating the conflict impact the security environment and these proxy relationships. Just sort of enclosing a few other things that I think might be worth talking about or including is one thing we also don't have is a good taxonomy for proxy wars. One of the sources you cited discussed in terms of state formation, six different kinds of proxy relationships and how they contribute to state formation. When it comes to state on state conflict and particularly non-state on non-state and state on non-state conflict that kind of taxonomy would also be useful. Also I think it's worth exploring in more detail the dual inconsistent and somewhat paradoxical role proxy relationships can have in either escalation or moderating a conflict. I think it's an open question. One feature that comes out in the studies of proxy warfare is the idea that well, particularly when larger powers are involved the use of proxies allows them to engage in conflicts settle their differences without having to do it directly and that somehow mitigates. However, at the same time it proliferates the kinds of smaller conflicts that can arise as a result and I think kind of understanding the dynamics that cause that and whether and how those kinds of relationships do moderate orally escalation is kind of important. I also think there's a lot of normative questions still remaining. In particular the report emphasizes that some of the, or characterizes proxy relationships in terms of them being in terms of secrecy, plausible liability and ambiguity in the rules of engagement and command structure as benefits or advantages of these relationships to give you which allows states to control their narrative and thus the course of the conflict. However, as I think it should be obvious from that that's certainly morally problematic and should give rise to concern as these characteristics also expand the space for exploitation and abuse. And this is where I think there's a lot of work to be done in terms of international law that goes down to benefactor can only really be held responsible for the actions of a proxy if there is a direct chain between an organ of the benefactor state to the proxy that leads to a illegal outcome or the proxy is not sufficiently differentiated from the benefactor, the organ of the benefactor state. Otherwise there's just not a whole lot out there to offer in terms of anything regulatory. So I think it's probably worth trying to argue or trying to articulate what sort of informal, formal practical, legal and moral norms should guide these kinds of relationships. And on that, those are my major comments. I think this report makes a major contribution and what I really appreciated about it a big reason I went through the history is that I felt that I understood the history was covering better through the lens of proxy relationships and that might be one of the final contributions that it makes is that we can understand not only what's happened I think better and perhaps more clearly but also determine ways to shape and understand our role in creating future history. Thank you very much. Thanks. So one thing I want to pick up that you discussed is dual phenomena is proxy warfare escalating conflicts or is it a way of de-escalation? And I have two questions for both of you on this. First is in the current phenomena we're seeing across the greater Middle East which do you think is more likely and are these proxy wars have the potential to escalate to fuller sort of more direct wars between either the competing regional powers or between the great powers the US, Russia, China that we don't really address in this paper as much. Secondly I want to ask you to tease apart is the threat of escalation or how escalation occurs different for different strategies? Here I just flag up for example there's some literature on US covert regime change that suggests regime changes perhaps I'm not sure I would say uniquely but I'll say it uniquely pose to cause disruption and chaos afterwards, worse consequences. The US seems to have embraced regime change in some of its proxy war strategies other countries have potentially also but some are waging sort of counter insurgent proxy warfare. Does that change it? Are there other autocracy versus democracy dynamics that you think structure that question? So on the escalation risks and I think what comes out from our research is that the more players you have in the game the more likely escalation will be essentially because states that rely on covert relationships rely on plausible deniability for their sponsorship are much less incentivized to signal very hard or very publicly what they do and they don't want what is acceptable and what is not acceptable in their proxies behavior. A good example here and I think addressing some of Anthony's comments on the paper vis-a-vis the quibble on surrogacy is a question around when a benefactor it could be a state, it could be a multinational company it could be in this instance it could be a larger fighting force like Hezbollah for instance that sponsors its own proxies in Syria and elsewhere around the world now we see them obviously training folks in Yemen. The definition of sponsor is obviously mutable but leaving all that aside whatever the controlling apparatus is whatever the relationship between the principal sponsor and that direct line to the proxy there is an obscuring factor and it really rests in the legal status of that relationship the legal status of the proxy itself if the proxy is acting outside of interstate norms then the character of the conflict is changing let me give you an example because I've been really wrestling with the question of who's doing what in Ukraine for the last little while the MH17 downing you'll probably remember now now five years ago still an unresolved question as to what exactly happened there Russia of course continues to deny that its forces were responsible for the downing of the jet which killed some 298 people obviously the joint investigation team which consists of Dutch authorities Ukrainian authorities and Malaysian authorities and others insists of course that the firing of the Buk missile at the jet was responsible for the downing of the jet therefore Russia is responsible there is a question obviously about responsibility, command responsibility in this instance but what we're starting to understand I think about what has occurred in Ukraine is in the early stages of the conflict there you had a number of different types of representative forces some masquerading as volunteers some genuinely acting as protection forces for certain interests in Donbass and also in Crimea but there is a clear connection between the platform from which you fire your weapons and the force that does the firing to fire a Buk missile you have to have an awful lot of expertise so the question is probably even less about Russia's responsibility in this case because the way in which the state enterprise of weapons procurement, weapons deployment especially large platforms like a Buk is done in the Russian context often means that it's automatically a state run enterprise and often means that whoever is manning that platform will by default be an arm of the Russian state so in some ways you can make the same illusions in Syria where you see for instance heavy weapons being used by proxy forces that have been trained by Russian mercenary groups or private military security contractors there you know it would be next impossible to run a T-72 tank without some serious training beforehand and so I think actually the question of command responsibility becomes actually a little bit more resolvable when you start thinking about the platforms that are being used and the concepts of operations that are being employed in those theaters I don't know what you think about that Anthony Well on the subject of responsibility I think actually it certainly is fairly straightforward to clarify it it's just that in terms of whether we want to talk about it in terms of what the international customary international law actually say or in terms of how we actually practice it those norms just don't seem to exist in these situations they should we should talk about that but often they don't and I mean a good example is U.S. sponsorship for the Contras in Nicaragua the international court found that the U.S. provided a manual that detailed activities that were illegal and this contributed to some of the legal activities that the Contras engaged in but did not find the U.S. at fault because there was no evidence that there was an organ of the United States government that then told them to go do those things however you're probably sitting there going huh why is that? well because we do intuitively we kind of understand there must be some kind of responsibility there but I don't think it's fully articulated in a way that I can then in a international venue get up and say okay you know this is how we there's a foul here so I think it's certainly possible I just think it's not something because it's not as simple as me giving you an order right it's not the same kind of relationship I might have internally because of all the things that characterize proxy relationships there are diversion interests there is a lack of control and there is a chance for miscommunication so we kind of have to address how those are going to factor in and how we assign responsibility I think the other part of the question was on escalation and its relationship to strategy and I think in my own work what I kind of uncovered was I think escalation is evidence of an absence of the strategy I mean the story of Vietnam is the United States was clearly engaged in the proxy war with the South Vietnamese government that as they became less and less capable and more and more distracted the United States had to keep escalating its contribution until it was pretty much the in direct combat and probably the major contributor so I was at the State Department on the policy planning staff in 2014 when the Russians took Crimea and things kicked off in Ukraine and the question we had do we give these guys leave the late and the way the conversation went and I think rightfully so was well that's an escalation are we prepared for the counter escalation and if the answer is no don't do it so the other flip side of that typically when it escalates evidence of lack of strategy but you have to go into these with a strategy to handle the escalation that could happen this one study should be these things don't happen out of nowhere there's one study and I'm not going to remember the exact statistic but over 90% of conflicts of civil wars in the 20th century where one side was benefited by a state actor the other side we got benefit from a state actor as well so all of these things kind of drug in and created gave rise to proxy relationship so another thing that we don't really discuss into paper but I think hangs over this entire discussion and it's probably worth its own entire set of papers is when we talk about proxy war what is the war aspect and is there proxy behavior that we need to understand but sits below war or is that simply prepping the battle space and to throw two examples to you should all states sponsor terrorism be put under the concept of proxy warfare or do we need a separate proxy terrorism set what about and I guess another area is sort of cyber security and cyber sabotage cyber espionage where there's a very strong reaction against naming that war but also clear proxy dynamics yeah I think the question on state terrorism is one that we somewhat resolved our report which is essentially if you're sponsoring external I mean if you're an external sponsor and you're sponsoring groups that are acting outside of constitutional order like Lashkar in Taiba in South Asia in the Pakistan India case and now increasingly in Afghanistan as well you know it's fairly and it has a paramilitary structure and there's sort of lots of qualifiers there but I think in that instance that certainly constitutes proxy war but I think your other question about actions that fall short of actual armed hostilities such as information warfare which of course has been discussed ad nauseam in the Ukraine case I think is worth pondering it was very striking actually on this trip while I was there in talking with a lot of the human rights activists who are who've been monitoring for a long time actually even before the conflict took place in Dumbass in particular there was a certain Dumbass was viewed as almost like the garbage can of Ukraine that really had one of the highest rates of poverty highest rates of AIDS infections you name it you know shortest life span it really was a very troubled region in the first place and there was already a kind of impulse of the sort of highly almost universal homogeneity linguistically in terms of Russian being spoken as the primary language in that region and most of Eastern Ukraine also obviously added that along with this stress over what official language would be used what wouldn't be used in certain contexts was already an exacerbating factor and well before the conflict took place the lack of sort of clarity on that provided a very important wedge for the information operators that did end up becoming an important fueler of the conflict at the civil civil level and I certainly think that there's plenty of evidence of that online if you look at the contact here you can sort of see the manipulation of memes around Nazism and that connection and it's across the board but then progressively you also see and it's actually interesting how it takes place over time you also see those memes kind of starting to dissipate and the sort of the visual indicators of this new Novorossiya resurgence this creation of this sort of Catherine the Great era of the Republic that is mostly imaginary but for its intensive purposes online it really gave a kind of unifying force to the ideology that stoked some of the grievances but also brought together a lot of the volunteer forces that some of which were genuinely volunteers forces that actually ended up clashing with the Ukrainian military really part of the conflict so I think the information warfare piece is something that we're still grappling with obviously it's hard to restrain especially in this environment I think there are probably other examples of that as well yeah I guess to start with the question you asked David is so you can certainly have a proxy relationship and in that relationship conduct activities that fall far short of war the question is I think is that relationship would be stabilizing or destabilizing and my concern would be because of the way that I already discussed those kind of relationships change the kinds of calculations both practical and moral for warfare they're probably more likely to be destabilizing absent some other measure than stabilizing and that's certainly something to concern with I don't know that I have a whole lot to say about the information and cyber aspects other than certainly it's a it's an avenue for proxies of various kinds to try to achieve their interests that's the weird funny thing about cyberspace there's a lot of conflict that goes on there that is non-violent and certainly it's a space for proxies to compete but I don't know that it changes our understanding of the proxy relationship or proxy wars you know the kind of conclusions that you're drawing I think it's a manifestation of the complexity more than more than I'll turn to my relationship we're about to turn it over to your questions my last question for you two Dr. Pfaff you mentioned sort of the history aspect and how proxy warfare explains some of the history of conflict up to today what is your both of yours most significant event that we covered or understood where there's a historical proxy war or historical rivalry that shapes why we are where we are today and then tell us why that's the case that is a hard question it's a trap Danny David I guess I'll start there's certainly well certainly and I'm not much of an expert in this you know one way to understand the Peloponnesian wars is through the lens of Victor Davis Hansen's Thucydides trap and the rise of two growing the rise of two great powers but you have to remember that the Peloponnesian war was a big time proxy war one over several decades and the proxy relationships were incredibly complex with not only city states changing sides but key leaders changing sides more than one time so I don't think you understand the complexity of that conflict without understanding it through a proxy lens which Thucydides gives you the details but not the analytical framework then current times as you guys were running through them the history of the Middle East you can understand a lot of not just US policy and behavior but other major powers as well in terms of the relation in terms of the relations that they established why they established them and what they asked out of those relationships which is much more interesting and I think much more revealing than just simply understanding the history of the facts and maybe what interests were involved because that's too simple and finally when you were describing the Syrian conflict I was like you know you can't really have a discussion about how to how to even understand much less resolved this conflict unless you understand not just that there's a proxy war going on because your point is it's not a proxy war between say Russia and the United States with the Syrians in the middle there is a multifaceted network many groups all have multiple benefactors switching sides it's very much more Thucydides world I think than the way we currently analyze these things at least through a Cold War lens so there I think I did okay I gave you three potential epics where if we understand the proxy relationships and how they affected things we have a better understanding of what went on I'd have to agree that it's maybe a little bit less event based than relationship based some of the things that we haven't noticed in two and one of the things that was really striking actually in just beginning to do some research on Syria as well as Ukraine is this kind of very strange wedge of anti-nado Kurdish communities that sort of sit on the border of Turkey that have pre-existing relationships going back to the Soviet times there's also pre-existing relationships between Iran and the Kurdish population so I mean actually for me I think probably the less well understood parameters are around Kurdish identity and the ways in which that has kind of split up the region I think that's been pretty key and I don't think we really understand enough about how the Soviet relationship kind of shaped that in some ways and then later of course the Iran-Iraq war was also very significant I think we really haven't paid much attention to the Iran-Iraq war in a way that reflects an understanding of both sides and I mean that in a good way so that we're really less looking at just Iraq and its motivations but also Iran and its motivations and who actually was doing what there one of the things that jumped out was of course that the Afghan and Pakistani militias that we now see fighting in Syria actually fought in the Iran-Iraq war and in fact they were pulled into that as you know cannon fodder in the sort of middle part of that very long conflict so there's a long continuity I think it's more the continuity of relationships that are kind of built around political identity and ethnic identity to some degree in the region that we've kind of missed in some ways. To be fair I'll give you mine before we turn it over which is I'd encourage people to go back to the Lebanese Civil War which I think is both the moment when international terrorism really becomes a major issue in the way we understand it now or at least the peak of a separation that began the Palestinian movement gets separated off from more direct state control after the 67 war it's also in its formation after the Israeli 82 invasion where we really get hezbollah from and to shift to the Shia transnational networks and it's really also one of the first conflicts I think where the U.S. stumbles into this multi-ferrous mesh of violent actors that are non-state that we just can't figure out how to control in the way that some of our other proxy forces and with that we'll turn it over to questions please we're live streaming it so wait for the mic and then tell us who you are and then state your question and then we'll answer let's do you in the back yes my name is Roger Shetty I work with private equity in the technology sector and my question really goes back to something you discussed briefly but I think deserves a little bit more attention and that is I wonder if the whole concept of proxies as we've known it since Roman Carthage is technologically outdated like the auto workers who used to make cars being replaced by robots because if you think about it let's say you were Iran or Russia or the United States or Britain take your choice for the parent and you had a choice you could spend $500 million and get a proxy state or proxy non-state actor they complain they have their own issues they have their own friends their own enemies they take vacations they have children or you could spend $100 million and get a piece of artificial intelligence that would monitor your adversary continuously 24 hours a day never complain always do exactly what's told it could inflict cyber damage on the adversary enormous cyber damage on the adversary it could simulate the adversary with fake images of your enemy saying things that they never said it could dispatch unmarked drones to assassinate whoever you want assassinated I mean the technology tools are all there it seems to me that the notion of a proxy state or non-state actor is kind of like an actor worker saying I can make the car better than those computers and pretty soon nobody listens because the computers work 24 hours a day or the robots work 24 hours a day and they have no healthcare I mean I think that's a very well taken point which is I mean technology is absolutely transforming I think the economics of proxy warfare so if you can get a hold of drones which you can which you actually don't need guided missiles if you don't care about the norms you can actually as you see in Ukraine people strap up drones with small plastic explosives and just sort of drop them into the battle space we saw that also in Syria we've seen that in other places as well in one of the examples where the proliferation of drones, small scale and the ability to deliver payloads and a willingness to deliver them in a way that is not going to distinguish between a target and doesn't much care about the actual collateral damage that goes with it sure I mean it's obviously it's a cheaper prospect I think the issue is though if you get a hold of drone technologies you really do and if you want to buy it en masse you really do need to find usually a pretty large combine that can that you can purchase enough that it will make a difference often in many cases those combines are at least overseen by their governments we have protocols in place in the United States for the monitoring of dual use technologies it's an imperfect system to be sure but it is a system and it is a way in which you can kind of trace and control exert control over the proliferation of these types of weapons from the AI perspective I think the assumption there is that there's a cohesive state with a cohesive bureaucracy an interagency where everybody agrees on what the objectives are I don't think in the lived experience of the United States that's ever been the case so and certainly in the Afghanistan and Iraq wars we see that actually the lack of internal interagency consensus around what the strategy is, what the objectives are often leads to I think less effectiveness in the use of more advanced technologies like you're suggesting no it's an interesting question I think until Skynet's fully active though I don't know that the technology is going to make prox relationships outdated as much as it certainly will change what we can do with them and how useful they are I guess my thoughts in that regard are as long as there are groups of people with interests and one's willing to sponsor the other the technology can enable that but even a lot of the technology we're talking about at some level has to happen some place even with drones often you have to have somebody on the ground that is facilitating that kind of targeting the other thing that's interesting I think from the point of view of the report is the report is extraordinarily agnostic on what counts as a benefactor and what counts as a proxy it can be a corporation it can be a non-state actor so I think in terms of perhaps states pursuing their goals yes absolutely it'll moderate that I think technology will for a while moderate it I don't know they'll ever really replace it but it'll certainly moderate it over time but we can already see our conceptions of it evolving and I think there's always going to be desire to reduce your risk cut your expenses and proxy as long as that's an option proxy relationships will be something that we'll explore I think both of those are key points the only thing I'd also flag is I think the technology can really address one of the major reason states and others resort to proxy warfare which is it means the people on the ground getting killed aren't your people I don't think it addresses one of the other core reasons which is really tied into our definition which is the reason you wage proxy warfare is you get to pretend it's not you either because it's secret or it's plausibly deniable and I think with most of the technology that you mentioned for it to really be used there's going to be some attribution back and some of that may be sort of diminished by the technology but if you're conducting a drone war like we are in say Pakistan no one thinks well it's not the U.S. responsibility that this drone strike killed some civilians it's everyone knows it's the U.S. and everyone blames the U.S. whereas it's the CIA gives some money to extraction to go hunt down white terrorists and kill them or bring them back for detention well there we have a little bit of playroom and I think that's not going to go away what other questions do we have let's do Heather Thanks I'm Heather Herbert here at New America and I'm afraid of getting lost in my thoughts about what auto workers do now as opposed to what they used to do which I think is an interesting extension of what you're saying but I had a question on a different topic Candace at the beginning being in proxy warfare as a symptom of the troubles or decline or collapse of the international liberal order and that seems intuitively true but at the same time as you've all said of course we've had proxy war with us as long as we've had writing about war so is it that what you're seeing now is different is there some qualitative difference in proxy war now that presages a challenge to the liberal order or is it that what we're talking about as the liberal order grew up in that brief immediate post cold war period where maybe we saw a decline in proxy forces unpack that a little more. Yeah I'm going to say something controversial that I kind of held back from saying at first and you're always good at that Heather sort of forcing me to the edge honestly you know I think there's the catalyzing force that changed the ability in the character of proxy war in the 21st century can be dated back to September 2001 and in the United States response to the attacks of 9-11 that was the instance in which a intervention and unilateral intervention got put on the table and less in the case of Afghanistan and obviously more in the case of Iraq but that was the precipitating moment I would say when bending the rules moving outside of the UN Security Council culture and norms became the rule of the day and I think from a Moscow perspective that was the case very much so you might even argue that Primaakov who was the former Foreign Minister in Russia even said this that had it not been for 2003 maybe things would be different in terms of relations between the United States and Russia had it not been for the unilateral incursion in Iraq we might be in a very different place it's not just the incursion right and the kind of thumbing of the nose at the very important institution of the Security Council and its restraining force it's also that we began to operate outside of our normative ways and means of conducting war we began detaining people we began targeting people without owning either of those actions so in many ways the emergent slow motion collapse of the liberal world order really on Washington and at the end of the day that shift that decision to act unilaterally in Iraq upset the apple cart not just on a regional level right but on a global level and I think probably others have more to say about that but especially since you worked on Iraq during that time but I do think it was a key moment in shifting the catalyst for proxy warfare yeah I I don't know how new it is broadly however new is often interpreted from the point of view of the security community who's confronting it and I think a lot of that's new and actually ties in nicely with the technology questions that you asked a few minutes ago because things are not only just increasingly network and not just information moves faster things move faster there's a velocity to this that has given rise to and or coupled with you know what we're saying fragmented and contested sovereignty in a lot of places and as a security community I think a pretty larger state to look at and go I don't know how to do that I'm not really organized to fight that and that's certainly to answer your question what we discovered is you know we're organized to do one thing we're having to do this other thing and then when you can't really figure out how to do that what do you do you go find proxies and proxies who can function environments that you know where you know I say the rules I just mean you know sort of the rules that make things work you know sort of the things that kind of work where the rules are just different in some of these fragmented contested areas and they are say in a state on state conflict where you're doing trying to do more building than destroying so I think what's new for us right now is the need to depend on these more as they proliferate you know regional and globally I don't know that that's unique in history the other thing I just add and what I'm about to say shouldn't be read as the opposite of the liberal international order falling apart because I think it's we could have had a very different vision of where we are now if we hadn't taken the various sledgehammers to it that Candace talks about but there's also sort of accelerating economic and technological development that brings us to something new so for example the Yemeni Civil War when the Edward Civil War Egypt intervened I think that's pretty clearly a proxy intervention then you had Egypt sort of being supported by the Soviets which is another aspect here you had Britain and some other states around in Israel actually at the time so we see some of this but also if we look at that conflict local groups that were the proxies they weren't really going to jump and escalate the conflict across the region they were local tribes the conflict was over in many ways not explicitly but in oil development that had only just begun penetration into the area by US diplomatic and other personnel and economic people as well as Soviet folks had just begun and I think that's fundamentally different from today when Hezbollah has the capability to project power quite across this region where ISIS draws 40,000 odd foreign fighters from basically every country in the world to Syria is there like a case similar to that from the past sure the Spanish Civil War the republicans drew thousands of fighters but also once again that escalation was in many ways very controlled by the Soviets when you look at the sort of documentary records there I think it shows pretty clearly the Soviet Union had an extensive amount of control over that recruitment and I don't think that's the case international terrorism again our very concept of it dates from basically 67 we have precursors but what we see now is new and I think that's all wrapped up in an escalating aspect where states and non-state actors are now able to project power and escalate the conflict across the region we look at that was the province of a very few states if not two states at least for the Cold War and really even before there was a question out there yeah I was wondering what policy recommendations you had towards combating and regulating proxy warfare specifically towards holding benefactors directly accountable for human rights abuses I'll take that one I have a few recommendations but they're a little bit mushy because I think they're still forming in my mind I think there's still a lot more work to be done I do think that where you see transnational corporations acting as sponsors of private military security contractors of paramilitaries that's an area that's very rich for policy action so specifically looking at a sanctioning companies that are involved in the facilitation and the movement of particularly heavy weapons into a conflict zone that then fall to proxy forces I think that certainly is an area for action I think then also secondly it's worth looking at whether and when I'm harping on this heavy weaponary piece because I think we see something qualitatively different today in Syria and Ukraine and I think potentially even in Libya the reason you see so many private military security contractors acting on behalf of Russia in these areas is not because they're private actors it's because they service state run enterprises and to the degree that we can better understand those relationships between state run enterprises and hired guns I think we would make a major policy shift I think our sanctions would be much more impactful I think we would have the ability to monitor and predict to some degree where investments from sponsoring states may become a increase over time so I think that's one certainly a big area where not only the governments of the United States and allies within the international community but also in the human rights community I think there's a lot more work to be done on that score One I've heard you speak about before and I was wondering if you expand on it is actually making public some of what we're seeing happening and creating the sort of foundation and protection for reporting and their independent work that lets that out That's also true that I mean what probably really needs to change is just the move from kind of over-classified conversations about actually what's bettering I think the greater the transparency on the side of governments that do have access to information and communication with groups that are monitoring the actions of proxies the better and certainly there's again I think we see with organizations like Bellingcat if you're familiar with them they've been tracking using digital sleuthing basically to better understand these relationships and revealing the relationships between proxies and sponsors I think that's very key and you know that has implications obviously for US because of course if you're going to hit targets that you know happen to be Russian citizens for instance as we saw in February of 2018 last year in Syria then you're going to have to take ownership of what that really means and obviously nobody wanted to do that but actually it may pay off to say in fact these are Russian citizens we know them to be you know to have some sort of command structure that is either related to a state-run enterprise and or they're not mutually exclusive have a direct line to the Kremlin right that's an instance that's a perfect case study in which greater transparency about what the US command in the field understood to be happening would actually really go a long way to exploding the entire narrative around who was actually doing what at that moment um yes I'd refer you to my epic tome proxy war ethics for all the policy recommendations I have but uh no I kind of I boil it down into two basically two broad categories one I kind of talked earlier about being attention how that relationship affects you know the calculations regarding conflict and whether or not to go and how one conducts oneself in terms of proportionality last resort chances of success and that kind of thing but then you also have to pay attention and have policies about the different moral hazards that arise like diffusion you know we provide a lot of weapons to a particular proxy then what happens well they don't stay there and not only can they go fuel other conflicts they can go they can fuel crime and destabilize just that local area you have you know problems of dirty hands you know proxies often don't do or act illegally how do you this kind of goes back to your point about transparency how do you do that and I think there's steps you can take to to address that kind of problem that you know anyone engaging in these kinds of relationships absolutely should and then obviously the issues of escalation and how intense diverge which is a huge problem in Syria I'm sure you've seen over and over again so I think there's a lot and I just don't think it's out there are there questions? Steve Perkins I'm involved in financial services consulting I wanted to ask about the current administration compared to the last couple of administrations is our use of proxy warfare for the United States has that increased decrease gotten smaller or larger what do you think about what's going on now compared to what we've had in the last 20 years since 9-11? Well one of the issues we have is still the conundrum around authorization of military force use of military force being again dating back to 2001 I think progressively we're seeing for instance in Congress right there's some questions around whether or not we can continue under that umbrella are we increasing I think our appetite for challenging others is increasing I certainly think that in the case of Iran in particular our investment in proxy forces is probably likely to continue for some time to come until there's a shift in the administration I think it's less about the administration more about frankly what we value most in the United States and visa VR alliances across the ocean particularly with our European partners which now of course is in question particularly on the Iran deal so it's hard to say increasing I just think that the incentives are there because the last thing there's just no appetite anymore for another Iraq or Afghanistan and unfortunately I think the national security apparatus of the United States hasn't quite figured out it's starting to try and figure it out but hasn't quite started to figure out if it's not Afghanistan and if it's not World War II then what is it that we actually do when we're war fighting we still don't have very good answers to that and there's actually a great deal of disarray that's less reflective of Trump or Obama and more reflective of our own I think national ambivalence that has been historical around external interventions and that's just something that's probably not going to go away anytime soon I very much agree with the sort of moving beyond the administration as a focus one thing I think is worth sort of keeping an eye on that's perhaps a bit tied into that is whether the sort of emerging support for a more restrained US foreign policy means that a US that still seeks to exert its influence abroad just doesn't via proxies and that generates more I don't think that's necessarily a clear question either way but the other aspect I think is immensely relevant to that is often proxy warfare is seen as sort of what you do when you want to be more restrained when you're not doing a direct intervention but we actually see in our sort of history section multiple instances where a direct intervention actually spins out a proxy network even while there's a massive application of in these examples direct use of US troops so for example in Iraq at the same time that we're doing the surge we're spinning out the sons of Iraq's program in other aspects you see it in Afghanistan the US presence and it's spinning out of proxies maybe that's not the same strategy sometimes but they don't necessarily always go in the ways you'd think I agree with all that I think the only thing I would add to that to answer your question in terms of quality I mean quantity no our major relationships are still more or less in place now the quality does change we're relying more on others now and less on others but also it's important to remember no one sitting there going well how many proxy relationships do I have and how can I get me some more they emerge from considerations of risk reduction cost reduction and balance with the particular goal and when we have a proliferation of say interest that fall below the level of vital national security interest but still are an interest that's when you kind of see either the strengthening of a particular relationship or the proliferation of one but these relationships emerge and I think if we actually thought about them like that in advance we might shape them differently but that's the thing they typically kind of emerge and then we wake up one day and say oh my gosh I have a proxy relationship what do I do now and so you'll see that do you see sort of the Reagan administration's policy in the 80s of sort of anti-communist insurgencies being what we could have labeled as this is a particular administration's strategy not just the moving forces of history spinning out proxy wars well that's a situation where you had greater cohesion around what's good ideology, what's bad ideology I think the Reagan administration and I will also say that the experience of Nicaragua, El Salvador and other places in Latin America in particular actually informed our allergy around the use of proxies so that whole period of the late 1970s through the 1980s where we were sort of toppling governments and running guns via Iran to paramilitaries in the Latin American jungles obviously I think much lowered the appetite I think that changed the conversation and that's why actually Iraq and Afghanistan stand up sore thumbs that they are historically for us I think we're probably out of time Any other last questions? Let's take that and that will be our last one I think Okay I'll try to wrap this up I'm Mike Radke I'm a military fellow at the U.S. Institute of Peace Thank you for the report and thanks for your time and insights today I did have a question about perhaps what your research and thinking might glean in terms of controlling your sponsor if you assume that proxy warfare will continue as a way of influence indirectly given the state of the world today but we also see technology diffusion that accompanies greater independence for proxies and less incentives to be controlled I'm curious if you could provide any insights or recommendations on how a sponsor may control proxy networks in the future I think to get very serious about diplomacy would be the first step I think what you see in the Ukraine example that's really fascinating is and actually even in the Syria example but there's a very clear pattern one fighting starts kind of on a seasonal basis in Ukraine it's usually at the end of the school year around Orthodox Easter and Orthodox Christmas that there's a cessation in fighting and Russia and Ukraine organize their entire engagement and hostilities around those dates and that's consistent throughout you look at the data you can sort of see it very clearly and that's interesting because actually you couldn't you know I tried to run parallel with Afghanistan where it was just sort of everything all the time basically I mean on the Taliban side there was some sort of acknowledgement around certain holidays like Ramadan for instance but it had less of a rhythm but in the Ukraine case what's interesting is once Minsk was in place this became a device for both sides to organize their control around and it's very clear if you can precipitate a ceasefire for up to a week this situation like you have in Ukraine that certainly indicates that you have much more control than you do in an Afghanistan situation and that may be because there's more players at the table and I think the same in Syria but almost always those ceasefires are accompanied by some new action in Minsk right there's no parallel in the United States in fact we've completely given up on diplomacy with military engagement forgotten that actually it's you know the military is used for coercive means incredible threat but because you want to get to the negotiating table right and that there needs to be some sort of diplomatic engagement and some sort of plan on what the outcome is so I think the first step is acknowledging the problem which is diplomacy at this stage is vastly depleted and undervalued as an important tool for controlling proxies I guess I'll just add to that I think is you also have to remember that control works both ways I mean that's one of the problems with a proxy relationship typically you don't have a lot to withhold support or not withhold support now you can persuade you can attempt to persuade but ultimately that's your leverage and that actually gives the proxy some control depending on how vital they are to your national interest that's certainly one of our issues with a couple of the relationships we have right now or we need them probably for other things than what the proxy relationship we have but as a result we can't just simply say no you can't have any support and a good example I think would be the fight against ISIS but unfortunately our acting the militias did moderate their behavior a little bit but never fully but we couldn't walk away why because the ISIS victory was so much worse than anything else so A problem with proxy relationships you don't have that kind of you know there's a limit to the kind of control you can actually exercise without exiting the relationship and so as a practical matter then it just depends on the strength of the relationships you actually have and the points of contact the contact that you actually have but ultimately because you have that limit these relationships always come with an element of risk I want to thank our speakers and also remind you this is the first initiating paper in a longer series we hope to see you back as we delve into some of these particular conflicts with some actual field research so thank you