essentially different as the external and internal push-and-pull factors differ entirely from states in the developed world. This country divided along religious and ethnic fault lines and governed by exclusive neopatrimonial elites has witnessed an extensive activity of nonstate contenders challenging the authority of the central government. Militias in the Niger Delta and the jihadist militant group Boko Haram in the northeast represent the most prominent local insurgencies, which the government is trying to address, making use of commercial and noncommercial surrogates. Lacking the capacity and the capability, as well as the legitimacy in the eyes of local communities, the Nigerian state has invested in security assemblages with maritime security companies,34 private military companies,35 and rebel groups.36 Here the state partners with surrogates that supplement the state’s capabilities and legitimacy to provide public security to communities that have withdrawn their support for the central government. In an effort to retain relevance within a complex, multilayered conflict over authority, legitimacy, and access to resources, the ruling elites have discovered that the partial delegation of the burden of warfare of counterinsurgency (COIN) and counterpiracy to surrogates provides the state with a degree of public authority as a manager of a neotrinitarian security complex. Instead of undermining the standing of the state, it brings the state back into the picture despite the fact that the management of violence is partially outsourced to surrogates.
In essence, surrogate warfare transforms the sociopolitical concept of security that has evolved in the late eighteenth century from a trinitarian into a neotrinitarian complex. Rather than characterizing this complex as nontrinitarian as Martin Van Creveld does in his Transformation of War, the new neotrinitarian assemblages are hybrid sociopolitical associations between communities, states, and a range of new security providers, new technologies, and norms. In that way, they retain a resemblance of the fundamental tripolar divide between a patron as an agent of a community delegating security provision through organized violence to a security provider. We argue in this book that externalizing the burden of warfare from the trinitarian complex to surrogates on the outside allows states to continue providing security as an increasingly abstract global good in transnational conflicts against actors disregarding the sovereignty and territoriality of states. By keeping the financial, human, and ultimately political costs for states in war to a minimum, enabling states to operate within a realm of public discretion and international deniability, the neotrinitarian security assemblages between patron and surrogate offer the state ways and means to deal with the risks of twenty-first-century conflict.
However, without the covenantal bonds between the authority strategically directing organized violence and the agent executing violence, the patron-surrogate relationship bears inherent risks that are alien to the trinitarian security assemblages that had come close to monopolizing the means over violence in the Western world in the nineteenth century. Unlike conventional civil-military relations between society, state, and citizen soldier, the relationship between patron and surrogate is often one of a temporary nature. Command and control becomes a fluid concept when surrogates readily advance into conflict with varying degrees of autonomy. The aspect of delegation, supplementation, or substitution intrinsically entails degrees of deputation whereby the deputy is entrusted to achieve tasks autonomously with limited or no patron oversight. This loss of patron control affects both the effectiveness and ethics of surrogate war, as this book intends to show. Thus, although at first appearing to provide the state with almost a silver bullet for its twenty-first-century challenges, the externalization of the burden of warfare to surrogates leads to fundamental issues in the way violence is being used in the century ahead. As much as it might be a response to what Hedley Bull might call a neomedieval anarchy,37 it might also contribute to the unpredictability, uncertainty, unmanageability, and proliferation of postmodern conflict.
Book Outline
Chapter 1 introduces the reader to the phenomenon of surrogate warfare historically, from antiquity to the postmodern era. As the chapter illustrates, the externalization of the burden of warfare has been a constant in warfare since pre-Westphalian times. The chapter commences by providing an overview of the various forms of surrogacy that have emerged through history, from simple auxiliaries in ancient times to mercenaries to rebel groups and unmanned aerial vehicles. Further, this chapter categorizes patron-surrogate relationships based on the proximity of the principal to the agent, ranging from direct to indirect to coincidental surrogacy.
In chapter 2, we outline the geostrategic context in which surrogate warfare needs to be understood. In a globalized, privatized, securitized, and mediatized world, modern concepts of state-centric security provision are being challenged. Therefore, this chapter lays the contextual foundation for understanding the future of security provision in what we define as an increasingly apolar world, where no state can exert unchallenged influence across all dimensions of power and where the perception of security might no longer be defined by tangible threats but subjective perceptions of risks. The changing character of war will be examined here against the backdrop of Clausewitz’s trinitarian concept of war. It will be argued that wars in the twenty-first century do not easily fit into the nineteenth-century trinitarian concept of war, which has to be perceived against the particular socio-cultural and historic backdrop of the Clausewitz era. The surrogate wars of the new era are becoming increasingly neotrinitarian, with alternative security assemblages arising that provide security as private or global goods with the state’s former monopolist role in war being reduced to one of a primus inter pares.
A conceptual framework for surrogate warfare is developed in chapter 3, providing a detailed examination of the model of warfare by surrogate. This chapter presents the externalization of the burden of warfare as a typical neotrinitarian war whereby the trinitarian relations between society, state, and security agent are being disrupted, allowing the patron to return to a premodern mode of war: the rational cabinet war removed from the passions of the people. Thereby, surrogate warfare provides the contemporary state with a solution to the dilemma of having to coercively manage risks but without relying on major combat operations. As this chapter shows, surrogate warfare allows the state to respond permanently and geographically dispersedly while widely avoiding international, domestic, or local scrutiny.
The fourth chapter focuses on the role of technology as a surrogate in contemporary and future warfare. It starts by providing an outlook of the role of technology in warfare from a mere force multiplier to a stand-alone autonomous platform. Drones are the first concrete and visible systematic manifestation of the use of technology as a surrogate. The cyber domain, however, represents a domain of warfare that is particularly appropriate for the use of surrogates, as this chapter will show in reference to Russian activities in this domain. The next generation of weapons relying on artificial intelligence will have a degree of autonomy unseen before. The implications of these technological developments on the trinitarian nature of warfare have been underresearched because of their infant nature. Yet it is essential to analyze this type of technological surrogacy in an effort to appreciate warfare in the twenty-first century as, after two centuries of state centrism, autonomous weapon systems might fundamentally alter the way states wage war in the future.
Chapter 5 focuses on the consequences of the trade-off between control and autonomy. This trade-off is key to understanding surrogate warfare as different push-and-pull factors make patrons seek maximum control over the surrogate by dissociating themselves as much as possible from the surrogate through high degrees of substitution. The surrogate, however, seeks to maintain autonomy from the patron while ensuring a constant level of external support. These push-and-pull factors determine the volatile nature of the relationship between patron and surrogate as principal and agent. Degrees of substitution and consequently surrogate autonomy or patron control are dynamic as relationships evolve from dependency to codependency. This chapter will therefore examine the whole range of surrogate relationships and provide a taxonomy ranging from indirect delegation over force multiplication to full-out substitution—looking not only at human surrogates but also technological surrogates.