Army demonstrates a poor understanding of how to achieve success within these environments. Given the ubiquitous nature of proxy environments, the U.S. 4 McMaster only scratches the surface of proxy hot spots, but his position serves as a point for starting the discussion. The problem with outsourcing fighting to proxies, as McMaster noted, is that these forces often are insufficiently resourced and possess limited will due to dissimilar interests. Army, can empower other forces-proxies-to do its fighting, just as Wild Kingdom host Marlin Perkins would have his assistants do the close-in work with the dangerous animals on the show. military, and more specifically, the U.S. McMaster reflected on this phenomenon while discussing the Mutual of Omaha’s Wild Kingdom fallacy, one of his many works on the continuities and changes of future war. 3Ī proxy war is favorable for a variety of reasons, but most notably, it provides the principal actors a degree of standoff and limited liability.
Curtis Scaparrotti, commander of EUCOM, highlighted the influence Russian proxies are achieving across EUCOM’s area of responsibility. Joseph Votel, commander of CENTCOM, has an entire section of his testimony dedicated to proxy warfare’s role within CENTCOM’s area of responsibility. Certainly, discussions of proxy warfare dominate the posture statements of the U.S.
To highlight this issue, one needs to look no further than the recent posture statements by multiple U.S. A quick scan of current events shows proxies fighting on behalf of partners from Ukraine’s Donbass region to the Euphrates River Valley in Syria and Iraq, and all points in between. Nevertheless, a proxy war is arguably the leading operating environment in modern war. Army flounders at seeing operating environments beyond binary conventional conflict and counterinsurgencies. More recently, there has been a substantial amount of literature written about modern and future evolutions of conflict however, the U.S. (Photo by Alaa al-Marjani, Reuters)Ĭhinese statesman and military theorist Mao Tse-tung reasoned, “Unless you understand the actual circumstances of war, its nature, and its relations to other things, you will not know the laws of war, or know how to direct war, or be able to win victory.” 1 Mao’s argument, written almost a century ago, clearly captures the essence of understanding the war in which one is engaged. Popular Mobilisation Forces fighters (mostly Iraqi Shia militia) ride in a tank near the Iraqi-Syrian border 26 November 2018 in al-Qaim, Iraq.