The Patterns and Pitfalls of Technology Diffusion to Proxy Forces
To continue on the topic of proxy not being pejorative, it is important to understand how technology diffusion in proxy strategies benefits and hurts states using proxy strategies in 21st century armed conflict. Many scholars and commenters have outlined that proxy strategies are a cost-effective way for one party to wage war against another party through an intermediary actor. To be sure, scholars like Tyrone Groh refer to a state’s use of proxy strategy as “the least bad option” for how to address many of the changes of strategic competition.
Considering the idea of a ‘least bad option,’ many features contribute to a good proxy strategy. This includes how to control (or manage) the proxy force in the field, how to overcome (or offset) a proxy’s agency costs, and how to support the proxy with technology to enable it to compete with state-based opponents. This latter consideration – technology diffusion to proxies – is a long-standing pillar of good proxy strategy. Technology diffusion, or providing proxies with weapon systems, intelligence gathering tools, and communications systems, is crucial for any proxy strategy to succeed, but it is not without cost.
This article examines the benefits and pitfalls that a state experiences when engaging in technology diffusion to proxies. I address this subject by looking at two questions. First, how does technology diffusion to proxies impact a conflict’s duration? Second, how does the diffusion of technology to proxies impact an adversary’s ability to understand principal-provided technology? This article uses the US-led war to defeat the Islamic State in Iraq and Syria and the Russo-Ukrainian War to support three findings.
States, and their militaries, must grapple with three strategic factors when making policy and strategy decisions pertaining to their potential involvement in a given conflict. First, technology diffusion to proxies extends a conflict’s duration. This is because the transfer of arms expands the proxy’s capacity to wage war, whether pursuant to their own interests or for those of their benefactor. Second, technology diffusion to proxies can easily lead to technology diffusion to one’s enemy. Third, the diffusion of technology to proxies can facilitate a loss of technological asymmetries. This results from an adversary’s active effort to find the gaps, loopholes, and other vulnerabilities in the principal’s military and intelligence gathering technology. The cumulative effect of these three findings is that proxy strategy might be the least bad option for many reasons, but policymakers, strategists, and senior military leaders must appreciate that proxy strategy can (and does) contribute to long, destructive wars of attrition and the loss of their own warfighting asymmetries.
Patterns and Pitfalls
Technology Diffusion to Proxies Means Extending a Conflict’s Duration
As a rule, one can generally assume that any contest between imbalanced forces will often go in favor of the stronger opponent, especially in situations in which the weaker opponent attempts to face the stronger opponent on the latter’s own terms. We find that this basic rule applies across the board, whether in sports, business, or military affairs. Yet, on occasions, weaker participants can find a way to sap the power differential that exists between them and the stronger actor or identify paths and partners to generate relative situational parity. This section explores that latter option – creating parity – and importantly, what impact that has on war.
Proxies emerge in one of two basic ways. Proxies are either (1) a pre-existing actor that a state (i.e., a principal) taps, or (2) states create proxies out of disparate groups and forge them into a generally cohesive force. This article refers to the pre-existing actor model as Situation A and Situation B is when a state creates a proxy force.
Situation A involves state-to-state principal-proxy relationships. A principal-proxy relationship temporarily existed between the US (the principal) and Iraq (the proxy) during Operation Inherent Resolve, for instance. By mid-2014, combat in Iraq demonstrated that Iraq lacked both the resources and tactics to defeat the Islamic State (IS) on its own. Early battles around Mosul, Ramadi, and Fallujah demonstrated that the Iraqi Security Forces (ISF) were no match for IS’s swift, brutal, and effective fighting force. Despite years of US military training and security assistance, Iraq’s IS-oriented policy aims exceeded what their military could accomplish on their own. Thus, the Iraqi military needed significant external support to eliminate IS’s pseudo-state in Iraq.
On the other hand, the US was interested in eliminating IS. Also being a policy goal for Iraq, this interest served both the US and Iraq. Then-US President Barack Obama stated that IS posed a danger to US national security, and accordingly, he would use the US military degrade and destroy it. Obama also stated that the US would not deploy a large land force to Iraq, but that it would operate through other intermediary forces, while providing a support to that surrogate from across the elements of US national power. In effect, Obama’s strategy framed a US proxy strategy to defeat IS, without using the phrase “proxy strategy.”
Thus, the US and Iraq formed a state-to-state principal-proxy union to fight IS. In this dyad, the US was as the principal, while Iraq served as the proxy. In this arrangement, the US provided Iraq with intelligence, weapons, strike support, and combat advisors. The Iraqis provided the preponderance of the combat forces to engage in direct physical combat with IS. The mutual US-Iraq policy aim to destroy IS annealed both actors, yet was not so overpowering that the one actor lost their agency to the other.
Agency, or the lack thereof, is often a criticism used to attack proxy strategy. The criticism of agency is often a strawman, however. Many critics fail to grasp that a handful of dyad archetypes exist and that properly identifying the dyad’s structure is critical to appreciating agency. Transactional proxy dyads are the most common state-to-state dyad, and those in which proxies most often retain agency over themselves, their self-interests, and their own activities.
Though we cannot rewind the conflict and let it playout with US intervention in Iraq, yet we can be certain in surmising that the US’s creation of the US-Iraq proxy dyad contributed to extending Iraq’s longevity in the conflict. For instance, had the US not created this political-military arrangement, Iraq would have certainly faltered, and given their combat record against IS to date, likely failed in any attempt to retake Mosul. Thus, one can deduce that technology diffusion to proxies, in this case through a state-to-state principal-proxy dyad, extends the duration of a conflict. In doing do, proxy strategies accelerate the death, destruction, collateral damage, civilian casualties, and civilian harm in a conflict. Put another way, proxy strategies are in womb from which wars of attrition emerge. To be sure, proxy strategies might be good for domestic politics of the principal state, but they are far from the “least bad” strategy for the proxy or the state in which the proxy war exists.
Moreover, one can easily replace Iraq in the situation outlined above and replace them with Ukraine, and replace IS with Russia, and find a near facsimile for the US’s approach to the Russo-Ukrainian War. The US and Ukraine’s national interest both reside in the restoration of Ukraine’s internationally recognized boundaries and the defeat of Russian armed forces in Ukraine. Setting emotion aside and examining the US’s arrangement with Ukraine from an analytical position, one can easily find the same state-to-state transactional principal-proxy dyad in Ukraine as in Iraq. Moreover, without the US’s creation of that dyad, Ukraine would have faltered in its defense due to the lack of modern warfighting and intelligence technology. Thus, like Iraq, technology diffusion in Ukraine has extended, or elongated, the conflict, at least as a conventional war, in ways that would have been inconceivable in any other circumstance.
Situation B differs from Situation A in meaningful ways. In Situation A, state-to-state connections were made to facilitate technology diffusion to proxies. In Situation B, however, states create proxies from any available nonstate forces. Subsequently, state forces, either directly, indirectly, or a blended version of directly and indirectly, provide their proxy with the technology it needs to accomplish its principal’s goals. In Syria, the US cobbled together the Syrian Democratic Forces (SDF) from scratch to combat IS. After forming and training the SDF, the US provided (and continues to provide) the SDF with intelligence, weapons, strike, combat advisors, and other military technology, to enable it to do the preponderance of ground combat.
Technological support to proxy forces allows those forces to remain engaged in a conflict longer than they would without external support. While this support might come with good will at heart, the technology diffusion to proxies causes the expansion of death, destruction, civilian harm, and collateral damage.
Russia’s relationship with the Wagner Group is another example of the state-to-nonstate force proxy dyad. In addition to Wagner Group’s own technology procurement, the Kremlin directly and indirectly provided (and still provides) the Wagner Group with the military and information technology that it needs to help Russia accomplish the Kremlin’s policy objectives regarding Ukraine. Proxy war scholarship characterizes this relationship as a contractual proxy dyad.
To this end, Russia enlisted the Wagner Group in 2014 to help create a proxy army in Ukraine’s Donbas, as well as to contribute combat power during the 2014-2015 period of the Donbas campaign. More noticeable, the Wagner Group was used to devastating effect following Russia’s February 2022 re-invasion of Ukraine. The Wagner Group provided the nexus of combat power for battles in the Donbas, and at Bakhmut, Soledar, Avdiivka, and others. Following a mutiny in the summer of 2023, Wagner Group’s presence has lessened, but nonetheless, they remain a viable Russian proxy force.
In both the SDF and Wagner Group examples, the creation of each proxy dyad, and the subsequent diffusion of technology from the respective state to their proxy force, proves to be the causal mechanism that elongates each conflict. The SDF without US technology would drift back into an amorphous blend of nonstate forces operating toward their own aims. Likewise, the Wagner Group would have been far less successful on the battlefield without the influx and diffusion of Russian arms and intelligence.
In summary, technological diffusion to proxies, regardless of the type of principal-proxy dyad might well elongate a conflict. This elongation emerges because technology serves as the fuel that allows a proxy, which often comes with far more limited resources than the principal, to remain engaged in combat longer than their inherent technology capacity would otherwise allow.
Technology Diffusion to Proxies Means Technology Diffusion to Enemies
Following the end of Operation Iraqi Freedom / Operation New Dawn, the US sold the Iraqi military 140 M1 Abrams tanks. This was part of a larger package of foreign military sales that total $2.160 billion and came with a robust maintenance support package to boot. The sale sought to bolster the Iraqi Army’s 9th Armored Division, which was based at Camp Taji.
Yet, in 2014, IS slashed through western and northern Iraq, and in the process, took possession of several of these tanks as their Iraqi crews fled in despair. Reporting varies, but fighters from IS captured between six and 10 M1 Abrams tanks after Iraqi crewmen abandoned their positions. Later in Operation Inherent Resolve, Iranian-backed Shia military groups, commonly referred to as the Popular Mobilization Forces (PMF), acquired as many as 10 M1 Abrams tanks. A 2017 Department of Defense (DOD) Inspector General (IG) report to Congress stated that the PMF obtained these tanks from IS, and that IS acquired these tanks following battlefield routes of the ISF. Considering that Iranian military officers, often from the Islamic Republican Guard Corps’ (IRGC) Quds Force, led or combat advised the PMF, as well as other Iranian proxies in the region, it is not a stretch to assume that some of these missing tanks made their way to Iran for technological exploitation. If not to transported to Iran, it would be illogical to assume that Iranian intelligence and Quds force operatives did not exploit those tanks for as much technological information as they could possibly retrieve at any number of exploitation sites within Iraq. Further speculation might suggest that Iranian intelligence could have very well share all, or portions of that intelligence to other state-based threats like Russia, China, and North Korea, although open-source reporting does current support this assumption.
In the Russo-Ukrainian War a similar incident occurred. In February 2024, Russian captured a US-provided Bradley Fighting Vehicle (Bradley). Although the Bradley does not possess the same technological innovations regarding its armor and its main gun’s firing computer, this is nonetheless troubling for the US. In May 2024, the Russian military also captured a Ukrainian M1 Abrams tank. Like the Bradley, it is not a stretch to assume that the Russian military is conducting a detailed exploitation of the M1 to better understand its armor, its firing system, and its other range of systemic capabilities. Both its tank and its Bradley – foundational components of the Army’s armored brigade combat team – are in the hands of threats eager to find any advantage against the US.
This problem is not limited to the US. In October 2024, reports emerged stating that Russia captured a German Leopard 2A6 tank during battle with Ukrainian forces. Further reports indicate that the Russian military shipped the tank to the Uralvagonzavod research laboratory for exploitation. Not only does this pose a significant risk to the German military, but it also weakens the strength of NATO land forces.
Thus, it is imperative to understand that although technology diffusion to proxies is a worthwhile endeavor, it certainly comes with high costs, such as losing technological advantages to strategic competitors.
Technology Diffusion to Proxies Means Information Diffusion to Enemies
Like the previous point, but slightly different, a state’s technological diffusion to proxies can, and does, result in adroit enemies learning how to overcome additional principal-provided technology. The TB2 Bayraktar, for instance, is instructive. Coming out of the 2020 Nagorno-Karabakh War, the Bayraktar gained the legend of warfighting supremacy, forever changing the character of warfare, and as many commenters emphatically (and erroneously) stated that the Bayraktar – and others like it – all but obviated tanks, armored land warfare, and large telluric military operations. The war in Ukraine, however, demonstrated that the Bayraktar had limited staying power, especially when faced against an adversary with sophisticated air defense capabilities. As Michael Kofman, Rob Lee, and others have noted, Russia was able to neutralize the Bayraktar within the first few weeks of the war, and essentially sidelined it for the remainder of the conflict. Yes, the Bayraktar was purchased by the Ukrainian military, but the principle of learning-in-contact is important when considering technology diffusion to proxies.
Kofman has also noted that the many of the US’s sophisticated munitions, whether fired by artillery, High Mobility Artillery Rocket System (HIMARS), or any other number of delivery systems, have been neutralized by a reflective Russian military. The Russians have been able to use cyber-attack, and other methods, to effectively neutralize many of the US-provided high-technology munition systems. This is certainly problematic for the US because it further erodes the US’s military advantages and demonstrates another negative aspect of providing highly sophisticated weaponry to battlefield proxies.
The US faced a similar situation during Operation Inherent Resolve. As we’ve already discussed, the US provided the Iraqi – its proxy against IS – with 140 M1 Abrams tanks. In October 2017, following a Kurdish independence referendum, the ISF invaded Iraqi Kurdistan to quell what the government of Iraq saw as a reemerging Kurdish independence movement. During the invasion, US-provided tanks moved on Kurdish forces in and around Erbil, Karbala, and other sites. Surprising to those paying attention, Kurdish forces unleashed Chinese made anti-tank rockets against US-supplied Iraqi M1 Abrams tanks. Much of the information pertaining to how this anti-tank system got into the hands of Kurdish forces remains veiled in secrecy. Nonetheless, this situation – and any others that might have occurred but not been reported – illustrate that US adversaries field-test their own weapon systems against US technology.
The lesson from US proxy strategies in Ukraine and in Iraq illustrate that technology diffusion to proxies can, and does, allow adversaries to field-test technology, identify practical methods to overcome US technology, and do so without having to directly confront the US military. Thus, technology diffusion to proxies provides a useful means for principal states to avoid the deployment of their own land forces at scale, doing so often results in competing state actors identifying technology, means, and methods for neutralizing US technological asymmetry.
Implications
Proxy strategies are often seemingly advantageous for states seeking to exploit international affairs in third-party states in which the ability to achieve policy goals against a strategic adversary is present. The US’s reliance on Ukrainian and Iraqi land forces as substitutes for their own land forces in the Russo-Ukrainian War and the war against IS, respectively, are excellent examples of this situation. Nonetheless, proxy strategies come with considerable costs. Most scholarship on the subject places the costs on losses of control over a proxy, denying a proxy agency over their own self-interest, and similar subjects. Those are worthy considerations, but they provide an incomplete picture of the challenges of proxy strategy.
Principal actors seeking to use proxy strategies face three basic risks when they diffuse technologies to agents. First, the principal must appreciate that any technology used on the battlefield is likely to fall into an enemy’s hands. Thus, strategic competitors can quickly erode a principal’s asymmetric battlefield advantages by exploiting any captured weapon systems and other warfighting equipment. Second, the principal must appreciate that enemies on the battlefield will test their own warfighting capabilities against the principal-supplied technology and identify how to defeat the principal’s technology. This doesn’t mean that an enemy will identify how to defeat all of the principal’s weapons systems, but they will figure out how to neutralize many new technological innovations. This cycle, in turn, creates significant challenges for the principal, because they must subsequently identify how to defeat the enemy’s new battlefield strategies, while also developing new battlefield technology and employment methods. In short, the diffusion of technology to proxies creates a challenge-response cycle that the principal must always stay ahead of if they hope to retain asymmetric strategic and tactical advantages in armed conflict. Third, and finally, the diffusion of technology to proxies extends that conflict in time and space. Technological support to proxy forces allows those forces to remain engaged in a conflict longer than they would without external support. While this support might come with good will at heart, the technology diffusion to proxies causes the expansion of death, destruction, civilian harm, and collateral damage. This consideration, perhaps most of all, is what states must consider.
In conclusion, technology diffusion to proxies is an inevitable part of a state’s use of a proxy strategy. Yet, states must weigh the cost of proxy intervention against the nearly inevitable implications of that strategy. Moreover, states must not assume that a proxy strategy is inherently ‘safer’ for them than direct, conventional intervention. Though we cannot rewind a conflict and replay it with principal forces fighting instead of proxy forces, it is not beyond the realm of possible that direct intervention yields more decisive results, in a quicker time.
