Presentation Title: Information Age Proxy War
Theme: Politics and Power
Presenter: MAJ Andrew Maher

The Defence Strategic Update (DSU) 2020 argued that Australia faces ‘the most consequential strategic realignment since the Second World War.’ This realignment brings Australia into an environment of major power competition, with resultant additional government investment in high-technology weapons platforms to the magnitude of $89 billion. Experience from the previous environment of major power competition – that of the Cold War – suggests that conflict will manifest through proxy wars; due to the so-called “stability-instability” paradox. That this paradox serves to dissuade major powers from engagement in conflict is evidenced by ‘grey-zone’ activities below the threshold of what might justify a conventional military response.

In this presentation, I examine the strategic proclivity to employ proxy actors as an asymmetric policy option. I argue that this employment of proxies is an enduring feature of military strategy, and hence part of the enduring nature of warfare. Nonetheless, through comparisons of the proxy war dynamic in Indochina over the Cold War period and the conflict in the Levant of today, we can observe shifting variables associated with proxy employment. These shifting dynamics speak to the changing character of war, which I hypothesise is trending toward an increasing likelihood and increasing consequence (and hence increasing risk) associated with the military employment of proxy actors. The implications of this trending risk of proxy force employment lies in the erosion of the Westphalian norm for the legitimacy of nation-states. I seek to develop a greater strategic understanding of contemporary conflict.

Major Andrew Maher has over twenty years of service in the Australian Army, most of which was with Special Operations Command, inclusive of multiple deployments to both Iraq and Afghanistan. He was the inaugural Special Operations Fellow 2018-2019, course-convening the Master’s subjects Theory of Special Operations and Irregular Warfare. He will be a Chief of Army Scholar in 2021.