class: center, middle, inverse, title-slide # Dirty Wars ## Half Light Wars and Clandestine Warfare ### Jack McDonald --- class: inverse # Pre lecture Discussion .large[ Let’s say that I am a sceptic. I say: "I don't believe that there is a war in Syria right now." ] -- .large[ Is proving the existence of a war different from disproving the non-existence of a war? Why? ] ??? --- # Recap: Defining Dirty Wars .pull-left[ .medium[ ## Bottom Up Dirty wars are conflicts over political order, where parties to the conflict seek to control a society and reorder it according to their values and ideology. Due to asymmetries of power, in order to survive some participants in dirty wars must hide their identities. In order to achieve their aims, some participants in dirty wars have to perform actions that break the rules grounded in both domestic sovereignty and international order, which in turn enables extreme forms of violence or political control. Dirty wars are therefore usually difficult or impossible to legitimate using existing rules, and attempts to legitimate them undermine or transform domestic sovereignty and international order. ] ] -- .pull-right[ .medium[ ## Top Down Dirty wars are something that are perceived as illegitimate because the contextual framing, application of rules, and/or action itself violates some social, legal, or moral rule; and/or cannot be justified in terms of these same types of rules. That reshapes the political order of a society because dirty wars involve actors changing (or attempting to change) the constitutive rules of a society, as part of the conflict. That reduces or eliminates the protections afforded individuals by forms of status that are derived from international order. That enables participants in a dirty war to perform actions that would otherwise be prohibited, so as to achieve their strategic aims and objectives. ] ] ??? --- .pic80[  ] ??? --- class: inverse # Lecture Outline .pull-left[ > Dirty wars are conflicts where one or more parties denies the political, legal, and/or moral status/standing of their opponents. How and why do these kinds of rule apply to secret conflicts? ] .pull-right[ 1. Explaining Secrecy in War and National Security 1. Secrecy and Legitimacy 1. Proxy Wars and Warfare ] ## Main Points International order doesn't have to be global, but implies a set of shared norms Gaming the rules of the international system is an important way in which both incumbents and challengers compete with one another Secret wars are less about absolute secrecy, and more about how states can utilise power to exploit the rules of international order ??? This lecture will draw together discussions of secrecy and warfare throughout the course to examine open-secret conflicts in the present day. We will be looking at the history of secrecy in war, and theories that explain the use of non-acknowledged military force by states. Building upon this we will consider how many of the issues covered in this course can enable us to analyse the epistemic dimensions of war itself. Lastly the lecture will look at some emerging bodies of work on proxy warfare and surrogates, as well as the key issue of regulating secret warfare in democracies. --- class: inverse # Part 1: Explaining Secrecy in War and National Security ??? --- # Facts in Politics > There are portions of the real world, objective facts in the world, that are only facts by human agreement. In a sense there are things that exist only because we believe them to exist. I am thinking of things like money, property, governments, and marriages. Yet many facts regarding these things are 'objective' facts in the sense that they are not a matter of your or my preferences, evaluations, or moral attitudes. I am thinking of such acts as that I am a citizen of the United States, that the piece of paper in my pocket is a five dollar bill... John Searle, _The Social Construction of Reality_ -- > They keep talking of some Russian intervention in Crimea, some sort of aggression. This is strange to hear. I cannot recall a single case in history of an intervention without a single shot being fired and with no human casualties. Vladimir Putin, _Address by President of the Russian Federation (2014)_ ??? --- # Clandestine Conflict .pull-left[  ] .pull-right[ ## International - Covert Action - Active Measures - Unrestricted Warfare - Hybrid Warfare - Cyber Warfare? - Grey zone competition - Lawfare ## Domestic - Insurgency - Counter-terrorism - Political Repression ] ??? --- # An Old Problem .left-column[  ] .right-column[ Tension between objective states of reality and socially recognised states of reality Declarations and acts of recognition or acceptance are political in nature, and were linked to the law of neutrality Two problems: - Are declared wars and undeclared wars the same thing? - How do rules apply in each circumstance? What defines present day: - Explicit global norms of declaration/status/recognition re armed conflict - Explicit global norms that apply in peace (and war?) such as human rights - Implicit global norms permitting secret intelligence activities ] ??? --- # Useful Secrecy .left-33[ Some activities or capabilities depend upon secrecy to work - Intelligence - Special forces - Internal security/secret police Therefore we need to think about the difference (if any) between political secrecy, strategies that depend upon secrecy, clandestine organisations, and secret activities ] .right-33[  > Ambiguous warfare consists of hostile actions that are difficult for a state to identify, attribute or publicly define as coercive uses of force. **The unclear nature of hostile actions, the responsible agent, and the threat that they may pose makes it difficult for a state to respond as they would to conventional armed attacks or threats.** The two primary roles of ambiguous warfare are: inhibiting the decision processes of an opponent, and undermining the ability of an opponent, or their allies, to legitimate the use of force in response. Andrew Mumford and Jack McDonald, _Ambiguous Warfare_ ] ??? --- # Twilight Wars .left-column[   ] .right-column[ .medium[ ## Cambodia/Operation Menu - Prince Norodom Sihanouk cuts ties with US in 1965 - thought the Communists would win in SE Asia, agreed to work with China to allow PAVN bases despite neutrality - Occasional US bombing during Johnson administration 1965-69 - Peace process rules out increased bombing of North Vietnam under Nixon - March 1969 Nixon authorises Operation Menu - secret bombing of Cambodia (details kept from public and congress, and some parts of the military) which lasts to May 1970 - Hanoi doesn't complain/reveal bombing - 1972 - US Congress (Senate Armed Services Committee) uncovers Operation Menu and grills Air Force/DoD chiefs to reveal details - Nixon not impeached for this, and senior politicians in both parties were aware of it Organisations that now enable covert warfare are radically different in scale and capability to those that preceded them Media/information environment has fundamentally changed - consider that it wasn't until the mid 1970s that existence of Bletchley Park was revealed ] ] ??? --- class: inverse # Small Group Discussion .question[Who or what does determine the existence of or non-existence of a given war? Who or what _should_ determine the existence of wars?] ??? --- class: inverse # Part 2: Secrecy and Legitimacy ??? --- # The Problem: Acceptable and Unacceptable Secrecy .left-33[ What rules apply to secret wars? What rules are secret organisations following? What kinds of decisions are being made in secret? What kinds of rules does secrecy violate? ] .right-33[ > Following from an **open declaration of war**, understandings of accepted modes of war are governed by the expectation that once war has begun its **conduct will be bound by certain rules, laws, and conventions** that will, again, act as constraints. These rules and conventions may proscribe forms of behavior—such as torture or assassination—that might be deemed illegal under domestic law and are consciously designed to limit the actions of a political authority. **Even in the absence of formally constituted restraints in domestic law, the general expectation is that combatants will follow the norms or rules of international behavior**, such as those laid down in the Geneva Conventions that outline the limitations on protagonists, most notably in relation to the treatment of prisoners. M.L.R. Smith and Sophie Roberts, _War in the Gray_ ] ??? --- # Why Keep a Secret? .pull-left[   ] .pull-right[  Is escalation the only reason? Are "hawks" the only problem? ] ??? Unilateral Secrets, Bilateral Secrets, and Open Secrets Secrecy can be adversarial, it can also be cooperative Detection and revelation problems Domestic politics International politics Relationship with Adversary Reasons inherent to utility of the act/practice itself (intelligence) --- # Disaggregating the State .pull-left[ A state is an institution that has rules about what different public and private entities can do States, leaders, and organisations exist in relation to power structures and rules that constrain them Finding ways around rules creates space for political agency that can be exploited for a variety of reasons, both for the public benefit and private gain - War powers - Emergency powers - Administrative law - Transparency, responsibility, accountability ] .pull-right[ .medium[ > Oversight and scrutiny depend on primary evidence: without sight of the actual documents provided to Ministers we cannot ourselves be sure – nor offer an assurance to Parliament or the public – that we have indeed been given the full facts surrounding the authorisation process for the lethal strike against Reyaad Khan. Intelligence and Security Committee of Parliament, _UK Lethal Drone Strikes in Syria_ ] - States - Leaders/Governments - Parliament/Congress - Courts - Organisations - Public ] ??? little green men Who is it a secret from? What is the role of acknowledgement? Transparency, responsibility, and accountability secrecy and executive agency War powers emergency powers administrative law --- # Rules in Context .pull-left[ Political orders are partly defined by rules - Constitutive rules - Regulative rules Contexts (war, political emergency, national security, intelligence, policing, etc) define applicable rules Any action is governed by the mix of rules applicable from international order, and the domestic political order that pertain to a given context Ability to define the context therefore shapes the rules ] .pull-right[  ] ??? - Freedom to define a situation - Freedom to define the appropriate context - Freedom to define the appropriate rules - Freedom to define action that conforms to said rules --- # Constitutive Problems .pull-left[ > Sovereign is he who decides on the exception. Carl Schmitt, _Political Theology_ > The notion that a situation of factual danger, whereby the existence of the state is threatened, allows for the suspension of the normative universe of a rule of law is provided for in almost every account of modern lawful rule. Nasser Hussain, _The Jurisprudence of Emergency_ - Who gets to say a war exists? - Who gets to say an emergency exists? - Who gets to interpret reality and the rules? ] -- .pull-right[  ] ??? --- # Legitimacy, Secrecy, and Coalitions .pull-left[ Need to be able to act, but need to act in a way legitimate to your coalition in order to sustain it (and win) Secrecy enables working with partners that might otherwise be politically impossible Potentially free-range constitutive rule-changing is limited by legitimacy concerns of allies ] .pull-right[  .small[Combined Air Operations Center (CAOC) at Al Udeid Air Base, Qatar] ] ??? --- class: inverse # Small Group Discussion .question[ Why do states refuse to acknowledge their involvement in proxy wars even when there is documentary evidence of their role in the conflict? Can you think of good examples? ] ??? --- class: inverse # Part 3: Proxy Wars and Warfare ??? --- # Proxy Wars .left-40[  ] .right-40[  > an international conflict between two foreign powers, fought out on the soil of a third country; disguised as conflict over an internal issue of that country; and using some or all of that country’s manpower, resources, and territory as means for achieving preponderantly foreign goals and foreign strategies. Karl Deutsch, _External involvement in internal war_ ] ??? --- # Proxies, Surrogates, and Death Squads .left-60[ > Principals typically employ agents because they lack the appetite or attributes necessary to directly achieve the aim themselves... > Typically, though, the aims of the agent will diverge somewhat from those of the principal, while the act of delegation invariably means that the principal will lack complete oversight of the agent's behaviour... > the more the interest asymmetry, the more the agent will benefit from diverting or misappropriating the principal's resources in furtherance of their own divergent aims, known as agency loss. Alex Neads, _Rival principals and shrewd agents: Military assistance and the diffusion of warfare_ ] .right-60[  ] ??? --- # Responsibility for Harm .pull-left[  ] .pull-right[  ] Three issues in tension: - Shifting responsibility between agents - Diffusing responsibility within/between agents - Centralising responsibility in leaders ??? --- # Conclusions .large[ Secrecy is fundamentally about shared and global rules as well as escalation concerns Secrecy can enable states and challengers to bend/break regulative and/or constitutive rules Secret warfare causes problems for incumbent powers attempting to support a rules-based system ] ???