Competitive Intervention, Proxy War, and Military Assistance: Anderson, Eyre, and Kuhlman

If you actually just look across civil wars in general, the average is actually 75%. So on average, across time from the end of the Second World War through to the present, 75% of conflicts have attracted aid of some kind. And so this really challenges this idea that civil wars are somehow internal conflicts bound by the borders of the state. In fact, they are more often than not subject to these external interventions. So I've come to believe that based on my time in Afghanistan and seeing other conflicts around the world, when you conduct what I've started calling security force substitution, where a foreign force comes in and displaces a host nation force, you are inevitably seen or come to be seen as an army of occupation. It doesn't work. You need local forces and local elites to take ownership. Welcome to Episode 146 of the Irregular Warfare Podcast. I'm your host, Kyle Atwell. Today's episode explores competitive intervention and the role of external military support in civil wars. Our guests begin by unpacking how opposing states intervene on different sides of civil wars and how this competitive intervention shapes conflict dynamics. We examine the types of aid most commonly provided and how external support often prolongs wars rather than ending them. We also discuss escalation dynamics, including why states tend to provide enough support to sustain partners, but not enough to enable them to win. Finally, the episode turns to implications for policymakers and practitioners, particularly in an increasingly multipolar world where proxy war is likely to grow. General-retired Wayne Ayer served as Canada's Chief of Defense Staff from 2021 to 2024, the country's highest-ranking military officer. With over three decades of service, he commanded at multiple levels, including operational deployments in Afghanistan and Bosnia, and now he serves as a senior fellow and visiting professor at the University of Ottawa. Dr. Noel Anderson is an associate professor of political science at the University of Toronto and author of Wars Without End, Competitive Intervention, Escalation Control, and Protracted Conflict, which today's conversation digs into. Lieutenant Colonel Matt Kuhlman is a U.S. Army officer, military scholar, and the managing editor at the Irregular Warfare Initiative, where he helps curate practitioner and scholar insights for the irregular warfare community. To submit a written article, check out the IWI website at www.irregularwarfare.org. You are listening to the Irregular Warfare Podcast, a joint production of the Empirical Studies of Conflict Project at Princeton University and the Modern War Institute at West Point, dedicated to bridging the gap between scholars and practitioners to support the community of irregular warfare professionals. Here's my conversation with Wayne Eyre, Noel Anderson, and Matt Coleman. Wayne Eyre, Noel Anderson, and Matt Coleman, welcome to the Irregular Warfare podcast. Hey, Kyle, thanks for having us, and I'm very excited for the discussion here. And moreover, I want to thank you for running this podcast. I'm a fan, I subscribe, and I believe Irregular Warfare is still very relevant. In fact, it's probably gaining an importance in this era of great power competition. And moreover, with the subject of today's discussion. As I reflect on it, every one of my deployments overseas was in the context of civil wars or the aftermath of them, from peacekeeping in Cyprus to the former Yugoslavia, Afghanistan, and even in Korea. So great to be here. Yeah, Kyle, thanks so much for the invitation. I'm really looking forward to the discussion today. Thank you, Kyle. Long-time listener, first-time caller. Well, I'm going to start by saying A huge congratulations to Noel. You're a good friend and a collaborator on the study of proxy warfare and conflict escalation. We have a couple of co-authored papers in the works with others to include Dr. Alexander Chinchilla, who's been on the podcast a couple of times, and Dr. Sarah Plana. And in this process over the last couple of years, I've had a front row seat where I've watched you absolutely suffer through the brutal process that is publishing an academic book. So huge congrats on the book Wars Without End, which is out in the wild now. and we're going to discuss today. Kyle, thanks so much. Yeah, it's been nice to have you beside me as I've slugged through the peer review process, which has been painful at times, but I'm absolutely thrilled that it's finally out, and I'm really glad to get to talk about it today. Yeah, so I'm going to start by motivating the conversation a little bit. We're going to provide some broad framing as to what the conversation is about and why this matters to the listener, and I'll start with you, Noel. What is competitive intervention, which is the topic of your book, and is this just another term for proxy warfare? Yeah, this is a great question. So competitive intervention is a particular configuration of external support to civil wars. So it's characterized by opposing simultaneous transfers of military assistance from different third-party states to both government and rebel combatants that are engaged in a civil war. So these things are competitive in the sense that they are attempts by third-party states to secure competing rather than shared interests in the outcome of a civil war and their interventions in the sense that these third parties are using military and economic instruments to influence the dynamics and outcomes of civil wars, mainly by affecting the balance of power between the government force and the insurgent force. And so essentially what we have then is a conflict scenario where the government is receiving external aid from one foreign backer. The insurgent organization is receiving external aid from a different foreign backer. And then these two third party states are essentially competing by proxy over the outcome of that civil war. And so in that important sense, yeah, competitive intervention is proxy warfare. All competitive interventions are proxy wars. However, not all proxy wars are competitive interventions. As I went through Noel's book, probably the part I found most interesting was the discussion of escalation dynamics and how the interveners will moderate what they provide in terms of support with the impact on escalation on the other intervener in the forefront of their thinking. And that's an aspect I hadn't considered before. Yeah, I mean, that's a good point. This leads to the question of, you're talking about a state giving support to either the rebels in a civil war or the government. What are the types of support that states usually give? And are there different levels or echelons that states are willing to give when they're concerned about the opposite side, seeing it as an escalation? Yeah, absolutely. So if you look across time, you see different levels of support of different types of external aid. So in the book, what I do is I create six buckets, if you will, of different types of support. And so if you look across time, the most common form of support that's provided is weapons transfers and ammunition transfers. So on average, about 60% of conflicts see weapons transfers of some kind. Very closely behind weapons is war material. So equipment, logistical support, as well as intelligence sharing and training and advising missions. And in fact, those three components tend to go together where you see weapons, training and war material. In fourth place is financial transfers. So sort of raw cash. In fifth place is sanctuary, territorial access or access to military infrastructure. And then this is where it gets interesting. The least common form of intervention is troop deployments. And the reason I say that's interesting is because I think there is a tendency to conflate intervention with boots-on-the-ground military operations. But in fact, that is the minority of cases. It's about 15 to 16 percent of cases on average across time. And so this highlights why we need a more comprehensive understanding of intervention in civil wars. It turns out that most intervention is not boots-on-the-ground, it's these other forms of support that we see states providing domestic combatants. I want to get into the difference between troop deployments versus advisors, especially with Wayne's perspective. But just to reinforce, you're saying 60% of civil wars occurring around the world have a degree of external assistance at the most basic level. Is that correct? And then just for all of you, how broad is the instance of competitive intervention or proxy war or whatever you want to call it? Is this a very common form of conflict or is this pretty rare? So just very briefly, I would say 60% is weapons transfers. If you actually just look across civil wars in general, the average is actually 75%. So on average, across time from the end of the Second World War through to the present, 75% of conflicts have attracted aid of some kind. And so this really challenges this idea that civil wars are somehow internal conflicts bound by the borders of the state. In fact, they are more often than not subject to these exogenous shocks, these external interventions in the form of external aid. In fact, Noel, I think we would be hard-pressed to find a conflict since 1945, a civil war that didn't bring in that external support. Can you think of any? So this gets into questions about how we define civil war. And so essentially, as you begin to increase what in political science we recall the death threshold, So how many individuals have to be killed for it to quote-unquote count as a civil war? As you increase that threshold, it becomes increasingly difficult. More often, the cases where you do not see this is much smaller conflicts. These can be sort of border insurgencies, who often are characterized by an absence of external support, although not always. And so, yeah, that's why when we look across time, it's in fact a majority. It is quite difficult to think of cases where we do not see external support. I think part of the reason it does dip down to 75% is because some years there may be support in a given conflict, whereas the next year that support falls off and then it's back again the next year. And so there's a little bit of volatility across time just based on the crudeness of the data, which is sort of yearly observations. But yeah, that kind of gives you a sense of how common this phenomenon is. Yeah, I think the thing that really interests me with this part of the conversation is that with the end of the global war on terror era, you know, the end of our focus on non-state actors and pivot to strategic competition and competition with great powers, it would be tempting to say that, OK, these civil wars matter less to us. If you are a military officer or a national security policymaker and you're trying to think about where to allocate your resources to prepare for conflict, how do you think about the role of civil wars and potential competitive intervention and proxy wars in the context of, you know, a potential great power war with China or Russia or whoever? How do you balance that? Hey, Cal, that's a great question. And I think we need to be looking at the future as one potential scenario has the world moving back to spheres of influence. And the fight becomes over those marginal countries that are in the middle or in between these spheres as great powers compete for interest. for interest. The other factor I think we need to be mindful of is the move towards hybrid warfare. And we've seen the weaponization of human migration. And you could argue that nothing produces more migrants than civil wars. And so they have a direct impact on a country's national security as well. And that's why they continue to be of importance. And if I may add, I think it's noteworthy too that military aid and military assistance doesn't just go to countries that are in conflict. It's a cost-effective means to influence policy and to secure interests across the board, across various interests in various regions. So often, military assistance has more impact in regions that aren't priorities, that kind of may be in conflict, but aren't kind of priorities for the larger powers, the polarities or large poles in the system. Economy of effort, if you will. Absolutely. Yeah. And if I can just pick up on that, the data also demonstrates over time that although the Cold War bipolar period was, of course, characterized by pervasive levels of competitive intervention by the great powers, by the United States and the Soviet Union. Matt is absolutely right that aid was not just flowing to these civil war zones. It was also flowing to client states of the United States and the Soviet Union. So the U.S. and the Soviets, they were using military assistance programs to build up their alliance networks, build up their blocks. And these non-great power states that were clients of the United States and the Soviet Union, they found ways to leverage the money and arms that they were receiving from the great powers to pursue their own independent foreign policy ends. And so you have arguably quite small states, like think about Cuba. Cuba is involved in civil wars in Ethiopia, in Zaire, and in Angola. Libya is providing aid to rebels as far afield as the Philippines and even Northern Ireland. And so what's going on here is these client states are able to leverage superpower aid to engage in what I would call foreign policy adventurism. And this, in fact, leads to a proliferation of competitive intervention among non-great power states. So this isn't just a Cold War story about the U.S. and the Soviets. This is a story about competitive intervention by non-great powers as well. So what we've established is just by the numbers, just looking at the number of conflicts in the world, the number of them that are state on state, you know, major wars versus civil wars versus competitive interventions, competitive intervention and civil wars are going to continue to most likely be important. They were during the Cold War, another era of great power competition. They were in the GWAT era, and it seems like they continue to be important today. Noel I like to ask the question of whether external intervention impacts a local civil war And this is interesting because you know my own research and my own experience with practitioners and scholars, there are a lot of people who argue that external intervention has no impact on the trajectory or direction of civil war. Like if foreign actors give aid, a civil war will happen. If they don't give aid, it will still happen. What is your answer to this question of does external intervention even matter at all? It would be that external intervention very much matters. And in particular, this competitive intervention dynamic really matters. So to give you an example, when you look at conflicts that attract competitive interventions, they are associated with a 50 percent decline in the hazard of conflict termination. So to put that another way, the likelihood that those conflicts end is reduced by 50%. So that's a finding that holds across the wide range of social and economic and political contexts in which civil wars are waged. And that's also a very robust finding. So that is a finding that is true if you look just at the bipolar Cold War period. It's a finding that's true if you look just at the unipolar post-Cold War period. It's a finding that holds if you look at just great power intervention. It's a finding that holds if you look at just non-great power intervention. So competitive intervention is substantively associated with a very large increase in average conflict duration. And this is statistically significant and meaningful. So, yes, competitive intervention and intervention more broadly has often very dramatic impacts on civil war dynamics and outcomes. Well, based on my experience, most civil wars I've seen have had a definite ethnic component to it. And that ethnic component has been exploited by national leaders seeking to create a sense of insecurity about the other. And a lot of these ethnic grievances go back centuries. So how does that play into your research? How does that play into the length of the conflict? Yeah, this is a great question. It's also a controversial question in the political science literature. And so the take-home message would be it depends on if you're looking at individual cases or if you're thinking about this in a generalized sense. So first, let's think about a generalized sense. The literature in political science is relatively clear that ethnic fractionalization or ethnic diversity, however you want to think of it, is generally not associated with the onset or duration of conflict. Now, the reason for this is that although it is true that many conflicts are characterized by ethnic fractionalization, it is also true that many countries that have ethnic fractionalization do not see conflict. So when we essentially average over the cases where we see ethnic diversity and no conflict and ethnic diversity and conflict, it sort of washes out. However, when we then start thinking about individual cases, the answer becomes more nuanced. And that's because ethnic diversity and in particular ethnic inequalities can be associated with the protraction of conflict. Ethnic inequality can result in harder bargaining and in an inability to reach agreement amongst whatever ethnic group tends to dominate a government and whatever ethnic group tends to make up the insurgency if there's fractionalization across the government and the insurgency. Related, I think if we fast forward to the contemporary context and look at conflict in general and broadly, there are other actors that would be interesting to get your take on how do we account for this complexity of outside of states and subordinate groups? What's their impact on conflict duration in this instance in particular? One example that comes to mind are NGOs, these non-governmental organizations that have become, in their way, a player in the battlefield. For one example, Spirit of America, they provided defensive equipment and other technological means in Ukraine to endure increased survivability of Ukrainian forces. And that's a new characteristic. Are there any other complicated factors that you've seen that exist in your data set? Or is this just a new kind of trend in contemporary society, either from weighing your side as a practitioner and leader of troops or no on the research side? How do we account for this? So I think a lot of this support also contributes to an element we haven't talked about, which is human will and the will to keep fighting. And that external support, whether it be from a state or a non-state actor, provides that moral support, which underpins one of the side's willingness to continue. Yeah. And so, Matt, I would say that although I don't look at intervention by non-state actors, there is a trend in the data of growing rates of intervention by other insurgent groups to help their fellow insurgents in other conflicts. And so we see this sort of growing network of insurgency, if you will. Part of this is driven by the so-called franchising of al-Qaeda and ISIS. And so I do think that networks of external support are increasingly becoming complicated. And that is in no small part due to the increased interconnections among groups as a function of globalization, technological spread, and so on. Just one point on this. A lot of your book focuses on a bipolar or unipolar international environment. Now, could we be seeing the emergence of a multipolar environment where you've got various state and non-state actors providing assistance with just increases the level of complexity? Yeah, I think this is one of the most important questions for us as we continue to grapple with our changing international environment. In the face of Russian military aggression, in the face of continuing rise of China, there are a lot of questions about what an emerging multipolar world would look like. My expectation would be that as we move towards an increasingly multipolar world where power is diffused, we are likely to see a return to greater rates of competitive intervention akin to what we saw during the Cold War. And the reason for that is that international relations scholarship has demonstrated for decades, if not centuries, that the structure of the international system meaningfully affects state behavior. And that's because different structures of power, they generate different incentives for cooperation, for conflict. They generate different balancing behaviors. And fundamentally, they generate different levels of geopolitical competition among states. If I go back to something you said earlier, Noel, and also Matt, it's not just multipolarity that might be leading to an increase. It's also that actors that have nothing to do with states are now actually contributing to the fight. Historically, when we think about proxy warfare, we think, hey, a state decides to back one side, another state backs another side, another fighting each other. But now there's these other actors, and it could even be a major corporation, for example, the impact that Starlink has had in Ukraine, and that totally convolutes the idea of external support. Kyle, to add on that to you, as you mentioned, Starlink is a great example as well. There's the power of these corporations that they have. And during the Gulf of War and Terror, obviously, there's proliferation of private security groups, the kind of this hybrid gray zone operations. We see it more as well with the Wagner Group or the AfroCore that Russia does in Africa. Even China has an increase in private security companies. It's a big gray zone that convolutes the challenges of conflict in a contemporary sense. However, I think to tie this to Noel's book as well, one of many aspects I enjoy the book is his case selection. In particular, when talking about the Angola conflict, he didn't focus on the United States or Soviet per se, but really on Cuba and South Africa. And I think that kind of ties to another thread that Noel's pulling on is that it's not just the great powers that are participating in this intervention. You see medium-sized states, potentially smaller states also involved, particularly regional dynamics. Yeah, absolutely. The Angolan case, as well as the Afghanistan case, those are the two main cases in the book. The reason I selected those cases was because they provided a hard test for some of my core arguments about why competitive interventions are associated with protracted conflict. My argument is centered on escalation dynamics and the way that escalation control generates constraints on interveners to try to help their side, but at the same time control escalation vis-a-vis an opposing intervener. And what's unique about Angola and Afghanistan is that these were brutally violent conflicts. We're talking hundreds of thousands of deaths, the complete destruction of these countries in terms of their social and political and economic institutions. And so these are not environments where we would expect to see restraint on the part of the interveners, at least as far as it relates to the conflict. Yet that is precisely what we see. We see restraint on the part of the South Africans and the Cubans. We see restraint on the part of Pakistan in the United States and the Soviets in Afghanistan. Importantly, that restraint is not vis-a-vis the domestic combatants. And I should be clear about that. They often are brutal towards the domestic combatants. But that restraint is vis-a-vis each other. The two competitive interveners or multiple competitive interveners, that restraint is oriented towards each other. I'd like to add on that, too, a little bit from my own research. What I've seen is there's some ancient dynamics when it comes to the superpowers during the Cold War era, as you say, in Africa in particular. Interestingly, China was supporting the opposite side and then the goal of a conflict that the Soviet Union was doing. Also, Nigeria, China was supporting the Biafra breakaway region, ironically, while the Soviet, as well as the French, were supporting the more central government. So you see these interesting dynamics where you expect some escalation, but you have some interesting bedfellows that do occur. In a multipolar world, do you think that possibility exists as it does now going forward? Are there an opportunity for strange bedfellows to cooperate instead of compete? No, absolutely. You know, much like deterrence in a multipolar environment, competitive intervention is going to be much more fraught with complexity and unintended consequences, perhaps. So understanding who is doing what in these cases, I think, is going to be a challenge going forward for any country that becomes involved. But isn't the inability to understand what's going on part of the purpose of why states do this less direct form of conflict? Like if you can obfuscate who's supporting who and who's fighting who, then you have plausible deniability. And therefore, you can essentially get away with things without it escalating. escalating. Well, Kyle, I think this goes back to one of your earlier comments about the intensity of the support, which is defined in terms of footprint, attribution, location, whether it's in the country undergoing conflict or in a third location. And as you increase in all of those closer to the conflict, the risk of escalation goes up. I mean, Wayne, I'd love to push on this one a little bit more because we talked earlier about the difference between troops on the ground and advisors on the ground, which are troops who are calling themselves advisors. As a senior military leader, how should we conceptualize the difference between troops on the ground and advisors? And is there some clear line here or is this kind of political witchcraft that allows us to communicate things that aren't actually happening on the ground? It becomes very blurry, but a lot of it is defined in terms of size and role and where they're going to be vis-a-vis the conflict. Are they going to be right in front lines where they could potentially become or cause casualties, or are they farther back, focusing more on the training and the advising? And so there's no clear, simple threshold for that. Attribution is a key part of it as well. Do you want to let the other side know that you actually have people there so that they avoid targeting of your individuals, to avoid that going up the escalation ladder. So many considerations here. If I could just build on what Wayne had just mentioned there, this is precisely what we saw in Angola. In Angola, there were Soviet advisors, and those Soviet advisors were assisting the MPLA government. And the MPLA government was engaged in large-scale confrontation with UNIDA, but they were also confronting the South Africans. These advisors were forward deployed with MPLA units, but they would make sure that they were just a few kilometers away from the Angolan units, from the MPLA Angolan units. And the South Africans, for their part, took care to make sure that they did not target those Russian or Soviet advisors. And so you can see the signaling game taking place. And in memoirs, Soviet advisors, they acknowledge this. They say, we know that the South Africans are avoiding. Sometimes the South Africans would even shoot leaflets over to say, hey, we're coming. So we don't want to mess with the Soviets, we're here for the Angolans. And so there's even explicit communication taking place to essentially de-conflict those Soviet advisors from South African combat troops. And Noel, didn't we see the same thing in Syria? Yes, absolutely. And we've seen that with many states, in fact. With respect to Syria, one of the important thresholds has been oriented around the Euphrates River, where U.S. troops and their partners have tended to stay east of the river, whereas the Russians have tended to stay west of the river. And that has, for the most part, helped to de-conflict American and Russian troops. There are, of course, instances where things have broken down, but for the most part, these have been effective to quite literally physically separate the different interveners. Why I find this so interesting is that you have combatants on both sides getting into conflict. I mean, when these advisors or troops, whatever you want to call them, get into warfare, There real risk People die They really killing people And yet the external powers who are intervening are creating artificial lines to make sure that while they contributing to this civil war fight they not going to attack each other And it just this complex thing where you really in a fight but also you putting all these limits on it for political reasons And rationalizing that is just incredibly complicated it seems like Yeah well that is the escalation dilemma at the heart of competitive intervention. And this helps us understand why these conflicts become so protracted at the level of the interveners and why interveners get sucked into these things and then struggle to get out, even as they go on for years, sometimes even decades, right? So So if you're an intervener engaged in a competitive intervention, on the one hand, you feel upward pressure to escalate the level of support to your domestic combatant. Because if you escalate your level of support, you're going to perhaps give them a military advantage that will help them win the day. And if they succeed on the battlefield, they will deliver to you the spoils of the war, the whole reason you got involved in the war in the first place. But this is a competitive intervention, and that means that there's another intervener on the other side. And this is going to generate contradictory downward pressure to try to constrain the scope of your intervention to avoid escalation vis-a-vis the other side. Because anything that you do to help your side win can be responded to by the other intervener. And so the other intervener may respond in kind, where they match your escalation. And this is bad because now you have upped your investment in the conflict, but you're not going to achieve anything. But much more risky is the other side may not just respond in kind, they may counter-escalate. And they may try to affect a reprisal on you for trying to help your side win. And this can all generate these action-reaction dynamics where one side escalates, the second counter escalates, the first counter counter escalates, and then you begin spiraling up the escalation ladder such that at the top of that escalation ladder is this risk of conventional war between the interveners in that civil war. And so this seems kind of extraordinary, but it happens more often than you might anticipate. It's what we see in a place like Syria. It's what we saw in Angola. In Angola, you had at one point 55,000 Cuban troops standing up against thousands upon thousands of South African troops. And so this is a really bad scenario. Right. And there's a need to find a way to control this escalation. And then these thresholds, that's how they do it. The thresholds are the unofficial rules of the game that constrain the scope of intervention and to tamp down those escalation spirals. The problem is that although these thresholds are really effective at controlling escalation, they simultaneously prevent the conferral of decisive military advantages on those domestic clients. And the net result is these protracted wars where you're providing just enough support to help your side survive, but you're not providing enough to help them decisively win. And this explains this protracted character of these civil wars that are afflicted by competitive intervention. I think this escalation dynamics that NOL explores are fascinating. At the same time, there's an aspect where there's an absolute ceiling for escalation dynamics that both sides, external interveners, don't want to get involved in. There's almost an attraction to become involved in the first place. I'm sure there's some cases in which a state is providing support to one side of a conflict, and then that pulls in other players, other states, whether they're big powers or medium powers, pulls them into the conflict themselves, not just to be present in the party, but not to necessarily escalate to break that ceiling. So there's a pulling effect, a gravitational pull of conflicts. And then obviously I think in the other case you do, obviously there was an interest in the United States to drain the resources of the Soviet Union in Afghanistan. So that kind of pulled them into it to a degree. Yeah, absolutely. And what you're getting at there is the strategic contradiction inherent in this form of intervention, which is this need to intervene, whether that is for humanitarian reasons, to secure national interests, whatever it may be, this need to intervene while simultaneously controlling escalation if you're in a competitive intervention. That contradiction is what explains why these wars become so protracted. So in other words, the intervener provides enough that the one side doesn't lose, but not enough to decisively win. Understanding that trend in conflict is important for practitioners. Absolutely. The way I sometimes refer to this is that the strategic dilemma of competitive intervention warps positive objectives of winning into negative objectives of just not losing. And what is driving that is this escalatory dynamic or these risks of inadvertent escalation under the shadow of competitive intervention? So there's a lot to unpack here. I'm going to throw two points at Wayne and just let him wrestle with them, which is first, it seems like in civil wars, there might be different objectives between the external intervener and the local government or the local insurgent group. So the local government or insurgent definitely wants to beat their adversary categorically, And the external intervener wants to support them, but not provoke a broader war with, you know, whatever other great powers on the other side. And so my question for you, Wayne, is given all these complex dynamics at the most senior levels of government where you've served, are we thinking about the strategic dynamics between states and actors and escalation, non-escalation? Is this a deliberate process or do we kind of just get caught up in the fight and the organizational bureaucratic politics of how we man this? And do we lose sight of these broader trends and where the conflict might end up going? Yeah, this is a great one to wrestle with because every case is going to be different. And the beauty of Noel's work, like many theories of war, it's descriptive, not prescriptive. And it helps you understand what you may be in the middle of. A lot of these things organically happen. And before long, you realize that you have entered into an agreement with the country with perhaps different objectives than your own, and you need to moderate what you provide. Escalation dynamics, I think, are incredibly important to understand. And I can't help but think about the situation in Ukraine right now, even though it doesn't fit nicely into your model, but the provision of support being moderated by escalation threats from Russia. The nuclear saber rattling, which happens every time there's discussion of a new capability, whether it be tanks, whether it be long range precision strike capability, whether it be aircraft. Certainly, those are considerations. You know, there's an article I would recommend in the Texas National Security Review by Janice Stein on escalation management, learning by doing, and how these red lines, these assumed red lines, the West cross those eventually by learning. It's a very interesting dynamic that's ongoing. When we're thinking about escalation dynamics, where in the government does this occur? Is it that the military is always pushing for more because our goal is to win and the political class is thinking about escalation dynamics? Is it a cohesive thing where both the senior military leaders and politicians are thinking about escalation dynamics? Is this a deliberate conversation? So I would suggest that every country, every conflict is different and really driven by personalities. In some cases, the military may be pushing harder. In other cases, it may be a restraining factor on otherwise rash action. And so it becomes a discussion between all of the senior actors, understanding that in a democracy, it's an unequal dialogue and the political level has got the final say. But there is no one single template that fits all, I would argue. If I'm thinking about the cases that I'm most familiar with, Angola and Afghanistan, that's what we saw. There's often very intense debates among different segments of a particular government where some are pushing hard for a particular type of escalation to cross a threshold and others are pushing very hard to constrain as much as possible. And I think what's really interesting is to understand and to work out why it is that some of those constituencies eventually win and why other constituencies may not be as successful. And so I'm thinking from my own book of the case of Afghanistan and around the intense debates that surrounded the Stinger missile. And different agencies of the United States government were pro or con the decision to send the Stinger. I think what ultimately won the day in terms of the decision to go ahead and cross a threshold, which in Afghanistan was known as battlefield credible, which is to say they had to have been credibly captured by the Mujahideen on the battlefield. field. The Stinger, of course, violated that threshold. I think the thing that pushed the U.S. to ultimately provide the Stinger was an increasing realization among important policymakers in the United States and also in Pakistan that if the Stinger was not provided, the Mujahideen, in a very real sense, were perhaps going to lose. And they were going to lose because the Soviets had complete air superiority. That fear that the domestic client, in this case the Mujahideen, was about to lose. I think that's why the debate was resolved ultimately in favor of the Stinger, and those who were more fearful of the escalation dynamics that could take place, why they ultimately lost that debate. I would just briefly say, though, that even as the U.S. crossed that threshold, they did a number of things to constrain the risk of escalation. They limited the number of Stingers they provided. They provided sort of the first version, the first variant of the Stinger that the Soviets could relatively easily defeat with countermeasures. And so even as they crossed the threshold, they did things to constrain escalation. And I would just flag that this is exactly what Janice Stein flags in the article that Wayne just mentioned. She highlights how the U.S. essentially learns by doing. They'll cross a threshold ever so slightly, and then they will wait. And they will put constraints around that threshold violation, and they'll see what the Russian reaction will be. If the Russians don't react in a particularly negative way, they'll push right up to the threshold again, and then they'll cross. And I think that's why you see the nature of escalation that we've seen in Ukraine, where it began with the javelins, and then it gets to the tanks, and then it gets to the F-16s, and then it gets to the attackums. They're slowly but surely learning by doing. In another context that I think is germane to this is we see it outside of conflict as well. In the escalation dynamics, we see salami slicing techniques and tactics, right? Building up atolls, building up islands, reinforcing them, introducing different types of equipment. So the escalation dynamics that NOL explores are valid in all kinds of conflict and pre-conflict escalation scenarios, which is fascinating. And I think it will be very interesting as we look at the future with the types of support that could be provided. Cyber, for example. More intelligence support, especially of targeting quality. Conducting cognitive warfare on behalf of who you're intervening for. Many new facets to this, which I think are going to become apparent in the years to come. So we've established that external intervention causes civil wars to last longer. Earlier, Wayne said when one side provides military support to one of the local civil war actors, it can actually increase their morale. And that, in turn, might be a reason why civil war lasts longer. Before we go to our closing, I'd like to understand what do we think the reasons are that external aid increases the length of civil war? Well, Kyle, just as you said, the moral component is a key aspect of combat power, and maintaining the morale of one side is very important. More important, I would argue, than the material side. The material side is critical as well. But those two, the moral and the material, are two that contribute to the length of wars. And that's what I would add, too. I think depending on which side the intervener is supporting, there is also the consideration of absorptive capacity. Is the equipment you're providing to this one side of the conflict, how much can they absorb? If it's high-tech equipment, there is going to be a challenge. While that equipment could be decisive in the conflict and end it shorter, the absorber capacity and the training and the ability to maintain it and keep the logistical tail to employ it may not be there. So that could be a deciding factor in the type of equipment that's provided. So instead of providing decisive equipment, you're providing what's just good enough that's employable by the one side of the conflict. I think Wayne and Matt are exactly right. And so I would repeat what they said in a slightly different way. So in the book, the way I try to understand the effect of competitive intervention at the level of the domestic combatants is to think about how competitive intervention distorts domestic bargaining processes. And I think it does three things. So the first thing it does is it subsidizes war costs. It makes war cheaper to wage. And what that does is it encourages the domestic combatants to dig in their heels and drive a harder bargain because it's easier for them to be patient and continue fighting today in the hopes of greater concessions tomorrow. So it's cheaper because it's not their money. Like they're getting arms and ammunition and whatnot from a foreign country. So they can just keep fighting because it's not their money, essentially. Exactly. I mean, if you imagine sort of like a thought experiment, imagine I said war is costless for you to wage. Well, there's no incentive for you to ever reach a negotiated settlement short of your maximalist demands because it costs you nothing to hold out. Now, the real world is not like that, but the more I subsidize warfighting, the easier it is and the more likely it is for you to hold off in negotiated settlements to keep fighting today in the hopes you get more tomorrow. So I think that's the first big effect of competitive intervention at the domestic level. The second thing, and now this gets to Wayne's point about morale. The second thing that goes on is that competitive intervention balances combatant capabilities. Now when I say balance I don mean that the competitive interveners are providing equivalent quantities and qualities of aid Of course that doesn happen but they do provide countermeasures that help overcome some of the advantages that their opponent might have For example governments generally have air superiority. That's just the way of the world. But maybe one of the interveners provides their insurgent client with something like manned portable air defense systems, like Stingers, for example, which is what the U.S. did in Afghanistan. What that does is it counters the military advantages of the opponent. And this generates balance. And when you get balance in that sense, stalemates set in and intangibles like morale, like resolve, they become much more important because now it's not clear who's going to win, right? Because we kind of, neither of us have a decisive advantage. And so now those intangibles, they become so, so important. And that encourages continued fighting. And then the third element of competitive intervention at the domestic level is it increases uncertainty. And so there is a lot of covert networks and obscurity related to these external aid flows. It becomes very hard for the domestic combatants to work out how the relative balance of power looks at any given time. That uncertainty, once again, encourages continued fighting because it's not clear who's actually going to win. And so it might make sense to hold out today in the hope for more concessions in the future. Yeah, I think it's important to double down on the central argument, which is that external military assistance does impact the trajectory of a conflict. And I can't tell you how many times I've been in a State Department briefings or military briefings or read academic papers that say, oh, our external aid doesn't matter. There's going to be a conflict there either way. It has no impact on it. You're laying out a good case that the provision of a bunch of military equipment actually can change the balance of power, the motivation, the incentive structures. It can fundamentally change a conflict. And I think your overall analysis, unfortunately, is that often it actually prolongs a conflict. It makes it worse, which is an interesting morality question about intervention. If intervening causes wars and suffering to last longer, should we do it? But we're running short on time, so I'm going to pivot toward the end. I'm going to ask two questions. The first one is, we're talking about competitive intervention in civil wars over the GWAT period and the Cold War period before that. But what role do we expect competitive intervention and proxy war to play into the future of multipolarity of great power competition and strategic competition? So I think if we take a look at some future trends, we're seeing an increased distrust in the institutions of government, calling into question in many countries government legitimacy, which if you take several steps farther result in civil unrest, perhaps even civil wars. And so civil wars aren't going away. And especially in a world which is becoming increasingly multipolar, this type of intervention, especially in countries where there's interest in, well, you name it, stopping human migration, resources, et cetera. This is going to continue. So understanding theories like this is going to continue to be important. Yeah, so what I would say to that is that competitive intervention is prolific to the present. So although we have seen a notable decline in the prevalence of competitive intervention in the post-Cold War period, it has not gone away, and it continues to afflict about one-fifth of conflicts. So in fact, a little over 20% of conflicts to this day are affected by competitive intervention. And so as we see growing geopolitical rivalry in the international system, My expectation would be that we will see an uptick in those arguably already quite large numbers. And so policymakers need to be seized of the escalation dilemma and the escalation dynamics inherent in this form of competition, because my expectation would be that they will have to confront this kind of problem increasingly in the future. You know, we're talking about interventions in civil wars. I'm assuming this requires different types of military capabilities than, say, a large-scale combat operations context with another great power. Do you think that we balance this correctly in our national governments, or do you think we tend to favor one form of conflict or the other? I think it's all situation dependent, depending what the world provides us. But what it demands is a large spectrum of tools, ranging from the provision of information to equipment to advisory support to, if necessary, intervention with forces on the ground. So, again, every case is going to be different. And I don't think one type is favored over the other. And I think I would add that for the role of competitive intervention in the future in this multipolar world, so-called, it's a function of some powers losing interest as well in certain regions, certain countries, which creates opportunities for others to kind of fill that vacuum and receive that. So not only is opportunities and dynamics changing in certain parts of the world, but secondly, there are new resources that we discussed earlier and new domains in which we can, with the diffusion of technology, that become open to this kind of intervention, this conflict outside of the Civil War conflict. But it escalates into other domains, which also creates these escalation dynamics to be concerned about. If I just build on Matt's point, I would say that insofar as we can look into the data on this question as well, something we can see over the last, say, 10 to 15 years is a growing regionalization of intervention, where there is a growing number of regional powers that are increasingly engaged in this kind of conflict scenario. And so I'm thinking here of Turkey, of Saudi Arabia, of Iran. This is a growing trend. And so insofar as some states are withdrawing around the world, we are seeing other states begin to step in, generating this regionalization of intervention. Yeah, that's a great point. And this was brought up earlier that when we think about military intervention and local civil wars, it's natural to think, oh, the Soviet Union in the United States, this is a great power thing. But actually, if you were to parse into your data, Noel, you would find that probably the majority of these conflicts have non-great powers, states you wouldn't think about that are conducting interventions like Sudan and Turkey and other states like that. So this isn't just a tool of great powers. This is a fundamental tool of statecraft that actually goes back a really long time. And so we need to understand it and prepare for it. And I could go for hours on this, but I'm just going to go to our final question. We always finish the podcast with what are the implications of this conversation for policymakers, practitioners, and scholars. I'll start with Wayne. What are the implications of this conversation for you? So I'll repeat something I said before. It is adding to our understanding of war and perhaps the war that we could be in. It's not prescriptive. It's descriptive. But anything that helps with the understanding of the moment that we may find ourselves is going to help determine a way forward. I will add two points. One, as we see from Noel's book, that competitive intervention is not going away. The research and the practice of civil war and conflict, obviously, is complex. And there, of course, humanitarian concerns, but also states have interests, particularly in a globally interconnected society. Those interests will always be there. Second, it's also equally important to understand competitive intervention, as Noel does for us in the book, that it's important to remember that military dynamics and military power are just one instrument in order to truly understand it, even as the domains expand. It's a whole government approach. There's a holistic considerations that we must acknowledge, particularly the deep-seated societal issues that were touched on earlier must be considered. Yeah, and I think I would close by highlighting that intervention, it's often not a unilateral exercise, which is to say that it is prone to competitive dynamics in the international system. So when one state intervenes to support one combatant of a civil war, it has to be prepared for a response in kind, a counter escalation or a counter intervention by a rival that's designed to check their influence or to impose reciprocal costs. And so under the shadow of inadvertent escalation, the contradiction inherent, again, in the need to intervene and at the same time, the need to control the risk of enlarged conflict, that can warp positive objectives of winning into negative objectives of not losing. And far from facilitating negotiated agreements, that can distort domestic bargaining processes in ways that prolong rather than resolve civil wars. I'll finish with one more question, which is in the wake of GWAT, there's an increased sentiment that, you know, the West and especially the United States should do less intervention abroad because it didn't necessarily work out in Afghanistan and Iraq. At the extremes, you have sort of neo-isolationism. Given your study of these interventions and your experience, do you think on net we can expect to see a decrease in this phenomenon? Is this the phenomenon of intervention fruitful for countries that do the intervening? Or is this on net actually not a good thing, and yet we keep doing it? We've been doing it for thousands of years. So I've come to believe, based on my time in Afghanistan and seeing other conflicts around the world, when you conduct what I've started calling security force substitution, where a foreign force comes in and displaces a host nation force, you are inevitably seen or come to be seen as an army of occupation. It doesn't work. You need local forces and local elites to take ownership of the conflict. And so competitive intervention, I don't believe, is going away, but it's the scope and scale of it. Perhaps not at the higher end, as we saw in Afghanistan and Iraq, but certainly with revision of equipment, of training, of advice that has much scope to continue. Yeah, Kyle, I think your question really is sort of a moral quandary. It's a moral dilemma. So my work very clearly shows that competitive intervention prolongs conflict, and so it prolongs suffering. At the same time, I'm saying competitive intervention is not going away. And in fact, it's likely to increase in frequency with time as we sort of see the diffusion of power. And so that puts us on the horns of a dilemma for sure. And so I think I would just say two things. First, national security establishments do need to develop capabilities suited to proxy conflicts, including competitive interventions. I think that conventional war among peer competitors, that represents the most dangerous threat at the current moment, for sure. But I think that the most likely threat is going to take the form of these kinds of indirect conflicts. And so for that reason, I think that policymakers need to be prepared. And I think that the types of capabilities necessary to address these kinds of conflicts are going to differ fundamentally from those that they would need for conventional confrontations. So it's going to be things that look more like security force assistance and things that look more like irregular war. And so that's the first thing I would say. We can't just put our head in the sand and imagine that this problem doesn't exist. But the second thing I would say is that precisely because I think security force assistance is going to play such an important role in the future, I think that policymakers must very carefully assess the decision to deploy these capabilities, which is to say that they have to use them judiciously. They have to use them with very clear political and military objectives in mind. And they need to take into account the potentially escalatory dynamics that are associated with security force assistance. I think it's quite common for us to see security force assistance as benign. We're engaging in partner capacity building, right? But in fact, there are competitive dynamics that can be unleashed when we use these programs abroad. And so policymakers need to be aware of this potentially competitive nature of these programs and the fact that it can lead to a form of mission creep where the act of assisting a foreign partner can inadvertently drag the sponsor into a protracted conflict that then resists traditional diplomatic or military solutions. Wayne Eyre, Noel Anderson, and Matt Coleman, this has been a great conversation. Thank you so much for joining us today on the Irregular Warfare Podcast. Hey, Kyle, thanks for having us. Great discussion today and keep up the great work with podcasting. Yeah, Kyle, thanks so much for the opportunity. This has been fantastic discussion and I really appreciate it and all the work that IWI does. Thanks, Kyle, and to the broader IWI team for all the great work and happy to be here. Thanks again for listening to episode 146 of the Irregular Warfare Podcast. We release a new episode every two weeks. In our next episode, Ben Jeb and I discuss adapting U.S. industry for future wars with Dr. Seth Jones from the Center for Strategic and International Studies and the current Army Chief Technology Officer, Dr. Alex Miller. Following that, Alisa speaks with General Joseph Fattel, former commander of both United States Central Command and United States Special Operations Command, and Dr. Chris Blair from Princeton University about the strategic logic of large militant alliance networks. please be sure to subscribe to the regular warfare podcast so you do not miss an episode you can also engage with us on x youtube facebook linkedin and across many other platforms if you found value in today's conversation please leave us a review on apple podcast it really helps us reach new audiences and also please consider sharing this episode with a friend and one last thing the views expressed in this episode are those of the participants and do not represent those of any government agency, the Empirical Studies of Conflict Project, or the Irregular Warfare Initiative. Thanks again for listening, and we'll see you next time.