Indirect Wars
Wars are not easy to write, wars in which the two central countries involved aren’t actually at war, even more so. This type of conflict, sometimes known as a “proxy” war, is one where the two parties directly engaging in combat aren’t just themselves fighting each other, but representatives of two or more other parties which are backing one side or the other. Country A supports Country B in fighting Country C, who is supported by Country D and so on. History is full of these conflicts: the Romans paid their neighbours to fight for them and against others who might cause them trouble. One of the reasons the Thirty Years’ War was so destructive and lasted so long was because outside powers began involving themselves in what was originally a civil war within the Holy Roman Empire. Britain spent much of the 18th and 19th centuries paying other European powers to fight for them. Even today, the Russian Federation funds proxies in West Africa while fighting an actual direct war in Ukraine.
So, say you want to add this sort of setup to your own setting. I can see why you would. Not only does it offer all the regular narrative hooks and themes of armed conflict, but it includes a second layer of them, which is ripe for more storytelling: those doing the fighting wonder about the motives of their benefactors, those in leadership positions of the two parties directly engaged can have conflicts with their supposed allies, and wonder whose interests they’re really serving. Meanwhile, the benefactors of the two sides might maintain peaceful – or even civil relations with each other, creating an interesting situation where the two “benefactor” parties are both at war with each other, and not at war with each other. There’s plenty of material for political intrigue, espionage, skullduggery, and diplomatic tension on top of what a wartime setting already provides.
At its basic level, this setup needs two pairs of opposing parties, those directly engaged and those supporting the two directly engaged parties. Note that I say ‘parties’ here and not countries because not all of these conflicts are between two countries. Sometimes, these conflicts are civil wars, in other cases, they’re between rival alliances. In whatever case, these are the two sides who are doing most of the heavy lifting and directly doing the fighting with each other.
It’s important to note here that if these two parties don’t actually have any outstanding conflicts or reasons to go to war, you won’t actually have a proxy war. History has shown that no amount of manipulation will force two sides to go to war with each other for a protracted period of time if at least some part of those directly engaged parties don’t want to fight. The idea of outside powers turning two groups who have no reason to fight against each other is something firmly within the realm of bad fiction, and the pseudohistorical narratives of the more cursed breed of extremist ideology. The Korean War was a proxy war where North Korea was heavily supported by the PRC and the Soviet Union, but there would not have been a war in the first place if North Korea (or at least, Kim Il-Sung) hadn’t wanted to reunify the Korean peninsula by force – and if South Korea hadn’t committed to violently resisting the invasion of their country. Likewise, even the strongest diplomatic inducements will not make a country go to war unless its people or its leadership feel like their interests are being served by it – which is why Italy sided against its own pre-war allies in WWI, and Ireland remained neutral in WWII, despite being offered Northern Ireland if they joined the Allies.
So, we have a ‘normal’ war between two parties, what makes this a “proxy” war?
First of all, it’s important to remember that “proxy war” is a term which is used from the perspective of those outside the conflict who are supporting one side or the other within it. To those doing the fighting, it’s just good old fashoned normal war. The fact that other powers are supporting them might be welcome, but the conflict is still defined by the directly engaged parties: outside support might determine the course of that war, but there would not be a war in the first place if the two directly engaged sides hadn’t resolved to fight.
Of course, that doesn’t mean the supporting powers have the same interests as the ones who are directly engaged. Usually, the fact that those supporting powers have differing goals is one of the main sources of tension this setup introduces. While supporting power usually wants the side they’re backing to win, they generally want them to do so for their own reasons, whether those reasons be ideological (to prevent the spread of a rival ideology or to spread their own), diplomatic (to create a friendly power in the region), economic (to create a captive market or trading partner through the use of loans and economic concessions in compensation for aid) or in the case of some kinds of governments, even familial (this would be more common in settings where monarchs still hold power and royal houses intermarry with each other regularly).
It should also be noted that supporting powers can also have more sinister motives. While they can’t necessarily force two parties to go to war with each other, they could certainly take advantage of the resulting conflict without even committing to a side. The PRC sold weapons to both sides of the Iran-Iraq War, for example, which served their interests by profiting from a war which they didn’t really have any ideological or geopolitical stake in.
So, how does this support manifest? I’ve already mentioned one example: the sale or donation of weaponry. This is particularly the case when the supporting power has much greater industrial capabilities than the directly engaged power – although this is not always the case (see: North Korea donating ammunition to Russia). The most famous example of this is the American Lend-Lease programme of the Second World War, which allowed the US to leverage its industrial capacity to support the Western Allies (and later, the Soviet Union and China) without directly going to war with Nazi Germany, Fascist Italy, or Imperial Japan – until the latter of those powers brought the US in directly.
Usually, this sort of aid comes with strings attached. In the case of direct arms sales, these naturally have a price tag. In the case of donations, there’s usually an expectation that the receiving party remain friendly to the donating one, both out of sheer gratitude and because the more the receiving party’s armed forces rely on those donated weapons (made by foreign factories and loaded with foreign ammunition), the more dependent they become on future arms sales, which naturally require friendly relations. This is one of the reasons why the Soviet Union (and later the Russian Federation) continually supplied vast amounts of military equipment to countries around the world – not just as a means to keep its bloated military-industrial complex viable, but as a form of diplomacy. This tends to be also tends to be why some countries maintain their own domestic defence industries even when they might not necessarily be economically advantageous (France, Israel, and Japan come to mind), because doing so allows them to assert a degree of independence which they might not have were they wholly dependent on a foreign supporter.
In a related case, aid sometimes comes in the form of money directly – often used to pay for the purchase of weapons, but also for other wartime expenses. For example, during the Japanese invasion, the Nationalist Chinese government spent an enormous amount of money not only on the army they needed to keep the invaders at bay, but also to shelter and feed the tens of millions of refugees fleeing Japanese atrocities in the areas they were occupying. A lot of this money was provided by interest-free loans by the Soviet Union and the United States, who were also providing limited amounts of weapons at the same time. Likewise, the British quite famously supported its allies on continental Europe with “subsidies” to make up for its relative inability to contribute militarily with its relatively small and ill-equipped army.
A supporting power could also choose to go a step further, providing “advisors”, or professional military personnel who are usually expected to stay out of direct combat, but provide advice and support to the side their country is supporting. These soldiers exist in a sort of legal grey area, because they’re technically soldiers helping one side of a war, but they’re also still usually connected with the government that sent them. Sometimes, those advisors will actually engage in combat – but with legal obfuscation to keep them from being seen as a supporting power’s combatants. One example of this was the famous American Volunteer Group, or “Flying Tigers”, of WWII: US Army fighter pilots who officially resigned from service to fight as “mercenaries” in China against the Japanese. They brought with them modern fighter aircraft – which the Nationalists desperately needed to fight off regular Japanese terror-bombing raids. Officially, the AVG were mercenaries fighting for the Chinese Nationalists – but had American training, and American equipment.
On the other hand, you have the Soviet advisors who accompanied the MiG-15 jet fighters the Soviet Union sent to North Korea during the Korean War. While these were experienced pilots, they were explicitly not allowed to fly combat missions (though some American pilots swore that some particularly skilled pilots were genuine Soviets). Usually, they sat back at base, training new pilots, and occasionally reading the manual to imperfectly trained North Korean pilots over the radio.
Advisors can be a double-edged sword. While the power that sends them is often possessed of a better equipped and better trained military, that doesn’t mean the training in question is the kind that will be helpful. During the early stages of the Vietnam War, American advisors who’d cut their teeth in conventional wars like WWII and Korea pushed Saigon to abandon its existing strategy of trying to build political legitimacy in the countryside. Instead, they conditioned US aid on the South Vietnamese adopting ultimately wasteful search-and-destroy missions, under the impression that the enemy they were fighting could be defeated conventionally. Likewise, during WWII, American advisors (in particular, Joe Stilwell, a man of considerable incompetence and a truly gigantic asshole, if his journal entries are any indication) were appointed to high posts within the Nationalist armies as a condition of American aid – where they proceeded to get a whole lot of Chinese soldiers killed through demanding aggressive and pointless attacks, and campaigns which really didn’t do anything except waste the best trained troops the Nationalists had at the time.
These two instances aren’t unique ones. I could probably name half a dozen examples from American military history alone. To talk about the other militaries who fell into the same trap of sending officers to order local forces to fight the wrong kind of war would require an entire book, if not an entire bookshelf.
Last of all, there’s the possibility of the supporting power sending troops to support one of the directly engaged parties directly. By this point, the term ‘proxy war’ could seem more like a polite fiction than anything else. The idea that the Vietnam War was a “proxy war” for the US seems pretty disingenuous once you remember that the US committed hundreds of thousands of troops, and ended up signing a separate peace with North Vietnam. Likewise the involvement of hundreds of thousands of Cuban troops in the Angolan Civil War. However, powers which have an interest in not being directly involved often try to maintain that fiction. For example, during the Korean War, instead of directly deploying the PLA, the PRC created a second parallel force called the People’s Volunteer Army, which was supposedly made up of PLA troops who’d crossed the border of their own free will to fight under North Korean command – something that was done to avoid direct confrontation with basically the rest of the planet (it bears repeating that they and the North Koreans were technically fighting a UN peacekeeping force).
However, regardless of diplomatic doublespeak, by this point, a proxy war has more or less become a normal war for the supporting power sending the troops, so this is the point where I’m going to stop.
Naturally, this is just a very simplified overview. History (and the news) are full of examples of how the variations of this basic model of conflict can play out. However, I hope I’ve been able to give you something of a framework as to how those conflicts can be understood.
Paul Wang 