The UAE’s ‘dogs of war’: boosting a small state’s regional power projection

ABSTRACT

This article suggests based on the case study of the United Arab Emirates (UAE) that mercenaries as commercial surrogates can become an integral part of an overall effort of military transformation helping regimes in the Middle East to increase military capacity and capability on the battlefield. As the most assertive Arab state post-Arab Spring, the UAE arguably shows the greatest discrepancy between ambitiousness of its strategic objectives and available in-house capacity and capability among states in the region. Consequently, despite its ongoing military transformation, the Emirates more than any other Arab state had to inevitably draw on external surrogates to maintain their military presence in Somalia, Yemen, and Libya. Thereby, the case study of the UAE is quite exceptional in the region, as it has set a new trend for the commercialization of military services at the higher end of the military spectrum when translating capital into military capability and capacity. This in turn confronts Abu Dhabi’s western partners with difficult choices as they rely increasingly on the UAE to bear the burden of conflict in the region.

KEYWORDS:

• United Arab Emirates
• mercenaries
• private military and security companies
• Yemen
• market for force
• small state security

1. Introduction

A New York Times report published on 14 May 2011 first shed light on the efforts by the United Arab Emirates (UAE), to set up a secret mercenary force near Abu Dhabi.¹ Amid the peak of military contracting in support of United States and NATO military operations in Iraq and Afghanistan, this report first went unnoticed, as wartime contracting, armed and unarmed, had somewhat normalized during the military operations that followed the terrorist attacks of 9/11. The most curious thing about this case of mercenarism, however, was not the fact that it was overseen by Erik Prince, the founder of the infamous private military and security company (PMSC) Blackwater.² What made this story stand out in 2011 was the fact that unlike Western partners, the UAE were not merely trying to supplement non-combat related support services to contractors, but to potentially outsource combat support and lethal combat services to armed contractors serving in Emirati uniform.³

This first report suggested that several hundred Colombian soldiers had been contracted to conduct special forces operations inside and outside the country – at a time when the revolutions of the Arab Spring threatened regime security across the Middle East and North Africa (MENA) region. Suggestions were made that the Colombians served coup-proofing purposes as Abu Dhabi’s Crown Prince and de facto leader of the Emirates, Mohammad bin Zayed al Nahyan (MbZ) had insisted on hiring non-Muslims allegedly stating ‘that he did not believe Muslim soldiers could be trusted to kill other Muslims’.⁴ Yet, as the United Arab Emirates became more assertive in their foreign and security policy⁵ following the revolutions of the Arab Spring, it became apparent that the oil-rich small state in the Gulf was increasingly using hundreds of mercenaries in direct combat across regional theatres in Somalia, Yemen, and Libya – arguably marking a seismic shift in the contemporary history of using commercial soldiers for hire.⁶

This article contextualizes the changing approach to the commercialization of military services in the Middle East within the wider literature on civil-security sector relations in the region. The literature contends that security sectors in the region, politicised by elites to prioritize regime security over public security or national defence, have deliberately sacrificed military effectiveness for regime security.⁷ The commercialization of security thereby has become an additional means for authoritarian leaders to augment insufficient in-house capacity and capability with surrogates-for-hire directly controlled by the regime.

This article, by contrast, shows that the of the United Arab Emirates case study suggests that commercial surrogates can become an integral part of an overall effort of military transformation, helping patrons to increase military capacity and capability on the battlefield. In so doing, the UAE’s surrogate warfare by mercenary is not only driven by attempts to enhance coup proofing or achieve plausible deniability, but also prompted by efforts to overcome capacity and capability shortages.

The United Arab Emirates is as a crucial case study for the commercialization of security in the region, as the traditional small state has most extensively relied on surrogates in their various expeditionary military operations – of which many were mercenaries. As the most assertive Arab state post-Arab Spring, the UAE arguably shows the greatest discrepancy between ambitiousness of its strategic objectives and available in-house capacity and capability among states in the region. Consequently, despite its ongoing military transformation, the Emirates more than any other Arab state had to inevitably draw on external surrogates to maintain its military presence in Somalia, Yemen, and Libya. Thereby, the case study of the UAE is quite exceptional in the region, as it has set a new trend for the commercialization of military services at the higher end of the military spectrum.⁸ Its extensive use of mercenaries across various theatres, however, is relatively well documented, which provides interesting insights into how a financially well-endowed Middle Eastern state with significant human capacity shortages can rely on the market for force to translate financial power into regional influence. Apart from drawing upon a growing body of secondary sources on the subject from investigative journalists with considerable access, this article relies as well on informal interviews conducted by the author to fill remaining gaps. Nonetheless, due to the fact that the UAE have created a vast commercial network across the region with shell firms and a range of subsidiary companies,⁹ it remains difficult to get an unmediated look into the inner workings of Emirati strategic decision-making and operational implementation.

The UAE’s warfare by delegation has policy implications for the Emirates’ western partners. Abu Dhabi has been marketing itself as a near-peer partner for Western states who in recent years have willingly absorbed much of the West’s burden of conflict in the MENA region that would have otherwise been borne by partners such as the United States. It is therefore essential to understand that while the UAE act as partner for western states in the region, it does so by further externalizing the burden of conflict and warfare to commercial surrogates who do not operate within the confines of international law. More so, the fact that much of the UAE’s military capacity has been outsourced to mercenaries actively contributes to a shift in the normative environment of what services ought or ought not to be commercialized.

The article commences by outlining the surrogate warfare concept in relation to the commercialization of military and security services, before looking at commercial surrogates in the Middle East. The article continues by illustrating how, when, and why the United Arab Emirates have delegated military and security functions to mercenaries across regional theatres like Somalia and Yemen. The Emirati experience of mercenarism alongside military transformation over the past decade has become an essential element of its hard power projection, providing the aspiring small state with opportunities to translate financial means into military capacity, capability, and deniability during its ascent to becoming a regional power.

2. The contractor as a commercial surrogate in the Middle East

The concept of surrogate warfare in the 21^st century, albeit rooted etymologically in the Latin word surrogare, i.e. ‘to elect a substitute’, exceeds the narrow concept of proxy warfare as it has been used in the literature throughout the Cold War. The list of surrogates in 21^st century warfare is far more diverse than militia or guerrilla groups sponsored by an external patron. Surrogate warfare is much more an umbrella concept that tries to include all forms of delegation and externalization of security and defence functions from a patron or sponsor, to a human or technological surrogate. Thereby, the surrogate can be a technological platform, such as a drone or an-Artificial intelligence-based bot, as well as a human surrogate, such as militias, insurgents, mercenaries, loan soldiers, or private companies.¹⁰ The surrogate is thus any agent, human or technological, who, through substitution or supplementation, allows a patron to externalize the burden of providing security and defence functions.¹¹

While surrogate warfare is as old as war itself looking at the role of privateers and auxiliaries throughout history, it has never been used as widely by modern Westphalian nation states as it is today, as the character of conflict becomes more globalized, securitized, privatized, and mediatized. The threshold of war is constantly shifting in grey-zone conflicts where information operations are at times as potent as kinetic operations and where moral and legal norms of war can be seemingly bypassed. Strategic objectives often appear to no longer be tied to tangible national security interests, but states are still pressured to fulfil their security role, protecting communities from challenges that are often subjectively defined. Consequently, states do so in more discrete and more deniable manner, delegating the burden of conflict to a range of surrogates who make this burden more bearable and sustainable in the protracted conflicts of the 21^st century.¹² At the heart of surrogate warfare, then, is the externalization of what becomes an ever more complex burden of war,¹³ encompassing financial and human costs, but also increasingly political costs of remaining committed to protracted everywhere and forever wars – wars and conflicts the modern Westphalian nation state was ill-designed to engage. For the Westphalian nation state has been built around the bond between society and state with the soldier serving both in defence of what are national interests, traditionally limited to the territorial boundaries and reach of the state.¹⁴

Although The surrogate allows the state to remain committedonly so far as it is bound by financial considerations to conflicts geographically removed from the home shores, often under the radar of international awareness and domestic public scrutiny. The surrogate is far from a panacea to the state’s challenge to engage in the globalized, securitized, privatized, and mediatized conflicts of the 21^st century. Delegation and externalization lead to issues of state control, as the patron has to inevitably surrender autonomy to the surrogate when externalizing the burden of conflict. Whereas the patron seeks to maximize control over the surrogate, the surrogate in turn seeks to maximize autonomy in what are often only temporary relationships of convenience where both patron and agent benefit. Over time, surrogates usually benefit disproportionately from linking with external sponsors, as few means exist for the patron to maintain leverage, influence, and control over non-state actors seeking means to become more autonomous in their decision-making.¹⁵

Wartime contracting has become an essential part of surrogate warfare providing states and increasingly also non-state actors, with means to translate financial assets into capacity and capability. Particularly the military operations under the narrative of the ‘War on Terror’, following the terrorist attacks of 9/11, caused a massive growth in the private military and security industry with tens of thousands of contractors serving on government contracts in operational theatres in both armed and unarmed capacity.¹⁶ Although the overwhelming majority of contractors serving on Western governmental contracts provided unarmed support services, the perception of the industry has been shaped by the images of highly armed contractors engaged in direct firefights in Iraq or Afghanistan in the 2000s. Today, private military and security companies, as locally registered specialist firms hiring security and defence professionals as contractors, are widening their scope of operations as lucrative government contracts began to wind down with the United States’ withdrawal from the post-9/11 theatres.

Nonetheless, the contractor remains an integral element of expeditionary operations for most Western states in times of austerity and military downsizing, providing essential capacity and capability to their clients – albeit entirely in military support functions.¹⁷ Although ill-defined and inconsistently applied, a norm has emerged in the Western world that makes warfighting the prerogative of the uniformed soldier.¹⁸ As a contested concept the anti-mercenary norm in the West distinguishes between the contractor as an employee of a private company who provides non-combat related services and the mercenary who strives for individual profit above the threshold of actual warfighting¹⁹ – a distinction, which is not easily made in the Middle East.

In the Middle East, where security sectors appear to be traditionally more diversified, less cohesive and less institutionalized than in the West,²⁰ commercial surrogates in the form of contractors, contract soldiers or mercenaries traditionally feature more prominently across militaries and law enforcement bodies. With security sectors in Egypt, Syria, Iraq, Jordan, or the Arabian Gulf being set up by colonial powers, external advisors, trainers, and officers have traditionally played an important role in building and maintaining military capacity and capability.²¹ Furthermore, surrogates as adjuncts to the regular security sector are less of an alien concept than for Western states. Authoritarian regimes in the region have relied on a variety of means to diversify and fragment the security sector in an effort to deal with what Feaver defines as the inherent civil-security sector problematique, namely the challenge of giving the very institution under arms sufficient power to protect the polity without it becoming a threat to the polity itself.²² Coup-proofing has created a different context for civil-security sector relations, as regimes have traditionally looked for means to guard the guardians by severing the rapport between the security sector and the public and tying those under arms directly to the regime.²³ With few exceptions, namely Israel and Turkey, coup-proofed security sectors in the Middle East have become ever more heterarchically organized with multi-level and multi-actor assemblages and networks of regular and irregular security providers tied directly or indirectly to regime elites.²⁴

According to the literature, prioritizing regime security over public security and defence in the Middle East has come at the cost of security sector effectiveness in the region.²⁵ As Talmadge argues, complex joint operations in the Middle East and basic tactics are undermined by coup proofing measures that diversify chains of command, create parallel security providers, fill key positions based on kinship or sectarian favouritism or develop multiple internal commissarist agencies monitoring loyalty to the regime.²⁶ Although founded on orientalist and reductionist views on security sector effectiveness,²⁷ most observations about how coup proofing affects security sector performance in authoritarian regimes in the Middle East still hold true, especially when considering per capita security sector spending and foreign-funded capacity building programs in the region.

It is against this backdrop that surrogacy in the Middle East is all but bucking the trend, as unlike in the West, security sectors in the region have traditionally more readily externalized and delegated security functions to alternate security providers, some of whom are non-state or quasi-state actors. State-sponsored militia in Syria, Iraq, or Libya provide regimes or quasi-state actors such as warlord Haftar’s militia, with shadow forces to divide and rule, bypass the regular chains of command, or compete in what are complex multipolar environments.²⁸ It is in these multipolar, heterarchical security sector assemblages that mercenaries have complemented coup-proofing strategies, providing potent force multipliers directly tied to the regime’s inner circle without any command and control overlap with the regular military. Far from being commercial surrogates working on contracts for registered companies, the mercenaries from Sub-Saharan Africa employed by Gadhafi in his now infamous 32^nd Khamis Brigade, became a praetorian guard of last resort in the final days of the regime in 2011 as the regular security sector was disintegrating.²⁹ Contract or loan soldiers, hired directly by security sectors in the Arab Gulf states, although arguably neither falling into the category of commercial contractors nor mercenaries, have likewise become means of coup-proofing for hire³⁰ – especially in countries such as the kingdom of Bahrain suffering from sectarian conflict. In Bahrain, estimates suggest that two-thirds of all staff in uniform both in the military and law enforcement were hired externally; preferably from Sunni background in what is a majority Shia country, where sectarian conflict between the public and a Sunni minority regime erupted in mass protests in 2011.³¹ Sunni contract soldiers in Bahrain come from Syria, Jordan, or Yemen and have either been on long-term contracts or were offered citizenship to fill capacity gaps caused by the deliberate exclusion of Shia Bahrainis from the security sector.³²

The use of contractors as employees of private military and security companies, however, is a recent development occurring in parallel to the expansion of the private military and security industry in the Western world. Amid the outsourcing of support services to private contractors in Western countries, security sectors in the Middle East have also experienced an influx of private contractors over the last decade, often in logistical and maintenance roles as part of larger defence industry contracts with Western partners. However, unlike the Western experience of wartime contracting occurring in the context of a weakening anti-mercenary norm,³³ contracting in the Middle East occurs in the context of already highly privatized and diversified security sectors where the line between statutory and non-statutory security providers is blurred. Externalization, delegation, and diversification have been long-standing means of regimes to increase regime security often at the expense of security sector effectiveness. In a region where multipolar, networked security sectors have undermined capacity and capability, commercial surrogates have become an important supplement for regimes to both increase regime security, but more so, add capacity and niche capability under the direct control of regime elites. As the case study of the United Arab Emirates shows, commercial surrogates in the Middle East can become discrete means of force augmentation, enhancing the operational effectiveness of militaries in transition, unconstrained of moral or legal reservations about the use of mercenaries in combat.

3. ‘Little Sparta’s’ guns for hire

The United Arab Emirates, as a federation of seven tribally based monarchies, at first sight seems to be not more than a conglomeration of small city states whose hyper-development from a regional backwater to a global brand was only made possible by immense hydrocarbon wealth. In the past 15 years, however, with the ascent of Abu Dhabi as the undisputed centre of gravity in the UAE, Abu Dhabi’s royal family under the leadership of hawkish Crown Prince MbZ have transformed the country from a hedging and bandwagoning soft power to a cyber and kinetic warfare powerhouse in the region. Albeit small in population size and territory, the UAE have strategically allocated resources in an effort to punch way above their weight amid the collapse of the old regional powers during the Arab Spring. As Egypt, Syria, Libya, and Iraq were descending into chaos and internal turmoil, Abu Dhabi was eager to not just secure its own homeland from the popular revolutions, but also embark on an assertive regional strategy to roll back the achievements of revolutionaries region-wide to restore the old order of ‘authoritarian stability’.

MbZ’s vision has been to make the UAE a more assertive player in the region, namely a state willing to pay the costs and accept the risks, whatever they may be, to pursue a particular endgame.³⁴ It is the vision of a military man who, unlike his father, values the military and kinetic hard power just as much as soft power – hence, why former US Secretary of Defence Mattis referred to Abu Dhabi once as ‘Little Sparta’.³⁵ The Crown Prince’s outlook on the region is defined by paranoia as he takes a rather pessimistic and realist approach to a regional environment that for him is defined by inherent structural insecurities.³⁶ Abu Dhabi’s leadership has since the early 2000s aimed at reforming its security sector to make it a self-sufficient force of its own right in pursuit of a mercantilist grand strategy securing Emirati access to vital regional trade routes and choke points as well as an ideational grand strategy defined by the fear of the mobilization power of civil-society, insurgency, terrorism, and most importantly political Islam.³⁷ The military transformation that has taken place in the monarchy has thereby been unprecedented by regional standards, as Roberts contends – in many ways the UAE have bucked the trend of sacrificing military effectiveness at the altar of regime security.³⁸ Yet, as the case of the commercialization of security in the country would go to show, this military transformation, albeit more integrated, determined and effects-oriented than elsewhere in the region, still confronts the country with some fundamental structural issues that cannot be easily overcome: first and foremost the lack of human capacity in the state of less than one million indigenous Emiratis. Reconciling a regional grand strategy displaying ambitious objectives beyond the shores of the homeland with an inherent shortage of manpower, makes the UAE as hydrocarbon-rich state a predestined case study for the attempt to translate financial assets into expeditionary military power via commercial surrogates.

Traditionally, the UAE military, like its neighbours in Qatar or Kuwait, has tried to account for the inherent lack of human capacity in the security sector with loan and contract soldiers, whereby the officership was supplemented with professionals from Western militaries, while the rank and file were filled with contract soldiers from other Arab or South Asian countries.³⁹ In the past decade, however, the Emirates have embarked on an extensive military transformation, whereby the procurement of military hardware was complemented with a professionalisation of the military. Command and control have been centralized in the hands of Abu Dhabi’s Crown Prince,⁴⁰ Emirati officers have been widely deployed on multinational operations alongside NATO personnel, and Western loan-service officers and contract soldiers were instrumental in optimising manoeuvrist warfare and joint operations.⁴¹ Nonetheless, while today the United States view the Emirati military as a near-peer military, issues of capacity and capability remain that the small state is unable to compensate for by relying on domestic resources alone.

3.1. Commercializing a small state’s regional ambitions

The history of the commercialization of security in the United Arab Emirates begins in 2009 with Erik Prince being introduced to Abu Dhabi’s Crown Prince, and initially had a strong regime security component. With MbZ explicitly asking for non-Muslim soldiers, Prince’s private military company Reflex Ltd set up in Abu Dhabi in 2010 with the ambition to create a force of commercial armed surrogates directly answerable to the Crown Prince, who could be used domestically and externally.⁴² Dubbed an ‘elite counterterrorism unit’, the battalion of predominately Latin American mercenaries was meant to engage any ‘terrorist’ threat against the regime – a buzzword loosely used in the UAE against any entity, predominately of Islamist origin, that could potentially challenge the internal order in the Emirates.⁴³ The idea that ‘Muslim soldiers … could not be counted on to kill fellow Muslims’⁴⁴ meant that Latin American mercenaries would provide the regime in Abu Dhabi with the ability to potentially command a force internally against fellow countrymen at a time when authoritarian regimes in the region were being toppled by popular revolutions.

In a country where, like in neighbouring states, the security sector had been primarily set up to secure the royal regimes of the seven emirates military transformation was however unable to eradicate the most critical challenge to building a military power able to project Emirati influence across the region: the shortage of manpower. As Reflex Ltd began training in a desert camp outside the capital, it became clear that, only a small military force could be raised from within a population of less than a million indigenous Emiratis, especially when considering the amount of support services required to maintain such as force. Therefore, foreign advisors, loan service officers and contract soldiers remained important surrogates for Abu Dhabi’s project to build an expeditionary military force. In the context of an already diversified security sector, with a range of different non-Emirati servicemen, armed contractors would be required to boost the capacity and capability of a military in transition. Fitted with Emirati uniforms, the few hundred predominately Colombian and South African mercenaries hired by Erik Prince’s company would become a military inside the military, equipped for warfighting as a quick-reaction-force.⁴⁵

Over the decade that followed, as Reflex Ltd was renamed, rebranded, and expropriated from Prince who fell out with the Crown Prince. The number of contractors started to expand across all segments of military capability from logistics and maintenance contracts, to aircraft piloting and the operation of complex weapons systems, including increasingly in the cyber-domain. Contractors would free up Emirati personnel for military core functions while at the same time become surrogates that would absorb the human costs of war, as contractors would more and more become involved at the higher end of military capabilities. The UAE’s engagement in the UAE and Somalia, discussed in the following sections, illustrate the vital input contractors provide to Abu Dhabi’s expeditionary operations.

3.1.1. Somalia

The first deployment of a subsidiary of Reflex Ltd by the UAE government came in protection of the Emirati mercantilist grand strategy in Somalia in 2011: creating an anti-piracy force in Somalia’s breakaway region of Puntland.⁴⁶ Identifying piracy around the Horn of Africa as a strategic threat to Emirati mercantilist interests, Abu Dhabi provided Erik Prince with extensive funds to create the so-called Puntland Maritime Police Force (PMPF), staffed with South African mercenaries acting as force multipliers to local Somali contractors. Prince’s idea was to create a self-sustaining air, land and sea battalion able to strike pirates off the coast of northern Somalia.⁴⁷

Unlike other counter and anti-piracy operations executed by the commercial sector, the PMPF was not operating as a force multiplier in a defensive security role. Instead, the PMPF provided lethal combat services, not just in self-protection but by deliberately engaging in combat as part of an anti-piracy mission chasing and neutralizing pirates by air, on land and sea. Unlike the name suggests, the PMPF was not just operating in the law enforcement realm, but conducted combat operations involving rotary aircrafts, speed boats and armoured vehicle against targets on land and offshore. While international organization have questioned the recruitment and training methods of the PMPF,⁴⁸ the perception in Abu Dhabi was that the force was rather successful in disrupting piracy bases and organizations on land in their area of operation.⁴⁹

Nonetheless, the project was prematurely cancelled by the UAE as the operation, which was supposed to provide the country not just with capacity and capability, but most importantly with discretion and deniability, started to become a reputational liability for Abu Dhabi. Erik Prince, renowned for a tendency of self-staging, had invited American press outlets to report on his operation, drawing attention to what was meant to be a discrete out-of-area surrogate operation. The UAE’s attempt to project power in the Horn of Africa was no longer plausibly deniable.⁵⁰

3.1.2. Yemen

When Saudi Arabia called upon the UAE to support their military operations against the Houthi insurgents in Yemen in March 2015, Abu Dhabi volunteered an expeditionary force that was meant to secure the maritime choke points along South Yemen’s coast while driving out supporters of Yemen’s largest opposition group, the Islamist Al Islah.⁵¹ While outside observers were impressed with the military capability displayed by the UAE Presidential Guard, especially in the initial amphibious landing in Yemen’s southern port city of Aden, it became clear for leaders in Abu Dhabi that the war in Yemen would put an immense political, operational and human burden on the Emirati military.⁵² In a single attack on 4 September 2015, 52 Emirati soldiers were killed by a ballistic missile fired by the Houthis – the largest single loss of life for the UAE military in its short history. This became representative of the human costs Abu Dhabi had to endure.⁵³

Amid the rising human costs of war, the UAE started to increasingly dispatch the mercenaries from the battalion Erik Prince had set up in 2010, to the war-torn country. Roughly 450 Latin Americans, battle-hardened in anti-guerrilla operations, were meant to absorb the human costs of war, being deployed in lethal combat in Emirati uniform as a force-multiplier to Emirati troops.⁵⁴ Working on lucrative contracts, the operational risks of lethal combat did not appear to deter these foreigners to fight on behalf the UAE on Yemen’s frontline. Not only do these commercial surrogates free up capacity of the already overstretched Emirati military; such commercial forces also minimize the political and training costs of Emiratis paying the ultimate sacrifice.⁵⁵ Beyond the purely human costs of war, there are considerable financial and training costs involved in identifying and training military specialists, which would then have to be re-educated and retrained from a very small pool of indigenous graduates. By December 2015, first reports emerged that some of these mercenaries had paid the ultimate sacrifice fighting for Abu Dhabi’s war in Yemen.⁵⁶ In the coming years, more and more mercenaries from Sudan and the Horn of Africa would be hired by Abu Dhabi to substitute Emirati boots on the ground and supplement mercenaries from Latin America.⁵⁷ Most remarkable were investigative reports that showed that the UAE had outsourced war crimes to American and Israeli mercenaries who would run death squads in Yemen to assassinate leaders of the Islamist group Al Islah.⁵⁸ Here, Abu Dhabi turned to the market for force to hire surrogates that would provide its patron with discretion, deniability, capacity and capability in operations that, had they been conducted directly by UAE operatives, would have brought with it huge reputational and operational costs.

3.1.3. Information operations

As a small state by traditional metrics, Abu Dhabi has been looking to create levers of power that maximize its shortage of capacity. While major combat operations are manpower-intense, its built-up of a small, agile expeditionary force supported by mercenaries as kinetic force multipliers has been a first step to maximize power with minimal input. Beyond the hard power realm, the United Arab Emirates have invested greatly into information and cyber power in an effort to develop another lever of power that though capital-intense, is not manpower-intense.⁵⁹ Not tied into the regular chain of command of the security sector, the UAE’s growing information capabilities are directly tied into the office of the Crown Prince’s brother Tahnoon bin Zayed, and supply elites in Abu Dhabi with a lever of power to be used internally against potential regime critics and externally against foreign powers and leaders.⁶⁰

Without any in-house capability in the information and cyber domain, Abu Dhabi has again turned to the market, creating local companies who rely on cyber specialists from the United States and the Israeli armed forces⁶¹ to hack domestic devices and systems in the creation of a perfect 21^st century surveillance state.⁶² At the disposal of Abu Dhabi’s inner circle around the Crown Prince MbZ, the UAE also use these cyber mercenaries for clandestine operations against targets overseas to conduct sabotage, espionage and subversion operations.⁶³ The UAE’s government has either contracted its own companies, such as Dark Matter, employing cyber surrogates from overseas, or delegated such services to Israeli specialist firms such as NSO Group or Black Cube who work from Israel.⁶⁴

While the cyber domain provides anonymity, the hiring of cyber surrogates from abroad has become a powerful means for Abu Dhabi to project power and influence with plausible deniability. Without a domestic knowledge base and a lack of expertise in the field, cyber surrogates for hire have allowed the UAE to fill a capability gap in already highly diversified security sector. Thereby, the resort to cyber surrogates is as much motivated by the need to buy-in capability and capacity, as it is motivated by the need to enhance regime security; cyber surrogates help monitor and survey levels of dissidence among the population, other elites and the security sector.

4. Emirati exceptionalism and the market for force

The UAE have tried to cultivate an image of ‘Emirati exceptionalism’, bucking trends in the Arab world to become a partner with appeal for Western countries. While this image was built around economic and social, but not political liberties,⁶⁵ it has also spilled into the military domain, where the Emirates have become arguably the most assertive Arab state punching above its natural weight. The UAE’s reliance on the market for force, is likewise an exceptional case in the region so far, showing how a country unconstrained by any Western traditions and norms of anti-mercenarism, can translate financial power into hard power. In this context, the Emirati case also goes to show that if a demand arises, some providers on a widening market for force might be willing to supply services on the higher end of the military spectrum.

In so doing, the UAE’s case is setting a trend in the region, albeit for now not for its direct Arab Gulf neighbours. Where Western notions of a public security sector primarily serving society are widely absent, commercial surrogates just add another layer to already diversified security sectors that primarily serve elite interests. The same is true when looking at Abu Dhabi’s mercenaries who are not subject to any checks and balances beyond the inner circles of the regime and allow the traditional small state to execute operations across the region in an expeditionary fashion. Thus far, the UAE's case certainly is not representative of the rest of the Arabian Gulf, where states do not regularly engage in expeditionary military operations and therefore feel less pressured to turn to the market to expand capacity or capability on the higher end of the spectrum. Contracting in other Gulf states such as Saudi Arabia, is usually limited to maintenance and logistics services linked to defence procurement deals with Western defence companies.

The primary motivating factor for Abu Dhabi to turn to the market for force is the absence of in-house capacity and capability, which despite an ongoing military transformation will not be able to be generated from the limited pool of its indigenous population. Beyond niche capabilities such as hunter-killer teams and cyber expertise, the UAE have augmented their military effectiveness overseas by deploying hundreds of experienced mercenaries to serve as force-multipliers on the ground in Yemen. Here, the UAE’s motivations are similar to motivations for surrogate warfare in Western countries,⁶⁶ namely limiting the human costs of war for the indigenous population – something that has become a key concern in Abu Dhabi after dozens of Emirati servicemen were killed in a single missile attack in 2015. This trend can also be observed in Russia’s use of mercenaries in Syria and Libya, which allows Moscow to outsource casualties to the market.⁶⁷

Further, like Moscow, Abu Dhabi has been able to use commercial surrogates to minimize exposure within the international community. Deploying mercenaries to Somalia and Yemen, meant that the UAE were able to achieve objectives with plausible deniability, below the radar of international public opinion. Although, several media outlets reported the UAE’s use of mercenaries, it has not triggered great media attention despite the fact that mercenaries on Emirati payroll might have been involved in war crimes.⁶⁸ Relying on commercial surrogates, the UAE has been able to dissociate themselves from these war crimes, effectively outsourcing the reputational costs to the market.

Nonetheless, although commercial surrogates appear to be a panacea to the UAE’s shortage of capacity and capability as well as the need for discretion and deniability, mercenaries and PMSCs, like other surrogates have limited utility for the client in the long run. While mercenaries provide the Emirates with means to disrupt on the battlefield, it remains questionable to what extent they can help the client achieve strategic objectives sustainably as patron control over surrogates appears to fade with time as the surrogate attempts to achieve more autonomy.⁶⁹ The case of Erik Prince’s PMC Reflex Ltd shows that mercenaries can overcharge and underperform as Prince tried to apply his own vision to Emirati-sponsored operations in Somalia which was not coordinated with the client in Abu Dhabi. A New York Times reports cites former Colombian mercenaries who served with Prince’s firm confirming that not all those recruited were actually skilled military professionals, pointing towards a problem with quality control.⁷⁰ Further, some of the mercenaries were unhappy to be deployed overseas in more malign environments, causing some of them to cancel their contracts.⁷¹

The essential issue with surrogate operations is patron control, which derives logically from the key benefit of surrogate operations: the dissociation between principal and agent. The greater the dissociation, the more surrogates are able to act autonomously and the less control the patron has over whether the agent delivers the objectives as intended. Therefore, in the long-term mercenaries rarely allow the client to seize, hold and build in an effort to bring about conflict resolution. For the UAE, mercenaries merely provide means to remain committed indefinitely in protracted conflicts at relatively low costs.

This loss of control between Emirati principal and commercial agent has implications for the UAE’s western partners who are actively relying on Abu Dhabi to absorb their regional burden of conflict, especially in Yemen. Although marketing itself as a near-peer ally for the United States and other NATO partners, the UAE are unable to provide sufficient in-house capacity and capability to simultaneously engage across various theatres in the region. On the contrary, as Abu Dhabi is outsourcing not just the burden of warfare but also war crimes, western partners, first and foremost the United States, implicate themselves in the UAEs’ delegated operations. Therefore, relying on the UAE’s network of surrogates means that western partners are indirectly sponsoring this new trend set by the Emirates of commercializing military operations on the tip of the spear.

The UAE has set a trend in outsourcing combat services, which contributes to normalizing the militarization of commercial security, moving the industry from a security industry providing at most military support services, to an industry that now offers lethal combat services to the highest bidder. This normalization defies the Eurocentric and Westphalian notion of the state monopoly over violence as it further erodes the boundaries between contracting and mercenarism, which could set a trend that other states in the region might choose to follow. Due to the fact that all the small Arab Gulf states suffer from chronic capacity shortages, while endowed with relative high GDPs per capita, the Emirati model of outsourcing lethal combat services to commercial surrogates might look appealing to some of its neighbours.

Western partners therefore need to review their burden sharing with the United Arab Emirates as the delegation of the burden of warfare to Abu Dhabi in the regional context is likely to undermine Eurocentric and Westphalian notions of the state monopoly on violence and the prohibition of mercenarism. The consequent lack of control over commercial surrogates further reinforces dynamics of a new medievalism as complex assemblages emerge whereby western powers such as the United States act as the ultimate patron delegating the burden of conflict to the UAE who subsequently outsource this burden to the market. It is imperative that especially the United States as the ultimate patron and security provider in the region puts in place adequate monitoring and enforcement mechanisms to ensure that its partners such as the UAE, adhere to laws of armed conflict and norms prohibiting the use of mercenaries. While the Emirates appear to not subscribe to these norms domestically, western partners have to convey to Abu Dhabi that military and security assistance is tied to the UAE’s respect of these norms.

5. Conclusion

In the Middle East, outsourcing security and defence functions to commercial surrogates occurs in the context of highly diversified and fragmented security sectors where regimes have traditionally already delegated functions to agents that were operating outside the regular chain of command. In a region where regime security and coup proofing have often taken precedence over creating agile security sectors able to provide security and defence functions inclusively for society and state, contractors, and mercenaries enter a market where objections to mercenarism is either weak or absent all together. In a region where the notion of serving state and society in uniform equally is often side-lined in favour of loyalty and commitment to the regime, the idea of hiring capacity and capability from the market appears a logical step – especially in countries, such as those in the Arabian Gulf, where financial means are more abundant than human capacity.

For the United Arab Emirates, as an aspiring small state with the ambitions of a regional power, turning to the market for force amid a process of military transformation has changed the character of security sector commercialization in the region. While initially the investment into Erik Prince’s private military company was meant as a tool of enhancing regime security amid the upheavals of the Arab Spring, mercenaries increasingly became a critical force multiplier for the UAE armed forces in operations overseas. As Emirati military commitments in the region were growing, mercenaries became a parallel strand of a networked security sector complex of local surrogates in Libya, Yemen, or Somalia supported by the regular UAE military, and supplemented with mercenaries conducting a range of roles on the highest end of the military spectrum. Unlike contractors working directly or indirectly for Western states, Emirati mercenaries were supplying lethal combat services in counterinsurgency and counterterrorism operations across the region. More recently, cyber surrogates became the backbone of the UAE’s growing information power.

The motivations for externalizing the burden of warfare to commercial surrogates in Abu Dhabi have thereby evolved. While initially the regime looked to build a private force under the direct command of the Crown Prince and relatives to be used when necessary domestically, the UAE’s rise as an assertive power willing to project power overseas, expanded the potential use of the growing mercenary force. Tied at times to external chains of the command, such as in the case of the assassins-for-hire hunting down Islamists in Yemen, these commercial surrogates provided their patron with both capacities and capabilities that was unavailable in-house. Even as the Emirati military grew in size and capability, mercenaries were able to project force more discretely and with plausible deniability – not only externalizing the human burden of war but also outsourcing the reputational costs emerging from war crimes.

It is here that that especially the United States as the ultimate security provider in the region and ultimate patron in a complex assemblage of burden sharing must use its leverage to ensure that all surrogates including mercenaries remain under effective control. Where the United Arab Emirates are unable or unwilling to provide military in-house capability and capacity, the U.S. should refrain from partnering with Abu Dhabi’s surrogate network so as to maintain oversight over the complete military supply chain.

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Additional information

Notes on contributors

Andreas Krieg

Andreas Krieg is a lecturer at the School of Security Studies at King’s College London, Royal College of Defence Studies, and fellow at the Institute of Middle Eastern Studies. He is an expert of Middle Eastern security, combining his research interests in the wider field of unconventional warfare with a geographic expertise in the Middle East and North Africa region. His latest books include Surrogate Warfare – The Transformation of War in the 21^st Century (Georgetown University Press, 2019) and Divided Gulf – The Anatomy of a Crisis (Palgrave, 2019).

Notes

1. Mazzetti and Hager, “Secret Desert Force Set Up by Blackwater’s Founder.”

2. Blackwater has been rebranded into Academi and is no longer under the management of Erik Prince.

3. Combat services are thereby on the higher end of the military and lethality spectrum of services provided by private military and security companies. See Kinsey, Corporate Soldiers and International Security, 11.

4. Cole, “The Complete Mercenary.”

5. Esfandiary, Changing security dynamics in the Persian Gulf: The case of the United Arab Emirates.

6. Krieg, “Defining Remote Warfare: The Rise of the Private Military and Security Industry,” 10.

7. Pollack, Arabs at War: Military Effectiveness, 1948–1991; Pollack, Armies of Sand: The Past, Present, and Future of Arab Military Effectiveness; Brooks, “Civil-Military Relations in the Middle East”; and Cronin, Armies and State-Building in the Modern Middle East.

8. See note 6 above.

9. Cole, “The Complete Mercenary.”

10. Krieg and Rickli, “Surrogate Warfare: the Art of War in the 21^st century,” 115.

11. Krieg and Rickli, Surrogate Warfare, 58.

12. Ibid., 48.

13. Ibid., 59.

14. Krieg and Rickli, “Surrogate Warfare: the Art of War in the 21^st century,” 124.

15. Krieg and Rickli, Surrogate Warfare, 120.

16. Taylor, “Review article Private security companies in Iraq and beyond,” 449.

17. Cusumano, “Bridging the Gap: Mobilisation Constraints and Contractor Support to US and UK Military Operations.”

18. Liu and Kinsey, “Challenging the Strength of the Antimercenary Norm.”

19. Krieg, Commercializing Cosmopolitan Security, 160.

20. Springborg, “Arab Militaries,” 147.

21. Pollack, Arabs at War: Military Effectiveness, 1948–1991, 248.

22. Feaver, “Civil Military Relations,” 216.

23. Quinlivan, “Coup-Proofing: Its Practice and Consequences in the Middle East.”

24. See Kinsey and Krieg, “Assembling a Force to Defeat Boko Haram: how Nigeria Integrated the Market into its Counterinsurgency Strategy.”

25. Pollack, Arabs at War: Military Effectiveness, 1948–1991; Pollack, Armies of Sand: The Past, Present, and Future of Arab Military Effectiveness; Brooks, Civil-Military Relations in the Middle East; and Cronin, Armies and State-Building in the Modern Middle East.

26. Talmadge, The Dictator’s Army: Battlefield Effectiveness in Authoritarian Regimes, 4–5.

27. Roberts, “Bucking the Trend: The UAE and the Development of Military Capabilities in the Arab World,” 311.

28. Krieg and Rickli, Surrogate Warfare, 22.

29. Sorenson and Damidez, “Fragments of an Army. Three aspects of the Libya collapse,” 157.

30. Barany, “Foreign Contract Soldiers in the Gulf.”

31. Lutterbeck, “Arab Uprisings and Armed Forces: Between Openness and Resistance,” 41; Noueihed and Warren. The battle for the Arab Spring – Revolution, counter-revolution and the making of a new era, 149.

32. Lutterbeck, “Arab Uprisings, Armed Forces, and Civil–Military Relations,” 42.

33. See note 18 above.

34. Narizny, The Political Economy of Grand Strategy, 11.

35. The Economist, “The Gulf’s Little Sparta.”

36. Worth, “Mohammed bin Zayed’s Dark Vision of the Middle East’s Future.”

37. Author’s Interview with UAE analyst II over Skype, 14 December 2019.

38. Roberts, “Bucking the Trend: The UAE and the Development of Military Capabilities in the Arab World.”

39. The vast majority of contract soldiers in the UAE are Bangladeshi, Pakistani, Sudanese and Omani. In the Emirati War in Yemen, evidence suggests that Chadians, Chileans, Colombians, Libyans, Panamanians, Nigeriens (from Niger), Somalis, Salvadorans and Ugandans act as force multipliers. Moreover, there are a range of Western contract soldiers in senior roles, such as American, British and Australian officers who joined the UAE Armed Forces after retirement. For more details see Zoltan Barany, Foreign Contract Soldiers in the Gulf’.

40. Interview with US-based, UAE-focused analyst over the phone, 14 January 2020 London.

41. Roberts, “Bucking the Trend: The UAE and the Development of Military Capabilities in the Arab World,” 328.

42. See note 9 above.

43. Krieg, “Laying The ‘Islamist’ Bogeyman To Rest.”

44. See note 1 above.

45. Ibid.

46. Mazzetti and Schmitt, “Private Army Formed to Fight Somali Pirates Leaves Troubled Legacy.”

47. Cole, “The Complete Mercenary.”

48. Fowler, “Somali Autonomy and the Failure of the Puntland Maritime Police Force.”

49. Cole, “The Complete Mercenary.”

50. Mazzetti and Schmitt, “Private Army Formed to Fight Somali Pirates Leaves Troubled Legacy.”

51. Author’s Interview with UK-based UAE analyst in London 11 December 2019.

52. Knights and Mello, “The Saudi–UAE War Effort in Yemen: Operation Golden Arrow in Aden. Washington Institute for Near East Policy.”

53. Fahim, “Houthi Rebels Kill 45 U.A.E. Soldiers in Yemen Fighting’.”

54. Hager and Mazzetti, “Emirates Secretly Sends Colombian Mercenaries to Yemen Fight.”

55. Author’s Interview with UK-based UAE analyst in London 11 December 2019.

56. Safi, “Joshua Robertson, Australian mercenary reportedly killed in Yemen clashes.”

57. Berdikeeva, “UAE Lures Foreign Mercenaries to Fight Proxy Wars.”

58. Brennan, “Yemenis Demand U.S. Arrest American Mercenaries Accused of ‘Blatant’ War Crimes’”; Roston, “A Middle East Monarchy Hired American Ex-Soldiers To Kill Its Political Enemies. This Could Be The Future Of War.”

59. Cornwell, “Emerging Gulf State cyber security powerhouse growing rapidly in size, revenue.”

60. De Young and Nakashima, “UAE orchestrated hacking of Qatari government sites.”

61. Ziv, “Mysterious UAE Cyber Firm Luring ex-Israeli Intel Officers With Astronomical Salaries.”

62. Bing and Schectman, “Inside the UAE’s Secret Hacking Team of American Mercenaries”; Biddle and Cole, “Team of American Hackers and Emirati Spies Discussed attacking the Intercept.”

63. Reuters, “UAE arranged for hacking of Qatar government sites, sparking diplomatic row: Washington Post.”

64. Mazzetti, “Adam Goldman, Ronen Bergman and Nicole Perlroth, A New Age of Warfare: How Internet Mercenaries Do Battle for Authoritarian Governments.”

65. Antwi-Boateng and Binhuwaidin, “Beyond rentierism: the United Arab Emirates exceptionalism in a turbulent region.”

66. Krieg and Rickli, Surrogate Warfare, 76/77.

67. Vasilyeva, “Thousands of Russian private contractors fighting in Syria.”

68. Faulconbridge, “Lawyers ask U.S., Britain to arrest UAE officials for war crimes in Yemen.”

69. Krieg and Rickli, Surrogate Warfare, 116 ff.

70. See note 1 above.

71. Ibid.