Review: Understanding the New Proxy Wars

The CIA's in house journal Studies in Intelligence reviewed Understanding the New Proxy Wars, the collected volume of essays on proxy warfare edited by Peter Bergen, Daniel Rothenberg, Candace Rondeaux, and David Sterman as part of New America and the Arizona State University Center on the Future of War's project to study proxy warfare.

This book’s lasting contribution may be its reminder that breaking things is easier than fixing them. Rare is the proxy that can both take territory and govern it afterward, and policymakers and intelligence officers alike would do well to heed the lesson that few strategic goals will be met through proxy conflicts, despite the allure of the tactical gains they can offer.

The review also praised Candace Rondeaux's work on the Wagner Group:

Rondeaux deserves significant credit for her work here, which accurately presages Russia’s use of its overt, covert, conventional, and asymmetric tools (including the Wagner Group) in its latest war against Ukraine, which had not yet begun at the time of this volume’s writing.

Read the full review here.