Following the military defeat of Islamic State (IS, ISIS, or Daesh), very little has been publicly written of Australia’s experience and lessons from this campaign, termed Operation OKRA. In Occasional Paper 32, Operation Okra Operational Analysis, author, Dr Andrew Maher, takes aim at this gap and in so doing, seeks to help policymakers and practitioners understand proxy conflict that emerges in the broader context of strategic competition.
Some might take exception to the portrayal of Operation OKRA as a proxy conflict. Viewed over the long-term, conflict in the Levant throughout 2014-2024 is best characterised by messy patron-client relationships. It was not just a situation of major power competition (Russia and the United States) that manifested in proxy support to a range of actors. It also involved a milieu of middle-power competition (Iran, Turkey, Saudi Arabia, Qatar and the United Arab Emirates). This presents as a strategic problem because the Australian Defence Force (ADF) has no publicly available policy guidance, strategic frameworks, or tactical doctrine for prosecuting proxy conflicts. This paper is a first step in responding to this gap.
Dr Maher employs operational analysis to inform future campaign planning, broader Australian strategic planning, and policy planning across the breadth of government departments. There is evident need for such inquiry. ISIS was more than a ‘terrorist’ group, and the Middle Eastern conflict in which it was involved, was much more than a civil war. By 2014, ‘the conflict was simultaneously a revolution, a civil war, and a proxy war involving nearly a dozen countries’.[1] Were Western governments attuned to such complexity in planning their military interventions? Were Western militaries basing their interventions on a robust understanding of the irregular organisation? How might these questions influence Australian strategic planning for competition?
This Occasional Paper argues that, despite Western operations ultimately proving successful (ISIS was clearly militarily defeated), the result does not intimate that Western strategy was wholly effective, that understanding of the adversary was complete, that Western forces did not create counterproductive second-order effects from their actions, or that Western appreciation of proxy strategy was flawless. There are clear lessons to discern from this conflict to ensure actors like Iran, Russia, or the People’s Republic of China, do not gain from the strategic vacuums military action may create.
Curiously, there has been little published by Australian authors examining the military challenge, personal experiences, and lessons from the military commitment to counter-ISIS. Dr Maher’s report aims to remediate the gap and in so doing, it examines four theories for the employment of force, that comprised Western operational planning. These need assessment, evaluation, and perhaps refinement:
- The employment of air power against an irregular adversary.
- The utility of counter-network operations against an irregular adversary.
- The dynamics of proxy warfare and principal-client relationships.
- The mechanisms and utility of Information Operations or Influence Effects.
The relevance of such concepts lies in today’s environment of heightened geopolitical competition. A frequent manifestation of competition is the proclivity of states to compete via irregular proxies to avoid the risks of vertical escalation into open conflict. This dynamic characterises the recent experience of Middle Eastern conflicts over the past decade and Russia’s strategy prior to its miscalculation of February 2022. The dynamism and complexity of the past decade of conflict in the Middle East raises questions about the efficacy of the West’s extant understanding of irregular warfare, proxy warfare, and the formulation of effective strategy in the context of competition. With a complex litany of actors comes a complex range of drivers and motivations. Such complexity is not going to abate.
In the Levant, ISIS initially thrived in this chaos and thus attained a quiet milestone in the evolution of war. Its actions demonstrated that a non-state actor could present simultaneously as a domestic threat to Australian society, a regional threat (through affiliates in South-East Asia) and a state-like military threat in Iraq and Syria. Understanding how ISIS was able to achieve such a sophisticated strategy is of real concern, particularly given the ongoing threat transnational Salafi-jihadist organisations present via ‘inspired’ attacks, such as the Bondi attack in December 2025. Somewhat unhelpfully, ISIS (and other Salafist-jihadist) recruitment and mobilisation has been presented as one of terrorist radicalisation, thereby falsely escalating the tactic of terrorism into a strategy. This matters as Islamic State survives and (in the opinion of some analysts) is making a quiet resurgence in north-eastern Syria, the Sahel region of Africa, and via its Khorasan affiliate in Afghanistan.
Irregular armed groups, particularly those that have sanctuary and external support, are highly resilient. They fragment and form new alliances, shift tactics and exploit localised conditions in a kaleidoscope of rapidly changing dynamics, which William Harris described as a “Quicksilver War”. The objectives the Australian Government sought to achieve in the Levant are undermined by this dynamism and resilience, yet there remains inadequate understanding of such movements. Australia, and Western nations, should expect ISIS’s strategy of subversion of 2012-14 to be repeated, as a new generation of frustrated Syrian and Iraqi Sunnis come of age and question the opportunities their government provides. Further, ISIS is likely to pursue expanded power in the under-governed spaces that result from Western governments’ re-focus and re-prioritisation toward other national security priorities.
As the ADF adjusts to an era of major power competition, it is truly intriguing that we do not look closely to the lessons of the past decade of competition between the United States and Russia, Sunni and Shi’a, Qatar and the Gulf States, and Turkey and Russia. These competitions demonstrate that vertical escalation carries the cost of unpredictable conflict that major- and middle-powers wish to avoid. This is not new, as Henry Kissinger wrote in 1955:
But is there any deterrent to Sino-Soviet aggression other than the threat of general war?... Our immediate task must be to shore up the indigenous will to resist, which in “grey areas” means all the measures on which a substantial consensus seems to exist…
Thus our capacity to fight locals wars is not a marginal aspect of our effective strength; it is a central factor which cannot be sacrificed without impairing our strategic position and paralysing our policy.[2]
Strategic competition manifests in proxy wars, where patrons support irregular or non-state actors to further their strategic interests. Operation OKRA Operational Analysis addresses the gap in understanding of this dynamic. It offers a critical reflection upon planning challenges when engaging an irregular adversary, such as the Islamic State, in the context of multi-party competition. By providing such analysis, the paper seeks to advance the preparedness of the ADF to continue to meet irregular threats.
Endnotes
[1] Anand Gopal and Jeremy Hodge, ‘Social Networks, Class, and the Syrian Proxy War’, New America, 6 April 2021, p. 5.
[2] Henry A. Kissinger, ‘Military Policy and Defense of the “Grey Areas”’, Foreign Affairs, Vol. 33, No. 3 (April 1955),
