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In this two-part series, we investigate successes and failures in the US counterstrategies against the Iranian Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC) and the Russian Wagner Group, as the most infamous Russian PMC, and its Africa-focused branch, Africa Corps. This first installment reviews two ways in which the United States contended with both these entities and succeeded. Specifically, we discuss two seized opportunities, where the US successfully leveraged instruments of national power to effectively counter the IRGC and Wagner Group.
https://irregularwarfareinsider.podbean.com/e/shining-a-light-highlighting-successes-in-us-counterstrategies-against-the-iranian-islamic-revolutionary-guard-corps-and-russian-wagner-groupThis article is relevant for operators, policymakers, and strategists who are grappling with the evolving threat by state-affiliated non-state actors like Iran’s IRGC and Russian PMCs. It underscores operational similarities between the two actors as well as lessons learned from US. For those engaged in countering these adversaries, this piece provides valuable insights into how strategies from one theater of operations can be adapted to effectively address similar threats elsewhere, ultimately helping to protect US interests abroad.
Introduction
While the Wagner Group has fallen out of the news cycle since the coup attempt in June 2023, it continues to further Russia’s strategic goals in multiple regions. Much ambiguity followed the subsequent demise of its leader, Yevgeny Prigozhin, in August 2023. For example, it remains unclear what form the group will take, with questions lingering over its base, headquarters, and geographical remit of actions.
Open sources about the Wagner Group paint a picture of a small but flexible bureaucracy reminiscent of another US adversary, the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC), or Sepah, and notably its Quds Force, which conducts the IRGC’s extraterritorial missions. The control elements of both entities are somewhat different, as the IRGC is singularly beholden to the Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei.
Until June 2023, Wagner operated as a military and economic entity that was only loosely affiliated with the Kremlin through Prigozhin. It is therefore appropriate, as the authors do in this article, to refer to the group as “Wagner” prior to that time. Since June 2023, however, the Russian Federation has taken decisive steps to centralize control over private military companies (PMCs), including the Wagner Group, signaling a strategic shift in how these entities operate within its broader military and geopolitical strategy. One key area where Wagner has expanded its influence and operations is the African continent. After 2023, when referring to the group’s activities in Africa, they should be referred their rebranded moniker, “Africa Corps.” For future iterations of the entity formerly known as Wagner, we refer to them as “Russian PMCs.”
The IRGC fits a similar bill in seeking to secure Iran internally and externally as a paramilitary and parastate structure. For Wagner, centralization involves integrating PMCs under the oversight of GRU-affiliated individuals, thereby tightening the Kremlin’s grip on their activities and ensuring alignment with national interests. Open sources reveal a concerted effort by the Russian state to reorganize and repurpose these PMCs, showcasing a lean yet highly adaptable organizational framework that is poised to further Russia’s strategic objectives across multiple regions.
The IRGC and Russian PMCs are not merely extending their influence across these regions: they are constructing a complex web of influence and military, political, social, and economic connectivity. A closer look yields more similarities between the groups’ practices and characteristics, which could, in turn, highlight interesting insights in terms of how they have been countered. Given the US and its allies’ ongoing urgency to restrict these organizations, this piece presents a collection of insights gained from studying the IRGC and the Wagner Group in tandem with the intention of applying these lessons to address both entities effectively.
Russia’s PMCs and the IRGC operate in similarly nefarious ways. First, they are characterized by sub-threshold engagement, or liminal warfare, meaning a penchant for operating below the threshold of war, at the seams of war and peace. Second, they are adept at evading conventional Western strengths. Third, they practice legal warfare, by effectively exploiting operational gaps. These similarities underscore a larger trend of states leveraging non-state actors to achieve their objectives in the contemporary geopolitical landscape. More importantly, they underline an often-disregarded aspect concerning the degree to which these shadowy organizations iteratively refine their strategies based each other’s on the insights and activities.
Given the increasing urgency to curb the influence of these groups across multiple regions, this article serves as a critical resource for policymaking, military, and intelligence audiences aimed at understanding and countering the evolving threats posed by state-sponsored non-state actors like the Russian PMCs and Iran’s IRGC. The article sheds light on the operational similarities between these entities—particularly their adaptability, use of sub-threshold tactics, and exploitation of legal and operational gaps.
By drawing parallels between these two adversaries, this piece provides actionable insights for crafting more effective counterstrategies. It offers a deeper understanding of their methods and also provides key lessons from previous US successes in countering these shadowy organizations. Policymaking, military, and intelligence analysts, strategists, and decisionmakers need to read this to refine ongoing efforts and to adapt lessons learned from one theater of operations to others where similar tactics are emerging. By staying ahead of the evolving strategies of both the IRGC and Russian PMCs, decision-makers can more effectively confront these challenges in an era of strategic competition and protect US interests abroad.
Seized Opportunity #1: Outline the Threat Nexus, Sketch the Syndicate
The United States has benefited greatly from private actors who have leveraged open-source intelligence to investigate the structure of these shadowy organizations. Volunteer organizations, like All Eyes on Wagner, Iran Watch, or bellingcat, think tanks, and journalists have taken advantage of leaked private conversations, open-source satellite imagery, financial accounting documents, flight records, shipping records, and clever forensic analysis of mercenaries’ digital footprints to forge a better understanding of these organizations’ infrastructure. These investigations have revealed a “tangled web of shell companies” and a network of economic proxies that illustrate these organizations’ expansive and intricate reach across a number of sectors. These efforts have demonstrated connections between gold companies, oil and diamond smuggling operations, propaganda dissemination platforms, breweries, election interference schemes, and, of course, security services for hire.
These clandestine connections create a constellation of systems that expands the complexity of the network and creates additional obscurity. By uncloaking the activities of these subdivisions, volunteers have eroded the criminals’ most effective weapons–imperceptibility and anonymity. As stated by a former Wagner Group mercenary, “The only way to fight the Wagner Group is to expose what they are doing.” This undermines the “legal vacuum” status that the mercenary group occupies, and it also assists analysts in identifying patterns. Once investigators establish connections between front companies and these paramilitary groups, governments can utilize additional resources to weaken the efficacy of the shells. When the curtain is pulled back to expose these shady operations, governments can employ tools of national power to counter them.
While this may seem like a useless “whack-a-mole” exercise, each sanction or legal action can consume the adversaries’ finite resources. It can push the organization off balance, potentially forcing it to recalibrate internal and external procedures. This can have the added benefit of making future investigations easier. Each time an adversary attempts to circumvent sanctions or legal actions, they leave digital and financial footprints. Monitoring these attempts can provide valuable intelligence to sanctioning bodies or law enforcement agencies, making it easier to track the activities, networks, and methods of the organization. Sanctions and legal actions can disrupt the normal operations of an organization. For example, sanctions might block an entity’s access to international banking systems, making it difficult to conduct transactions globally. This disruption forces the organization to seek alternative, often less efficient, methods of operation, such as using smaller banks or adopting less reliable financial channels.
For example, Africa Corps is heavily involved in the gold trade–relying on routine extractions from the Central African Republic for fundraising. The financial restrictions imposed through sanctions prevent the group from selling this gold through conventional channels, directly impacting their profit margins. Sanctions target the group’s financial networks and access to global markets, forcing them to resort to less transparent and more cumbersome methods of selling their gold. This forces the group to adopt evasion tactics and increases their operational costs, as the group must navigate through a complex web of intermediaries and black markets to monetize their assets. The cumulative effect of these sanctions is a tangible erosion of the financial base of the Africa Corps and, to a lesser degree, IRGC, with its illicit fundraising efforts, demonstrating the efficacy of targeted financial measures in disrupting the economic foundations of such criminal organizations.
Seized Opportunity #2: Leveraging Military Might
These shadowy groups’ strength is the low visibility of their operations. Their small size and clandestine nature allow them to operate discreetly by exploiting weaknesses in their adversaries. This often requires the deployment of limited resources, manpower, and equipment. Because the Wagner Group (and other Russian PMCs) and the IRGC rely on guerrilla tactics and asymmetric techniques like licit and illicit fundraising and supporting state and non-state actors, they cannot scale their organizational structure or expand their military capabilities to effectively compete with conventional military forces.
The situation with Russian PMCs in Africa represents a distinct challenge compared to their operations in Ukraine, not only in scale but also in nature. In most of the countries where Africa Corps works, these Russian contractors operate with minimal external support, integrating into and leveraging the local economies to procure necessary supplies. This mode of operation underscores a significant reliance on ad-hoc logistics and adaptability, often at the expense of operational scalability and sustainability. In Ukraine, these PMCs function in a more traditional military role and benefit from being closely integrated with the Russian military’s logistical network. Russian PMCs in Ukraine are heavily reliant on the Russian military for both logistical support and operational sustainment. This integration with Russian conventional forces helps to alleviate many of the vulnerabilities PMCs face in Africa.
Because these organizations are associated with state adversaries, the United States is often hesitant to employ military might in countering them. In the case of the IRGC, since 2020, the United States has overall demonstrated restraint in responses, as exemplified in the aftermath of an uptick in Iranian-backed attacks in Iraq and Syria after the Israeli war in Gaza to reduce the risk of escalation. Then again, when forced into direct confrontations, these groups often lack the firepower, logistical support, and defensive capabilities necessary to withstand the onslaught of a modern military. The Russians experienced this vulnerability in 2018 in Syria when 300 mercenaries were killed by US Special Operations Forces.
Conventional state militaries with high tech hardware are not the only military obstacle that these groups face. As the Russians encountered in Mozambique, terrorists, likely the Islamic State, proved to be too much for the ill-equipped, poorly-trained mercenaries. It was not the power of another state’s military hardware that defeated these Africa Corps fighters. It was its own logistical constraints and the skill and determination of terrorists that were well-acclimatized to bush warfare.
Conclusion
The examination of Russia’s PMCs like the Wagner Group (and Africa Corps) and Iran’s IRGC reveals a sophisticated and shadowy facet of global geopolitics, where sub-threshold engagements, evasion of Western military strengths, and exploitation of legal ambiguities serve as the modus operandi. Their strategic deployments across Africa and the Middle East subtly mirror the expansive reach of China’s Belt and Road Initiative. These entities are not merely extending their influence across these regions; they are constructing a complex web of influence and connectivity reminiscent of China’s global economic strategy.
Policymakers, military strategists, and intelligence officials facing similar challenges of state-affiliated non-state actors in regions such as Africa, the Middle East, and Eastern Europe can draw direct lessons from how the US has countered these networks. Specifically, US efforts to curb the IRGC’s influence in Iraq and Syria and its strategic disruption of Wagner’s activities in Africa, offer valuable insights for addressing current and future threats posed by these actors in other contested regions. This analysis provides an initial framework for adapting successful US counterstrategies to emerging threats from similar state-backed entities.
The integration of lessons learned from the Wagner Group and IRGC’s playbook into our understanding of global influence mechanisms highlights the importance of adaptability, innovation, and holistic approaches in strategy formulation. The United States, despite its vast resources and capabilities, encounters systemic challenges in counteracting the nuanced strategies of these organizations. As we discuss in the second installment of this series, the lack of synchronization across its instruments of national power hampers its ability to present a unified and effective front. This dissonance not only affects the coherence of US foreign policy but also undermines its efforts to mobilize international consensus against the nefarious activities. This is increasingly worrisome as recent reports indicate Wagner cooperation with Iranian proxy, Hezbollah. However, the US’s success in delineating the networks that support these groups and applying direct military force when necessary demonstrates the potential for effective countermeasures.
Dalton T. Fuss is a US Army special forces officer. He received a Master of Arts in International Relations from Johns Hopkins University’s School of Advanced International Studies and an undergraduate degree from Texas A&M University. He focuses on the intersection of irregular warfare and technology.
Nakissa P. Jahanbani, PhD is a senior analyst at the Afghanistan War Commission. She is also an Adjunct Lecturer at the Pennsylvania State University. She received a PhD in Political Science from the University at Albany and an undergraduate degree from at American University. She specializes in political violence with a focus on Iran and Iranian-backed groups.
The views expressed are those of the author(s) and do not reflect the official position of the Irregular Warfare Initiative, Princeton University’s Empirical Studies of Conflict Project, the Modern War Institute at West Point, or the United States Government.
Main Image: Long Exposure of a Lighthouse at Night (Photo by Unsplash from Freerange Stock)
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