It seems monstrous, as we watch children in Gaza wasting before our eyes. But in truth, the weaponization of food in counter-insurgency is nothing new.

The British counter-insurgency in Malaya in the Fifties is often cited as a textbook “hearts and minds” program. Less mentioned is that the army also targeted Malayan stomachs. In 1951, Sir Harold Briggs, director of Britain’s “anti-bandit activities” in the colony, launched “Operation Starvation”. He ordered “food denial operations” to shut down farming and trade in the countryside where the Communist guerrillas roamed. Instead, rural people were relocated to “protected villages” where all food supplies were rigorously monitored. To prevent food falling into the hands of the rebels, Britain at times ran central kitchens to feed those in the camps. As a metric of success, they counted the number of Communist guerrillas who surrendered, citing hunger as a reason.

It was a brutal campaign, but it worked. Setting aside whether food weaponization is legal or not, it is effective when two conditions are met. Firstly, it’s important to prevent reports of famine — which are politically embarrassing. And secondly, there must be a big enough political carrot alongside the stick of hunger. Key to the success of the British campaign in Malaya was that Britain promised that when the Communist threat receded, Malaysia would become independent.

Israel has taken a page from the colonial war handbooks. But it is doing something that has never been done before. It is bringing the weaponization of food into the digital age — hoping that precisely targeted food rations will be a way of selectively starving Hamas operatives, and also, we can assume, providing Israel with a public rationale for the policy.

The Israeli strategy has evolved. It began, in a crude manner, the day after Hamas’s massacre of Israelis on 7 October 2023, with the imposition of a total blockade on the Gaza Strip. As Israel controls all the entry points, and local farm production is very small, the blockade quickly caused widespread hunger. The situation was made swiftly worse by an intense bombing campaign, which destroyed essential infrastructure, and the forced relocation of the Palestinian population to what were euphemistically called “humanitarian zones”. By the time of the short-lived ceasefire seven weeks later, when Hamas released a first batch of hostages and humanitarian aid was allowed in, most of the population were hungry. Since then, the UN’s Integrated Food Security Phase Classification (IPC) system — that measures the distress of an afflicted population on a five-point scale with “catastrophe” and “famine” as its worst categories — has made assessments every few months, five in total. Encouraged by the United States, Israel has tried to keep the Gazans from descending into “famine” by turning the aid tap on whenever the data indicate it is about to cross that threshold. When it does this, and the IPC reports that the deterioration has been arrested, Israeli advocates claim that the famine story was made-up all along. That’s wrong.

Three times Gaza has teetered on the brink of the IPC’s “famine” threshold, and Israel has opened the aid tap. The IPC experts protest that even when the situation is an “emergency” (level four) or “catastrophe” (level five for food insecurity) the level of distress is unacceptable. But for international policymakers it seems that what counts is the “F-word”. They won’t say it out loud, but the implication is that hunger that doesn’t reach the famine threshold is somehow tolerable.

Some humanitarians say privately that Israel is gaming the IPC system, others that the “famine” benchmark no longer makes sense. What’s certain is that Israel wants to deprive Hamas of all possible resources. It’s also likely that Israel wants desperate Gazans to blame Hamas for their plight and turn against them. And indeed, formerly quiet criticism of Hamas leaders’ crimes and blunders is turning to public protest.

Gazans had a brief respite with the ceasefire in January this year. The situation sharply deteriorated after Israel imposed a total blockade on 2 March and resumed its military actions on 19 March. Food stocks are running out. The small amounts of food on sale in markets are so expensive that few can afford it. There’s no clean water and scarcely any fuel for cooking.

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The statistics published by the UN’s IPC earlier this month showed a population once again on the brink of famine. Fully 93% of the population were in “crisis” levels of food insecurity, with 244,000 of the 2.1 million people of the Gaza Strip classified as suffering “catastrophic” lack of food. This means that people have literally nothing — they’re scavenging for scraps and living off crumbs provided by relatives and neighbors. Child malnutrition rates were poor but not yet disastrous — probably because adults are going hungry to provide what little food they have for children. The IPC have no data for the numbers who have perished from hunger, disease, exposure and exhaustion — possibly because mass death from starvation hasn’t yet arrived, but perhaps because Gaza’s deeply conservative society doesn’t report hunger deaths to the authorities and simply buries the dead quietly with only private grief.

But this time Israel hasn’t responded by opening the regular, UN-based aid tap. This week’s relief supplies, according to the head of the UN’s humanitarian affairs office, Tom Fletcher, are “a drop in the ocean“. Israel argues that relief supplies provided by the United Nations and international organizations will fall into the hands of Hamas. To some degree this is surely true — it happens in every conflict of this kind and there are videos that show Hamas men commandeering aid trucks — even if senior officials in the Biden administration were never convinced that diversion was happening at scale.

So now Israel is setting up an aid system of its own design — one that will prevent even the smallest amount of food aid feeding any Hamas operative. The technology to achieve something close uses individual surveillance and ration minimization. A planned US-Israeli aid mechanism, called the Gaza Humanitarian Foundation, appears to be based on this. The details for how the GHF will work are unclear, because it is new and untried, and the information it puts out is changing day-to-day. But there are signs of how it intends to operate.

The GHF aims to use a small number of aid distribution sites, strictly controlling access. They will be run by private military contractors. In phase one it will have just four. (The UN and voluntary agencies had 400). Pre-identified Gazans will be notified that they can go to one of these centers to collect a week’s worth of rations (including food, sanitary kits, and medical supplies) for their families at a specified time. Biometric screening will ensure that the correct person gets the ration. The target is 300 meals over 90 days (an average of 1.6 meals per person per day) with a ration of 1,700 kilocalories per day. This is less than the 2,100 Kcal/day recommended humanitarian ration used by the UN but more than the 1,560 Kcal/day fed in the Forties to the volunteers of the “Minnesota Experiment”, which examined the effects of starvation on the human body.

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We can conjecture on how the recipients will be selected. The IDF uses an algorithm known as Lavender for selecting Hamas suspects, based on individual profiles and electronically tracked behavioral traits. It’s a method for targeting assassination. That system can also generate a list of people who are not affiliated with Hamas — who can be targeted with food. If the ration is just enough to feed a family for a week, it’s fair to assume that the chances of food falling into Hamas’s hands are very low. Hamas operatives will go hungry; innocent civilians will be fed. It is a hybrid of Operation Starvation and surveillance humanitarianism.

The UN and liberal humanitarians are horrified by the way that this trounces various principles that they hold dear. They have condemned it as “a dangerous, politicized sham”. But let’s set aside the legality and consider whether it might prevent the descent into famine and achieve the victory that Israel seeks.

The recent IPC report outlines two scenarios. One is a continued blockade and ongoing war. The arithmetic of food availability is simple: mass starvation within weeks. The second scenario requires the GHF. Taking an untested emergency aid operation to scale in a few weeks is a huge and risky undertaking. And in the unlikely event that it works it will slow starvation but won’t stop it.

First, the quantities just aren’t sufficient and not in enough places. Second, there’s no provision for specialized feeding for malnourished young children, which requires skilled staff and special foodstuffs. Third, there’s no plan for clean water and electricity. A family member might be able to carry enough food to feed a family for a week, but no one can carry enough water even for a single day. The GHF isn’t designed by a relief professional.

The last and biggest problem is that counter-insurgency only works if there’s a political endgame. Israel is offering the Palestinians a choice between starvation or capitulation — with unknowable long-term implications. Hamas may be destroyed, but there’s no sign that the Palestinians of Gaza will abandon their land or submit quietly to Israeli occupation. They may turn on Hamas, accusing it of crimes and blunders, but that doesn’t exonerate Israel. And if protracted, intimate humiliation of surveillance humanitarianism in the ruins of their homes becomes the future, not only will Palestinian society in Gaza become dismembered, but Israel itself will forever be tarred by the inhumanity it is inflicting.

A product of Russia’s mafioso imperium, neither fully of the state nor a market mercenary, the Wagner Group threatens to become our latest example. But in the contest between Vladimir Putin and Yevgeny Prigozhin, there is are clear winners — aggrieved frontline soldiers who demanded better conditions, and their non-commissioned officers (NCOs) who nurse a cult of militarist ultra-nationalism mixed with toxic masculinity. The two men were competing for the allegiances of these soldiers.

Indeed, commentaries on the Wagner Group mutiny against the Russian high command have focused on what it tells us about Putin’s political frailty and the balance of forces in Ukraine. Few have fastened onto the point that Prigozhin channelled the anger of neglected soldiers, and Putin neutralised him by appeasing their grievances.

As it turned out, Prigozhin’s appeal didn’t ignite a wider mutiny and Putin’s counter-offer was better on the day, but the bidding isn’t over. Russia’s soldiers — in the regular army and in the half-dozen private military companies — have tasted power and will be asking for more. Whether they will settle for a material payoff, or whether their demands will be overtly political, remains to be seen. Probably it will be both.

Like forgotten soldiers throughout history, Wagner’s grievances are easy to understand. Shared experience of combat generates heightened emotions and deep bonds of solidarity. Low wages paid late, poor rations, worse sanitation and medical care, are the topic of resentful gossip during the interminable hours of boredom, alongside stories of generals who care only for their own comforts. When the war is over, their skills are no longer in demand. All of this breeds feelings of collective victimhood. Bitter veterans often despise civilian political leaders; they are commonly misogynistic and conspiracy-minded. Theirs is an infectious sentiment that can be eagerly adopted by other men who missed out on the war and crave to join the club.

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A ruler bidding for the loyalty of disaffected soldiers is a combustible mix. The would-be tsar in the Kremlin might want to reflect on what happened during the “auction of the Roman empire” in AD 193. That year, the Pretorian Guard mounted a coup and declared that whoever paid them most would become Caesar. Didius Julianus, a man whose wealth and vanity exceeded his political acumen, outbid his rival and won the post — and was assassinated a few months later.

America’s more recent imperial experiments have created their own host of monstrous military offspring. Perhaps most infamously, al-Qaeda started life as a welfare and employment scheme for the “Arab Afghans” — the international brigades of volunteers from the Arab world who joined the jihad against the Soviet Union in the Eighties with CIA backing. They had nowhere to go when the conflict ended. But the Arab Afghans are an unusual case in that these forgotten fighters had actually won their war and had every expectation that they would be welcomed home as heroes. But Saudi Arabia, Egypt and other Arab countries didn’t want them — and Osama bin Laden offered them a home. He gave them jobs on construction projects and farming schemes in Sudan, while those with disabling war injuries got pensions. After Saudi Arabia rebuffed bin Laden’s proposal to remobilise the Arab Afghans as an alternative to the US Army to expel Saddam Hussein from Kuwait, he launched his second jihad.

Later American interventions also saw abandoned soldiers remobilised. Hussein’s Iraqi army was recklessly dissolved by the US provisional administration after taking control of Baghdad in 2003. Many of them joined al-Qaeda and later the Islamic State. The overthrow of Muammar Gaddafi in Libya let loose his Saharan brigades to destabilise Mali. And an even more contemporary case can be found among the US-trained Afghan special forces, abandoned two years ago, and now being recruited by Russia. Isolated, unemployed and under threat in Taliban-ruled Afghanistan, turned away by an impenetrable US immigration system, some of these soldiers have accepted good pay to use their skills in Ukraine.

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The frontiers of empire are always cruel. And when those empires retract their reach, the men they employed on their front lines — officers from the metropolis or local irregulars — may opt for freelancing. There’s no doubt that regular Russian officers sympathised with Prigozhin’s tirades against the field marshals, and should that high command crumble, both regular units and mercenaries may go rogue.

The end of Europe’s empires left many colonial officers adrift. Often candidly racist, they had won many battles and refused to accept that they had lost the wars. France’s mutinous colonels in Algeria were placated by Charles de Gaulle’s words, “I have heard you”, spoken with the credibility of a war hero, but the rancour of abandonment was diluted, not purged.

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And some veterans of Britain’s counterinsurgencies in Malaya and Kenya gravitated to Rhodesia and South Africa where they contributed to the last stand of racist rule in Africa. In turn, as South Africa’s post-apartheid army shed its dirty war specialists, some of them turned to commercial mercenarism. The flagship was Executive Outcomes, which provided combat services in Sierra Leone where it was paid in diamonds. It is a template for a host of private military companies which now operate across the Middle East and Africa — including Wagner.

Perhaps the most chilling parallel comes from Sudan. The paramilitary “Rapid Support Forces” currently ravaging the nation’s capital and committing genocidal massacres in Darfur are a hybrid of state militia and mercenary enterprise. Their leader, General Mohamed Dagolo “Hemedti” is, like Prigozhin, a plain-speaking populist commander and a wealthy mafioso businessman. And the two men became business partners — not least because Hemedti has been selling smuggled gold to Moscow.

The RSF’s origins lie in the notorious Janjaweed militia used by Sudanese president Omar al-Bashir to suppress rebellion in Darfur 20 years ago. The Janjaweed were drawn from nomadic Arab tribes, some of the most deprived communities of the region. They stalled rebel advances by burning, pillaging, raping and killing their way through hundreds of villages suspected of rebel sympathies. The militia was vilified internationally and disowned by al-Bashir. And, cast adrift, the Janjaweed began to mutiny, using the label “the forgotten soldiers”. They were eventually brought back into al-Bashir’s fold with amnesty and financial inducements, and under Hemedti’s capable and merciless leadership they were formalised as a paramilitary, reporting directly to al-Bashir.

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They fought as mercenaries in Yemen, gaining battlefield experience while their commander established personal links with Gulf rulers and became a gold trader. It was at this time that al-Bashir brought the RSF to Khartoum as a personal protection force, refusing to heed the advice of his army generals to dissolve the group or at least to relocate it away from the capital. It was a big mistake. Four years ago, Hemedti conspired with senior generals to depose al-Bashir. By this point, the RSF had become as powerful as the army itself; what they lacked in aircraft and tanks, they made up for in tactical acuity and battlefield experience.

This rogue private army tried to seize power in a kleptocratic-gangster state. The putsch failed, but the regular army — corrupt and inept — can’t prevail either. The Sudanese state is being destroyed in the generals’ fight to the death. This is the scenario most feared by Russians.

How, though, do you resolve the problem of abandoned but ambitious soldiers? There’s some experience from the deals that ended civil wars in countries from Myanmar and Colombia to Congo and South Sudan. The military men who negotiate these are attentive to the demands of their armed followers. The text of a peace agreement typically includes material recompense for their foot soldiers — what’s known as a “payroll peace”. This is sold to international mediators as a temporary expedient, though it rarely turns out that way. Officers are licensed to stick their fingers into the national honeypot. Armed groups are supposed to transition to civilian political parties, but their leaders normally keep both the armed and civil options open — while adding crony capitalist businesses to their portfolios.

The political price for pandering to populist militarism is harder to quantify. Myths of honourable causes abandoned, of national entitlements betrayed, endure for generations. Once these beliefs are planted, they don’t get forgotten. Whatever the DNA of the original seed of discontent, the laws of militarist mutation decree that the plant that grows will be toxic.

Putin had hoped for a short, victorious war in Ukraine. He didn’t get it. Putin hoped to be the master of the imperial militarist narrative. The jibes of Prigozhin and other hardliners, and the steps Putin took to placate the mutineers, suggest that imperial militarism is now his master. It’s hard to see him repeating de Gaulle’s performance in Algiers: the howls of betrayal will be too loud.

The logic of power in a mafia state is that the ruler pays the going market rate to specialists in violence. In Russia, that price — financial and political — has just gone up. Russia’s military politics have taken a toxic turn. That’s good news for Russia’s mercenaries and ultra-nationalists. It’s bad news for everyone else.