Concepts of influence (CONFLUENCES) are critical to combined effect influence strategy. Like the definition of “confluence,” they merge processes into a flow of activities. CONFLUENCES join concepts of operations (CONOPS) to explain how ways and means affect will and capability for desired ends. They should consider pervasive uncertainty and help manage risk. Without them, our operations can fail without us even knowing it. A CONFLUENCE may be entirely human-created or assisted or created by artificial intelligence. Like CONOPS, they must be competitive to be effective. If they aren’t contested, just about any concept can work, even the ideologically ridiculous.

That’s why the United States, allies, and partners need them, to compete against truth-toxic regimes. This paper shows how China’s Belt and Road Initiative (BRI) generates combined effects via deceptive concepts of influence.

First, let’s review how these concepts work in the combined effect influence strategy.

How Combined Effect Influence Works

The combined effect influence strategy framework helps us arrange multiple ends, ways and means that can be cooperative and confrontational, psychological and physical, and preventive and causative. Combined effects are broader than combined arms. We can blend any element and dimension of strategy for different meanings in various contexts (“information”). This approach generates more effective results in context. Our bureaucratic tendency is quite the opposite.

Based on the idealistic notion of being at peace or in war, U.S. government policy has tended to expand its initial goals in a military confrontation. Then, it expected to win with military ways and means because, after all, we’re at war. This flawed approach has produced one bad strategy after another. Witness Victory in Iraq[1] and the tragic Bush to Obama to Trump administrations’ flip-flop-flip of counterterrorism-counterinsurgency-counterterrorism in Afghanistan.^[2]

We need to sustain success, not just win temporary victories. The highly competitive and interconnected environments where we operate require superior strategy. In Afghanistan, U.S. operations required counterterrorism and counterinsurgency with the societal will to sustain it. As in Vietnam, inconsistent strategy and the associated lack of will to implement it at scale failed against a lower-tech but consistent “talk-fight” strategy of sustained resistance.

U.S. joint doctrine now calls for consistently integrating informational and physical power. The combined effect influence framework facilitates this by systematically displaying the basic elements and dimensions of strategy. That way, we might consider more specified options and assess whether our concepts of influence are working:

Framework for Combined Effect Influence

Key Questions

Influence should always be contested. With that in mind, effective concepts of influence start by answering four challenging questions applied to selected audiences and targets:

• If we want to persuade or dissuade, are we assuring the will or enhancing the capability of those we need to, compared to our competitors?
• If we want to deter or compel, are we intimidating the will or neutralizing the capability of those we need to, compared to our competitors?
• If we want to secure or defend, are we demonstrating the will or exercising the capability compared to our competitors?
• If we want to defend or coerce, are we punishing the will or denying the capability of those we need to, compared to our competitors?

AI can process all that, but we humans want visuals and abbreviations. So, cooperative effects are in italics to distinguish them from confrontational effects. The eight basic effects are Dissuade (Ds), Persuade (Pr), Deter (Dt), Compel (Cp), Secure (Sc), Induce (In), Defend (Df), and Coerce (Cr). 

Functional Categories

We also must categorize these effects because we end up organizing ourselves to accomplish tasks and missions to achieve them. The following functional categories reflect our bureaucratic divisions, except for the last one. I added that because we ignore it but shouldn’t. These are Diplomatic (D), Informational (I), Military (M), Economic (E), and Social (S). The categories are very basic and overlap, but they provide a pronounceable starting point: DIMES.

With these distinctions, even without programming them into an AI, we can code the types of effects, and see our strategy at a glance.

Common Examples

For instance, a common cooperative combined effect is diplomatic persuasion, informational dissuasion, military security, and economic inducement. For example:

• A diplomatic communique that announces a strategic partnership
• An information campaign against domestic opponents of that partnership
• A military exercise featuring a new capability
• Acquisition contracts with key stakeholders  

This combined effect is coded, D Pr  I Ds  M Sc  E In. What’s missing? Social effects. Their absence indicates a taken-for-granted civil society, considered off-limits for military operations in most democracies. Oops. We forget the temporary occupation of postwar Germany and Japan that was critical to securing democratic reforms. By comparison, authoritarian regimes permanently add social surveillance, state-sponsored youth leagues, ideological narratives, and social media controls.

One way to compare different combined effects is to consider how effectively they compete.

The Nature of Effective Strategy

Historically, effective strategy is holistic, agile, and asymmetric.

Holistic Strategy

Strategic effects interact with one another as parts to produce new wholes. Consider that diplomatic communique. The military exercise should strengthen it, not undermine it. That synergy requires coordinating with affected ambassador(s). Showcasing a nuclear capability should include allied domestic and regional considerations. There are tradeoffs as well, which require agility to manage.  

Agile Strategy

Such interactions must be anticipated and planned for. How can an alliance be agile enough to tailor its military exercise activities and coordinate an information campaign to support the diplomatic communique? How can we enhance all that with economic inducements? Agility relates to holism. The alliance needs to be comprehensive enough to compensate for necessary tradeoffs.

Asymmetric Strategy

Contending strategies interact, sometimes in asymmetric ways that confer advantage due to a vulnerability. For instance, China and U.S. ally South Korea have separate territorial disputes with U.S. ally Japan. The Korean peninsula has suffered as a tributary state under China and as a colony of Japan. By emphasizing Japanese colonization rather than China’s imperialism, Beijing tries to undermine the U.S. extended nuclear deterrent to Japan and South Korea.

The Belt and Road Initiative is a signal example of a holistic, agile, and asymmetric strategy. It operates via toxic concepts of influence.

Concepts of Influence in the BRI

China’s BRI is an overtly cooperative strategy of security and inducement. But it works with confrontational compellence and coercion operating in the background. At a glance, the combined effect is:

E Sc In D E M Cr Cp

The BRI blends cooperative and confrontational CONFLUENCES. Three of them show how China’s Party-government generates its combined effect. See how the third one reinforces the first two:

• Cooperative-physical CONFLUENCE demonstrates China’s will to extend credit and exercises the financial capability to do so, to secure financial dependence on China and induce debt.
• Confrontational-physical CONFLUENCE punishes the will to apply for further loans by denying the capability to repay them, to coerce broader compliance with China’s foreign policies.
• Confrontational-psychological CONFLUENCE intimidates the will to go elsewhere for loans by neutralizing the independent digital capability to do so with obligatory data-streaming and storage in China to compel debt-ridden dependence and compliance.

Next, add to the induced unsustainable debt an increasing military presence to control geo-economic choke points. Given China’s use of military, paramilitary, and a dredging fleet forces to seize territory from its neighbors, that’s the military coercion piece of China’s combined effect. Now add China’s New Generation Artificial Intelligence Plan to become the leading AI power by 2030. Get ready for expanded influence and effects.

Becoming an AI superpower expands security, inducement, coercion, and compellence by improving its concept of influence in two respects. First, setting technical standards shapes BRI participants’ will to accept an increased market share for Chinese companies under Party control. That becomes accepted as rules-based if these victims also accept Beijing’s bargains and information collection as trustworthy.

Second, Chinese surveillance technology coerces social compliance in China and along the BRI route where possible.^[14] Party-government diplomats’ demands to not criticize China and its willingness to coerce states that do (Australia, South Korea e.g.) portend more authoritarian CONFLUENCE.

CONOPS Need CONFLUENCES

Developing CONFLUENCES for CONOPS is an informational and operational imperative for succeeding in strategic competition. Joint forces must sustain effective operations across the entire competition continuum to set favorable conditions for cooperation and confrontation. We already know that authoritarians like China use concepts of influence toxic to the sovereignty and self-determination of their neighbors. The deceptive ways and means to achieve strategic ends detailed in this short paper reveal some of what has been going on for decades. New U.S. joint doctrine and allied doctrines call for more effective informational and physical power. To implement that, we must understand how our CONOPS intend to achieve effects, end-states, and objectives in support of strategic priorities. We need concepts of influence to out-compete threats.