If democracies are to win strategically significant competition and warfare against AI-empowered threats, we must improve our operations in the information environment (OIE). The U.S. National Security Strategy and new military doctrine call for integrated deterrence, integrated campaigning, and a joint force that contributes to strategic competition. All that relies on a profession of arms with all-domain military dominance. This is not enough to prevail. Given the fragmented nature of democratic politics, we need a common profession to integrate national efforts for superior effects. Fulfilling this requirement begins with a strategy that can operate across the competition spectrum.
Competitive Strategy
In AI-influenced OIE, all elements of strategy–its ends, ways, and means–need flexible agility to change and outmaneuver opponents. The OIE is pervasive and inherently dynamic. Effects that support strategic priorities matter most, and causality is complex. Effects cause more effects, anticipated and not, that can become ways and means for further effects as we compete to achieve our ends.
So, our operating concepts must adapt to current and future conditions (proactive adaptation). As a competitive process, strategy must apply to dynamic circumstances. It must fight to win. Industrial Age concepts are not necessarily competitive in the contemporary IE. Take the initiative, for example, as in the time-honored belief, “seize the initiative to gain an advantage.” Well, not so fast.
Initiative operates differently in a hyper-connected and accessible IE. Commanders, strategists, planners, and operators must recognize how to adapt, reform, and even reject traditional aspects of initiative–tempo, momentum, learning, decision, terrain, and freedom of maneuver–to create superior effects against the competition. In each of the examples below, new operating concepts emerged to manage initiative for sustained advantages. Out-thought is out-fought and the fight for influence never stops.
Accordingly, influential information is key to success. Understanding the meaning and context of data (“information”) is critical to designing superior effects under various and changing conditions. Historians write about strategy in terms of past human agency, contingency, and context. The emphasis is on a situation’s distinctiveness. This provides insights into that context, but we also require effective strategies for changing and uncertain contexts.
Therefore, we need theoretical and historical understanding to question our operating assumptions in the IE. In this expansive time-space, armed force is only part of potential solutions. In many circumstances, its uninformed use makes it harder to achieve effects for desired end-states, objectives, and strategic priorities. It can make things worse unless we think through combined effects, not just the combined arms’ performance.
It follows that we must cognitively maneuver better than the adversary. We can ask questions that authoritarians find domestically difficult to do. Such as what we assume about a situation and how we can influence it. And are we trying to disprove what we think will happen, not just “prove” what we prefer to happen? Of course, we’ve found it difficult to ask those questions, too.
The Need for Realistic Assumptions
American strategic failures—notably Vietnam and Afghanistan—are the results of unrealistic assumptions that drove ineffective strategy. Persistent mistakes include (a) mirror-imaging an adversary or partner so we assume they think just like us, and (b) equating peace with cooperation and war with confrontation. Both of these assumptions oversimplify reality and largely determine whether and how we compete or fight at all. After all, fighting is what we do in war, right?
American leaders repeatedly promote that narrative with a “when-deterrence-fails” approach to warfare. Deterrence, that is, of violent conflict. So we follow the Law of Armed Conflict, but that’s narrower than Geneva Law or Humanitarian Law. The self-imposed gap leaves ample space for opportunistic competitors to wage all-domain, all-effect warfare that we fail to recognize as warfare.
For authoritarians, there is no such fantasy about peace or war. They co-exist. Russian and Chinese active measures combine territorial invasions and economic coercion with systematic disinformation and diplomatic persuasion, just for starters. Authoritarian competitors assume a perpetual state of peace-war. It upholds their domestic rule by justifying the elimination of individual freedoms. For strategy, this means unrestricted warfare that blends cooperation and confrontation across the entire competition spectrum.
To compete and prevail under acceptable rules, democracies need superior strategies with realistic assumptions. We also must preserve our ideals, such as civilian control of the military. A profession of effects that’s accountable as an institution and competitive as a system is broader than the profession of arms. We already operate that way when we collaborate for national security.
A profession of effects involves national security teams providing options to elected and appointed officials entrusted with properly constituted authority. To be effective, the options must be more than a when-deterrence-fails on-switch. Courses of action must include competing and waging warfare as appropriate–diplomatic, informational, military, economic, and social. The core competency of such a profession should be effective strategies, including those broader than brute force and coercion to deter and defeat threats.
Narrow and Unrealistic Strategy: Brute Force or Coercion
American strategic thought since the Cold War is based on those two options. Brute force is for warfare, while coercion, defined as compellence and deterrence by denial and punishment, is for peacetime. Yes, the dominant coercion theory regards compellence and deterrence as forms of coercion. Even worse, because coercion is not brute force, coercion theory regards compellence and deterrence as cooperation. After all, coercion theory emerged out of a sincere desire to deter nuclear war, which has worked so far. So what’s the problem?
The problem is that the IE enables many more ways and means than denial and punishment to influence a selected audience’s will and capability. Our language of strategy has not caught up to this reality. A competitive profession of effects must expand strategy beyond coercion theory to include cooperation and confrontation simultaneously.
Broad Realistic Strategy: Eight Effects and 16 Concepts of Influence
The combined effects influence strategy presented in my book (Combined Effect Strategy and Influence, Bloomsbury Publishing, 2023) offers a practical way to start. It begins with 16 basic ways, means, and ends that constitute “concepts of influence.” Concepts of influence are more specific than most concepts of operations because they explain how to affect a selected audience or target’s will or capability to achieve a particular effect. That makes them more assessable and falsifiable, too.
Here are the sixteen. Notice that they include denial and punishment, but not just to compel or deter:
- Assure will to dissuade or persuade
- Neutralize capability to deter or compel
- Enhance capability to dissuade or persuade
- Punish will to defend or coerce
- Demonstrate will to secure or induce
- Deny capability to defend or coerce
- Exercise capability to secure or induce
Three General Questions for Strategy
This strategy asks three universal questions drawn from the basic “dimensions” of strategy. Then, it applies them to the “elements” of strategy–ends, ways, and means: (1) cause and/or prevent? (2) cooperate and/or confront? (3) psychological and/or physical?
We must compare the answers across particular contexts. The problem is we don’t like to speak this language. Adversaries certainly behave as if they do. Consider the Russian Federation under President Vladimir Putin.
Combined Effects from the Russian Federation
I analyzed 15 cases of hybrid competition (“coop-frontation”) since 2008 using this language. Here are the combined effects and concepts of influence:
(1) Ukraine, 2004: coerced compellence via denial and intimidation
(2) Estonia, 2007: compellent coercion via intimidation and punishment
(3) Lithuania, 2008: compellent coercion and inducement via intimidation, punishment, and exercise
(4) US, 2008: defensive deterrence via denial, neutralization, and intimidation
(5) Georgia: coercive compellence via denial and intimidation
(6) Kyrgyzstan, 2009: inducible compellence via exercise and intimidation
(7) Kazakhstan, 2009: inducible compellence via demonstration and intimidation
(8) Ukraine, 2013: inducible compellent deterrence via exercise, intimidation, and neutralization
(9) Ukraine, 2014: coercive deterrence and compellence via denial, neutralization, and intimidation
(10) Netherlands, 2015: deterrence and compellent coercion via denial and neutralization
(11) Syria, 2015: coercive deterrence and compellent inducement via denial, neutralization, intimidation, and exercise
(12) US, 2016: inducible compellence and coercion via demonstration and neutralization
(13) Switzerland and NATO, 2018: coercive deterrence via intimidation and denial
(14) Global, 2020: coercive deterrence and defense via denial and neutralization
(15) Germany, 2021: persuasive deterrence and compellence via enhancement and neutralization
Patterns
In this sample, the prevailing Putinian pattern combines compellence, coercion, and deterrence. Those are the most frequent effects—compellence (11), coercion (10), and deterrence (8).
Russian concepts of influence most often included intimidation (11), denial (8), neutralization (8), exercise (5), punishment (2), and demonstration (2).
None of the cases combined denial with punishment.
The most frequent combination of effects was compellence and coercion (8), followed up by compellence and deterrence (5), then coercion and deterrence (4).
What can we do to compete and wage warfare when warranted? A profession of effects with authorities and permissions could enter this arena of competition responsibly. Democracies must do this before an authoritarian AI goes rogue, disables a nuclear command and control system, or creates other forms of human-uncontrolled escalation.
Uncontrollable AI?
Competitive strategy is a survival skill and it’s getting more advanced. AI writes code and learns to iterate rapid solutions that humans cannot. AI has no moral agency. It’s like an unaccountable authoritarian state that competes by sowing chaos or a fascist world order, but much worse. AI capabilities are inherently dynamic.
Can we expect Putin’s Russia to abide by restraints on AI-enabled operations? The ability of AI to generate novel results should convince us to negotiate controls and limitations as in the Cold War period.
As for Xi’s China, the Party-state refuses to negotiate until it has achieved military equivalence. The mutual dread of uncontrollable AI should convince China to negotiate prior to the point of nuclear or otherwise AI-assisted destruction.
In both cases, we should negotiate effects control, not just arms control. We need a profession broader than the profession of arms to do that.
Integrated Strategy Requires a Profession of Effects
Consequently, strategy in an AI-enabled IE must integrate diplomatic, informational, military, economic, and social (DIMES) concepts of influence. Our “when-deterrence-fails” language of strategy puts diplomacy in the lead by default. This approach can work, but we need a combined effect influence framework to consider all effects across the competition spectrum. There is no default type of cooperation or confrontation.
AI is already a part of some whole-of-government and private-sector strategies. Besides military and social applications, AI governance and trading technology help mitigate risk. Democracies can become more competitive by developing a profession of effects committed to the following four basic things.
Four Requirements of a Profession of Effects
1. Develop a common language of strategy that’s more holistic, agile, and asymmetric than brute force or coercion.
2. Possess appropriate permissions and authorities to influence will and capability for all-effects competition and warfare, not just all-domain lethal warfare.
3. Establish a narrative, code of conduct, and rules of engagement.
4. Be prepared to Implement DIMES-wide combined effects and concepts of influence.
