Create Combined Effects and Concepts of Influence in Five Steps

Today’s security environment demands broad, multidimensional strategies to compete against dynamic threats. Same-route, same-time, same-tactic operations are less effective than ever against competitors using expedient technologies to exploit vulnerabilities. Deterrence and resilience can provide some security, but prevailing over the long term requires a superior strategy.

The combined effect influence approach expands two legacy concepts: combined arms and concepts of operations (CONOPS). The new approach does two things. First, it diversifies combined arms to create meaningful combined effects in context. Second, it informs concepts of operations to make them concepts of influence. Concepts of influence are the keys to success because they propose the ways and means to affect a selected audience’s will or capability to achieve desired ends—in other words, strategy.

Step 1. Start with a broad strategy of specified, assessable concepts.

Step 2. Treat strategy as technology, a practical application of art and science. 

Step 3. Learn from history proactively with ops and info to seize the initiative. 

Step 4. Combine effects with concepts of influence that target will & capability.

Step 5. Reform structures & processes for all-effect, all-domain competition.

On to Step 1. We need a big, sharp, analytical knife to cut through vague concepts and determine courses of action. National strategies highlight highly valued but often vague concepts, such as “stability,” which can mean different things to different people in various contexts. So, to achieve our desired ends in a competitive environment, we need to know what success and failure look like, then gain and maintain the initiative in setting those conditions.

1. Start with a Strategy Broad Enough to Compete

There already are dozens of US national strategies, so consider what’s supposed to be the overarching one: the US National Security Strategy (NSS).

The NSS focuses on destruction and lethality to deter and defeat threats. This focus is historically understandable, but it’s a vulnerable limitation for a strategy to compete with authoritarian regimes. Rapid information and material technology changes have armed old and new threats with unprecedented scope and scale of new weapons. The combatants include, but are not limited to, organized military forces. We don’t recognize many combatants as combatants. 

As a result, we wait to win battles that satisfy our narrow definition of warfare as if that wins contemporary wars. When we do fight, we use the best available technology to destroy enemy targets and deter weapons of mass destruction. However, we tend to disregard competitors’ weapons that produce other mass effects below our threshold of war—direct violence. 

The strategically significant operational problem is that competitors are waging all-effects warfare to gain influence. Not just any influence, but influence that sets the conditions for operations that combine cooperation and confrontation. Cooperation includes coop-frontation. Confrontation includes warfare, especially the kind we don’t recognize as warfare but that our adversaries do. In the contest for influence, strategy matters as much as technology. It is technology.

1. Embrace Strategy as a Form of Technology

Strategy and technology are practical applications of art and science, both human and AI-assisted. Our weakness is in strategy and capacity, not technology. Why? Democracies follow a “when deterrence fails” approach to warfare. Deterrence of what? Just violence. When we wage warfare, we fail to defeat technologically inferior adversaries with broader strategies. Take Afghanistan over 19 years, even though we “won every battle” (as in Vietnam). 

Technological superiority is more challenging in non-military contexts, and victory is more elusive. Businesses and citizens have limited government protection against non-violent attacks and are prohibited from conducting “offensive” operations. What happens “when resilience fails,” then? Adversaries armed by any means have the initiative. This mismatch of capabilities reflects our ideals but imposes real negative consequences. 

Don’t Over-restrain Strategy 

Even when we’re ahead in critical technologies, we over-restrain our strategies. It’s like over-specifying a technical standard that limits interoperability. We over-specify what warfare is, so we don’t respond in kind to non-violent combined effects, such as Russian election interference (direct and via proxy) and Chinese territorial seizures (by artificial construction). So, instead of funding a domestic opposition to Putin or recognizing allies’ claims, we avoid denouncing Putin’s legitimacy and sail and fly around Xi’s artificial structures. We also erroneously call them “islands,” which is a self-inflicted information defeat. 

Authoritarian competitors don’t show equal restraint. Putin’s strategy is to fracture NATO’s unity with a Pyrrhic victory that also deters direct military intervention. As more Russians become aware of his ruinous campaign, domestic influence can oust him. Xi’s strategy is wreckless in a different way—economic inducements and political-military coercion for an authoritarian world order. Xi’s greatest vulnerability is also domestic, as more citizens distrust his centralization of power and unaccountable mistakes. 

To be sure, democracies need to win the nth-G, quantum, and AI races, not just to create superior military capability. We must generate combined diplomatic, informational, military, economic, and social effects. Have we forgotten that lesson from World War II?

1. Learn from History Proactively

The US led the liberal “postwar” order that’s reflected in the United Nations Charter today. Democracies had to defeat fascist expansionism. The wartime effort required leadership, mobilization, courage, and an allied strategy that exploited enemy vulnerabilities. Then, the Cold War emerged, a struggle for influence over the rules of world order, national sovereignty, and human rights. Led by occupied Japan and West Germany, some authoritarian states won their freedom. Former colonies won their independence. The Soviet Union’s collapse freed others but reignited rivalries. Putin’s Russia and Xi’s China emerged as the new fascist threats, complete with victimization narratives, xenophobic nationalism, and endemic corruption.

Defeating these threats requires a broad strategy, proactive operations, and information that seizes the initiative. To do that, we need situational awareness to align the effects of activities, from tasks to goals. 

Align Combined Effects

From the bottom up, activities must produce the effects that realize joint force objectives, setting conditions to attain whole-of-government strategic priorities. 

From the top down, leaders must set and resource strategic priorities that accountable civil and military authorities interpret into conditions (“end states”) to attain those priorities. These conditions guide military leaders in establishing joint force objectives to set those conditions and empower subordinates to develop effects for realizing those objectives. Then, activities must produce those effects.

Our awareness must also be lateral across organizations, better than our competitors. Why? Because the battles for initiative occur in a hyper-connected, multi-domain arena where combatants seek multiple effects.

Competitors are already there. Xi’s China exploits our restraint and wages lawfare. The party-government operates its coast guard, militia and other proxies for the “People’s Liberation” Army (PLA) throughout disputed territories to intimidate smaller neighbors. At the same time, the regime combines diplomatic and economic initiatives to shape regional loyalties and financial interests. The “people’s liberation” identity “purposes” the whole enterprise and portrays it as democratic, bottom-up to top-down.

Despite this expansion of the battlespace, leaders routinely reinforce legacy identities and narrow concepts. Most military identities are entrenched in favored platforms, not effects or strategic priorities. The paramount NSS reflects uncompetitive assumptions about warfare. The latest version (October 2022) was the first formulated with the Nuclear Posture Review and Missile Defense Review. The purpose was to integrate resources-to-goals across all three national documents, but it contains a glaring weakness. 

Example: U.S. National Security Strategy Priorities

Take a look at the top four NSS priorities:

• Defend the homeland, paced to the multi-domain threat posed by China
• Deter strategic attacks against the United States, allies, and partners
• Deter aggression while preparing to prevail in conflict when necessary, in particular against China and Russia
• Build a resilient Joint Force and defense ecosystem

The Glaring Weakness

Defending, deterring, and being resilient are reactive, not proactive. These priority effects mirror an after-the-fact “when deterrence fails” mindset. Any business leader will tell you that “when resilience fails” is not a competitive position. Where more agents have more access to more weapons with significant societal effects, resilient deterrence and defense alone are a losing strategy. 

We can debate where this mindset comes from, but the bottom line is that it’s dangerously naive. It’s narrower than authoritarian competitors’, and it’s ill-equipped for the AI-driven fights to come. 

In an AI Age, losing the initiative against a competitor with a proactive combined effect strategy may be irrevocable. Think about Xi’s China setting technical standards in manufacturing, currency, internet, quantum, and nth-generation, then political “standards” such as his four demands to Australia.

To seize the competitive initiative, we must correct the two unrealistic assumptions that restrict the operations of every security practitioner, military or civilian: 

• During wartime, winning is a military “end state” (condition)
• During peacetime, “winning without fighting” means no lethal force

Two Uncompetitive Assumptions and Their Losing Results

1. Winning is a military end state. US military joint doctrine defines an end state as a military one despite calling for collaborative, whole-of-government efforts. This viewpoint ignores reality. Real “winning” is a continuous process of gaining an advantage over competitors who employ diverse combined effects and the most relevant combined arms. The result of the strategy is a demilitarized zone between democracies and authoritarian. In it, authoritarians have plenty of maneuvering space to produce the same effects as warfare. Examples include:

• cutting off energy and food supplies
• disrupting financial and trade transactions
• seizing and expanding territory
• igniting social violence
• destroying public trust in democratic governance

2. “Winning without fighting.” This adage from Sunzi is routinely quoted out of context as if ancient Chinese leaders avoided killing and as if fighting required lethal violence. Both assumptions are wrong. 

First, Qin Shih-huang-di unified “China” in 221 BCE by fighting across three dimensions of strategy and combining different effects. The strategy was cooperative and confrontational, including brutal conflict, preventive and causative, and psychological and physical. The resulting strategy worked as a multidimensional dilemma-inducer.

Second, The Tiger Emperor was the wolf warrior-diplomat of his time. Qin persuaded and induced competitors with political-agricultural diplomacy, compelled splits in their alliances, and coerced their armies and population centers into defeat and subjugation. All that was “fighting.” His “irrevocable expansion” of the Qin at the expense of five Zhou states broke the norms of interstate fighting, eradicating other sovereign claims while establishing standards and networks for trade, communication, and imperial rule. Xi’s China behaves similarly today, fueled by a propaganda work department, while we plan to wage war when deterrence of “real war” fails.

Narrow Assumptions Lose Wars

Uncompetitive assumptions might preserve legacy identities, but they lose complex wars. Why? Because “winning” is more than achieving a military end state. 

Military victories can lead to political, economic, and even social change. However, such success requires more than off-ramps and exit strategies. 

They require persistence. We can “win” most military engagements and fail to achieve the larger-than-military end state, losing the war. In Afghanistan, every so-called great power that has tried has not had a competitive strategy. Or, we can “lose” military engagements that win a more significant war with more-than-military follow-on campaigning. The Korean War has produced roughly the same boundaries as before North Korea invaded the South. Yet, the subsequent US-South Korea alliance has enabled a thriving democracy with the 13th largest GDP today.

Conditions have changed since then. We can’t afford to lose a military engagement against a pacing competitor that wages unrestricted warfare we don’t recognize as such. Xi’s regime seeks a “rejuvenated” larger-than-military authoritarian end state. The strategy aims to create synergistic effects such as persuasive inducement and compellent coercion (the Qin example above). We can compete and win if we expand our approach to include the entire competition continuum from cooperation to lethal conflict:

4. Combine Effects with Concepts of Influence

Let’s expand our competitive mindset. Looking at competition through a 3-D lens, we see strategies with eight basic effects: cooperative-confrontational, causative-preventive, and psychological-physical. Here’s a 2-D (x-axis, y-axis) rendering of the effects.

The effects are in numbered quadrants from a causative-preventive perspective of the other two dimensions (cooperate-confront, psychological-physical). For ease of reference, the causative effects are italicized, and the preventive effects are underlined:

Eight Basic Effects

A quadrant’s parameters define each effect. The four cooperative effects in quadrants 1 and 2 are Persuade and Dissuade (cooperative and psychological), and Induce and Secure (cooperative and physical). The confrontational effects in quadrants 3 and 4 are Compel and Deter (confrontational and psychological), and Coerce and Defend (confrontational and physical).

Notice that there’s no “Offense.” That’s because “offense” does not specify how. All eight effects can constitute “going on the offense” by changing the status quo.

These basic effects are broad but don’t include all possible effects. However, they’re more precise than “peace,“ “war,” and “stability.” We can specify what those words mean in terms of basic effects. The effects serve as a basis for thinking about inexhaustible combinations (from Sunzi) of ends, ways, and means across our three dimensions of strategy.

These effects apply across the competition continuum, not just “when deterrence of armed conflict fails.” The latter is often too late compared to a proactive competitor’s initiative to shape the terms of armed conflict and achieve objectives short of that form of warfare.

These distinctions are practical, not just theoretical. Authoritarians are already waging all-effect, all-domain competition, including warfare on their terms. The practice extends to tactics, operations, and strategic policy via frameworks that help align effects, such as this potential one:

Four Practical Considerations

To plan superior effects, we can start with four basic considerations:

1. Confront or Cooperate
2. Psychologically or Physically
3. to influence will or capability
4. for Preventive or Causative effects.

Desired effects can be preventive and causative, but they also vary in how confrontational, cooperative, and psychological and physical they are.

Desired effects also differ in how they are produced by concepts of influence that target an actor’s will and capability. Strategy arranges the tools as means and ways to influence will and capability to achieve ends. To compete effectively, we need better concepts of influence.

“Concepts of influence” describe how ways and means interact with will and capability to achieve particular desired ends. Some CONOPS do this, but a concept of influence specifies how.

Implementing a concept of influence requires thinking through activities’ actions, reactions, and counteractions—not just ours but relevant agents’, too. The big idea is to outthink competitors to defeat them relative to desired effects. This RAND study explains many meanings and contexts of defeat, will, and capability, such as the defeat mechanisms and mental, moral, and physical spheres of war (from JFC Fuller). 

These distinctions yield holistic strategies that can produce superior causative and preventive effects.

Let’s take a confront-cooperate perspective to see how we can arrange activities to produce these effects by influencing will or capability.

* NOTE: Figure 3 below arranges all basic effects and concepts of influence in a worksheet chart for designing and planning combined effect influence. 

Concepts of Influence…to CONFRONT and COOPERATE

TO CONFRONT:

Psychologically Intimidate Will / Neutralize Capability to Deter or Compel

Physically Punish Will / Deny Capability to Defend or Coerce

In confrontational interactions, an agent can psychologically intimidate another’s will to deter or compel behavior, such as bullying a vulnerable neighbor into opening or closing borders. Or, an agent can neutralize another’s capability to perceive, such as state propaganda that deters external loyalties and compels proper attitudes among citizens. Physically, an agent can confront a threat by punishing another’s will, to defend against or coerce behavior, such as running large steel-hulled ships into small wooden vessels on fishing grounds. Or an agent can physically deny another a capability, such as cutting off energy sources, to defend against or coerce a perceived or manufactured threat.

TO COOPERATE:

Psychologically Assure Will / Enhance Capability to Dissuade or Persuade

Physically Demonstrate Will / Exercise Capability to Secure or Induce

In cooperative interactions, an agent can use psychological methods to assure the will of another and to dissuade or persuade behavior. Such as well-crafted narratives to blunt an opponent’s agenda and advance one’s own. Or, an agent can enhance another’s capability to perceive by providing intelligence, to dissuade or persuade another concerning a partnership. Physically, an agent can demonstrate the will to secure or induce a commitment, such as joint statements and strategic dialogues. Or, an agent can physically exercise a military or economic capability to secure or induce a commitment from an ally, partner, neutral, or competitor.

Figure 3: Eight Effects and 16 Concepts of Influence

5. Reform for All-Effect, All-Domain Competition

Reform to survive and thrive in competitive contexts. There are so many agents and strategic options in the contemporary threat environment that competing along a one-dimensional “conflict spectrum” is more than fatal. Conflict is one small part of the multi-dimensional competition spectrum. Focusing on lethal effects essentially over-specifies what warfare is today. It cedes vast battlespace to opponents using non-lethal methods that achieve strategically significant effects.

We need to win conflicts by shaping their conditions. First, the Department of Defense must prioritize weapons systems with the capability and capacity to defeat peer and superior competitors. Second, the U.S. government must reform its national security bureaucracy to wage and assess all-effect competition and warfare across all operating domains.

The three competition spectra are more complex than we currently use, but they still simplify reality. The competition is complex, so humans (unlike AI) need a starting point. We begin with just eight basic effects that lead to 16 concepts of influence. Combining eight effects across the three elements of strategy (ends, ways, and means) develops even more combinations of effects. Many of these are synergistic, such as persuasive inducement combined with compellent coercion.

Combined effects and concepts of influence offer more options for more contexts. This approach can reform uncompetitive practices into all-effect, all-domain strategies to seize and retain the initiative for advantage.