In a densely interactive strategic environment, influencing networks can create asymmetric advantages by exploiting aggregates. This article shows how with combined effects and concepts of influence. Networks and aggregates operate as systems–inputs, changes, and outputs–across the competition continuum. To win in this context, we need broader agility, concepts, and weapons than we currently use.
Start with Broader Definitions
The following definitions expand the scope of competition:
Strategic environment: anywhere in space-time that strategy (ends, ways, and means) interacts in three dimensions (preventive-causative, psychological-physical, and cooperative-confrontational).
Agent: any decision-making entity that perceives an environment and performs actions (adapted from Norvig and Russell, Chapter 2).
Aggregate: sentient agents that link together to form a purposeful whole of structures and functions to influence competitors (adapted from Hall, Chapter 4, p. 72).
Network: any material or virtual structure with a node (“vertex”) and connection (“edge”) to other matter or an idea (adapted Newman, Part I).
Asymmetric: any difference that presents strength against weakness for relative advantage, applicable to ends, ways, and means (adapted from Metz and Johnson and an expansion of dissimilar forces).
Synergistic: the whole is greater or more significant than the sum of its parts.
Agile: the ability to change quickly, either physically or psychologically.
Combined Effect: a physical-psychological, preventive-causative, and cooperative-confrontational condition resulting from actions, effects, or other changes (expands US joint military doctrine’s definition from behavioral to psychological and adds preventive-causative and cooperative-confrontational)
Concept of Influence: how an activity or task intends to affect a selected audience or target’s will and capability for desired effects.
Why Definitions Matter
These definitions reveal more characteristics of operating environments than our national strategies currently exploit. Intelligent agents and aggregates do this all the time. They interact in networks where asymmetric relationships present opportunities for advantage. To sense and seize such opportunities, we must be more agile than competitors. All advantages are temporary and subject to pervasive uncertainty. The best we can do is develop competitive concepts of influence and be prepared to apply them in context. Concepts of influence are how means and ways affect will and capability to achieve desired ends. The most competitive ends tend to be combined, not just a single effect.
Overview
We’ll begin with three examples: social upheaval in the movement referred to as the Arab Spring (2011), China’s ongoing supply chain warfare (1949-now), and the Eastman Kodak Company’s decline into bankruptcy (2011-2012). Then we turn to aggregates that emerge from common interests, specifically, integrating different types of influence and magnifying combined effects. The keys to unlocking advantage are combined effects and concepts of influence, including cognitive maneuvers. The article concludes with a summary and practical recommendations. Now let’s look at the Arab Spring movement in 2011.
Networking Outrage
The historical context in December 2010 includes disillusioned individuals and groups throughout North Africa and the Middle East. They share some commonalities, such as beliefs in reversing authoritarian rule. Agents compete in virtual and material arenas like chat rooms and on the street. They can temporarily overcome differences if the common interests or values are strong enough.
Concepts of Influence
In that chat room, more than on the street, commonalities and differences present opportunities to change the will and capability of attendees. Provocateurs exploit them with physical and psychological activities that evoke emotions. Why?
Emotions spur action. How?
By creating and exploiting incidents that affect the will of selected audiences or targets. The simmering outrage erupted against autocratic, corrupt, or ineffective governments in Tunisia, Egypt, Bahrain, Syria, and Yemen. While each case differed, emotional outrage exploited, animated, and for some, created, a robust common cause among protesters.
By networking with otherwise opposed groups, influencers crowd-sourced a new capability for action. How strong?
One way to measure strength in a strategic environment is the virality of a shared narrative. A viral coefficient, for instance, is a ratio: the number of referrals that generate new relevant agents divided by the total number of relevant agents. Without an enduring narrative, virality is short-lived. For protestors advocating democracy, the desired effect of the uprisings was temporary, with the possible exception of Tunisia.
Integrating Capability with Will
Incidents that intimidated, punished, demonstrated, or assured the will of selected audiences or opportunistic agents sparked significant interactions. They also neutralized, denied, exercised, and enhanced the capability of various agents. These complex interactions produced multiple effects, intentional and not. The causative effects included compellence, coercion, inducement, and persuasion. They produced various reactions. Such combined effects demand thinking about counteractions in perpetual cycles of inputs, changes, and outputs.
The activities that created the combined effect included curfews, blockades, shootings, marches, riots, and armed battles. The actions also created preventive effects: deterrence, defense, security, and dissuasion. Examples include police and troops who refused to follow orders and foreign intervention. The actions, reactions, and counteractions caused individuals and groups to aggregate. Some groups disaggregated and fell apart.
From Will to Capability
This opportunity to gain advantage began on December 17, 2010, when a street vendor, Mohamed Bouazizi, publicly burned himself to death after being harassed by local Tunisian authorities. That personal tragedy infuriated enough people to stir up demonstrations across North Africa into the Levant and Arabian Gulf.
Within weeks, the aggregate included marginalized youth and labor unions, secular and religious groups, peaceful protestors and criminal rioters, arch-rival soccer fans, and Google engineers and hacktivists.
Magnifying Combined Effects
Protestors and influencers aggregated in cyber and physical space, magnifying viral compellence, coercion, inducement, and persuasion. Activities influenced the various participants and observers in different ways. They intimidated, punished, demonstrated, or assured the will of some and neutralized, denied, exercised, and enhanced the capability of others. Virtual referrals exploded, abetted by Twitter and Facebook retweets and hashtags. International media coverage magnified the total quantity.
Government attempts to block all of that resulted in massive blowback. The brutal government reaction to protests in Egypt on January 25, 2011, ignited further battles and uprisings. Connectivity via social media, radio, and television maintained social awareness that impelled more violence. The combined effect resulted from diverse activities. Some of them were pre-planned cognitive maneuvers. Others were spontaneous. This complexity is why understanding aggregation is essential to strategy in networked environments.
What about deliberately organized aggregates designed to produce desired interactions? Web designers such as Social Igniter and leading manufacturers like Unilever) arrange specialized functions to supply such goods and services. In that strategic environment, persistent networking and campaigning are vital to achieve and sustain desired effects.
Networked supply chains provide insightful examples because all goods and services rely on them. Pretty much everything is either a good (tangible–appliance, car, computer), a service (primarily intangible–police, educators, doctors), or both (energy, restaurant, software).
Supply Chains as Influence
A chain of activities for goods or services is an end-to-end concept, from development to marketing, procurement, fulfillment, and customer service. Supply chains, or more generally, value chains, create and fulfill demand. To do that, they create networks of desired effects. From development to fulfillment, activities must influence customers for three desired effects:
- Persuasion to buy the goods or services.
- Inducement to purchase the goods or services.
- Dissuasion to not buy competitors’ goods or services.
The broad scope of activities includes buyers, suppliers, infrastructure, and rules. All these compete with other companies and influencers trying to persuade, induce, dissuade, and even compel, deter, and coerce behaviors. Competition is cooperative (marketing, joint ventures) and confrontational (hostile takeovers, supply chain attacks on software development).
What should the network focus on, if that’s possible? Business models that add value with processes, such as this one from Michael Porter, tend to focus on the competitive advantage from higher prices or lower costs:
The tradeoffs between profit margin and market share limit pricing and cost options. It’s challenging to have both. Regardless of what the company leadership decides, it needs to create value from the customers’ perspectives. Supply chains should add distinctive value compared to rivals–competitive advantage. How? By designing strategies of desired effects that get you there. Effects can increase the value of goods and services with networked resources. So, persuading and inducing customers to value our goods or services and dissuading them from valuing competitors is a workable combined effect. In this case, our secret sauce is “persuasive and dissuasive inducement.”
Aggregating Networks
If we broaden business models like Porter’s, we can understand how authoritarian systems achieve competitive advantage with supply chains. They aggregate supply networks to produce advantages that most democracies struggle to organize. Understanding deliberate aggregation for national advantage can help us anticipate competitors’ surprises and avoid self-inflicting our surprises.
To do that, let’s broaden the assumption that a company’s distinctive value is financial. That way, we can see more networked effects in various contexts if we look there. We’ll keep our ideals, such as prosperity being a universal human value, but recognize that competitors with different ideals also pursue advantages.
China’s Vulnerable Advantage
China’s authoritarian capitalism weaponizes supply chains to produce a tenuous advantage. The Communist Party of China (CCP) creates and manipulates aggregates to increase market share and weaken any other political influence that might threaten its authoritarian rule. There’s a catch to adding this kind of value. It doesn’t value perspectives other than Communist Party elites. The same activities that create and manipulate also produce domestic and global blowback. How?
The CCP seeks to control aggregates with party and state tools that cooperate and confront simultaneously. Such coop-frontation claims compliance while violating international standards of behavior. Examples include:
- Granting, de-granting, and buying favors with illegal investments
- Setting import quotas and high tariffs before and after joining the World Trade Organization
- Concealing and stealing information, including intellectual property
- Dumping and re-routing dumped exports
- Falsely claiming to enact reforms while benefiting from liberal economic institutions
- Erecting alternative institutions with opaque rules
- Cyberattacks against research institutions and universities
This holistic approach to controlling capital, resources, information, products, and even generative AI is problematic. As aggregates form, agents seek different purposes. The CCP can’t control everything, but it tries. The Party spends a lot of resources on social surveillance, compellence, and coercion. As a result, without 9% or so annual GDP growth, the CCP faces the prospect of more demonstrations, riots, and outright rebellions. The CCP’s latest answer? Unopposed networked warfare.
Networked Warfare
Linked end-to-end, the above activities constitute totalitarian supply chain warfare. Control is problematic, but less so if the CCP’s incredible narrative goes uncontested. As long as Chinese citizens tolerate control and deception, the CCP competes cooperatively and confrontationally with little restraint. It’s relatively unrestricted warfare.
There are international costs to China’s reputation, but the CCP’s overriding concern is maintaining total domestic control. The CCP’s narrative permeates all party-government activities, an aggregate of elitist self-interest cloaked by deceit. Many citizens tolerate the Party as a necessary evil for economic growth.
Despite the CCP’s ongoing territorial seizures and threats to invade or blockade Taiwan, it blames foreign imperialism and claims peaceful development. The breadth of supply chain-related networked warfare is challenging to state briefly. In a wordy nutshell, the CCP steals, procures, and exploits foreign technology with discriminatory practices while marketing disinformation to supply a demand that it shapes via networks.
What to do?
Influencing Networks with Physical and Psychological Maneuvers
Recall that a “concept of influence” is how any activity or task intends to affect a selected audience or target’s will and capability. The purpose is to set conditions that produce a combined effect. Influence essentially means “have an effect on.” Concepts of influence include maneuvering for advantage to achieve an effect. They can involve any element or dimension of strategy. Let’s focus on the psychological-physical dimension since we tend to ignore the latter, despite the power of emotion and cognition.
Combined Arms Maneuver
Combined arms traditionally use physical maneuvers to impose dilemmas on the enemy. One arm can hold the enemy while another arm chokes off supplies or pummels a vital organ. The idea is to set conditions that put your opponent in a position with bad options. For instance, fixing the enemy in place with infantry and destroying them with armor, artillery, or aviation. However, when we think about all the potential effects, combining arms is a psychological maneuver, too. How?
Purpose Combined Arms Maneuvers with Concepts of Influence
We don’t deploy a combined arms brigade or joint force just to wait for armed conflict to begin. The movement is also designed to psychologically intimidate the enemy’s will and neutralize capability. Depending on the context, the desired effects could be to compel a retreat and deter an attack. When compellence and deterrence fail, a combined arms attack could physically punish the enemy’s will and deny capability. Typical desired effects “when deterrence fails” are to coerce surrender and defend against an enemy attack. Most of the time, however, an out-gunned opponent is smart enough to escape this dilemma by competing below our threshold of armed conflict. We need to out-think opponents to out-fight them. Enter cognitive maneuver.
Cognitive Maneuver
Cognitive maneuvers are often described as indirect and contrasted with physical maneuvers, but, as Patricia DeGennaro pointed out in a 2017 article, there has been little guidance in US military doctrine. That’s changing. In practice, cognitive maneuvers directly affect will and indirectly affect capability. New doctrine on information in joint operations calls for developing narratives that explain the reasons for military operations. This approach is inherently psychological.
So, when we define “information” as meaningful data put into context (see Figure 1), we should develop a better understanding to gain information advantage. Accordingly, a cognitive maneuver includes any or all of the following: processing data into information, then analyzing and synthesizing that into knowledge for better understanding. That’s not all. Just as combined arms maneuvers can create psychological advantage, we can use information for physical advantage. How?
Purpose Cognitive Manuevers with Concepts of Influence
By purposing cognitive maneuvers with concepts of influence, we can arrange activities to influence will and capability for combined effects in more ways than a typical “attack.”
For instance, we can simultaneously conduct numerous cognitive maneuvers to generate activities that create combined effects. Narrative strategies do this, with each effect causing subsequent or simultaneous effects. It’s a competitive cycle including all effects across all domains. As mentioned previously, opportunities to influence are generally contested and often fleeting.
With these considerations in mind, we can enhance many “offensive” and “defensive” attacks/counterattacks” with maneuvers to influence will and capability for advantage. Maneuvers vary in many ways. They can be direct and indirect, overt and covert, cognitive and physical, causative and preventive, cooperative and confrontational, population-centric and adversary-centric, conventional and hybrid, denial-oriented and inducement-oriented, etc.
With so many options, we must assess how we and competitors intend to affect will and capability to achieve particular effects. Wargaming all available ends, ways, and means is vital to testing concepts and practices. This broad specificity goes beyond a typical concept of operation. A related danger is micromanaging the whole process. Mission command is essential to agile operations that adapt and proactively achieve desired effects.
The Case of Eastman Kodak
The well-studied example of Eastman Kodak (“Kodak”) provides a business case of networked physical and psychological maneuvers. Kodak’s decline suggests what could have been (see Chapter 4) a successful transition to digital photography. Instead, Kodak retrenched and lost significant advantages in the movie industry.
To succeed in the photography business in the mid-1990s, the required technologies were to produce an image, replicate it, and project it in ways customers wanted, with audio. Kodak faced competitors in all four areas and more. Mike Sekora, a physicist hired by Kodak to develop a technology strategy, came up with maneuvers to influence the will and capability of Kodak and its competitors. He called them “influence maneuvers.” The plan would aggregate emerging technologies into a dominant supply chain system.
Sekora’s proposed activities included alliances to expand influential relationships, satellite access to enhance transmission capability, algorithms to increase digital storage capacity, and encryption to integrate security technology. Unfortunately for Kodak, its leadership delayed making decisions while competitors maneuvered to reduce Kodak’s technological capabilities.
The physical-technological, and psychological marketing maneuvers worked as an influential network. There was no single unified actor or agent in charge. As a whole, the network focused on Kodak’s vulnerabilities, strengths, and future technologies.
Targeting Competitors’ Vulnerabilities with a Combined Effect
Kodak’s main vulnerability was the will of its leadership to invest in technological capabilities that customers wanted. Sekora had proposed viability studies of current technology, positioning with partnerships, and re-directing funds to dominate the digital imaging market. These changes required decisions to acquire and apply cinema-grade projectors, digital displays and audio, and satellite networks. Which technologies would persuade and induce customers to buy their products? The combined effect was persuasive inducement. Kodak’s leadership was split, and competitors exploited the vulnerability. They targeted movie studios to monitor the technologies used. Before Kodak could (or would) act, competitors integrated effective technologies.
Updating Capabilities to Sustain Competitive Combined Effects
Kodak’s key strength was the quality of its film-making. Quality was a persuasive inducement to buy Kodak. A competitive price was a plus. The combination also dissuaded customers from going elsewhere and secured a dominant market share for Kodak. The combined effect was persuasive inducement and secure dissuasion. However, instead of developing fiber optics, broadcasting, satellite transmission, and projector acuity capabilities, Kodak focused on short-term profit margins. Meanwhile, competitors out-paced Kodak’s with the same technologies under consideration. Customers flocked to instantly available images and superior sound with sharper acuity, conveniently stored and accessible.
Investing in Future Technologies to Create Superior Combined Effects
Kodak eliminated much of its future technologies by rejecting Sekora’s plan. Legacy capabilities carried the day. As a result, Kodak declared bankruptcy in 2012. The added effect was to be out-competed in more technology space. The technologies that persuaded, induced, and dissuaded customers and secured market share were changing. The list of competitors included AT&T, Pioneer, Hewlett-Packard, Hughes, JVC, Mitsubishi, Time Warner, Sony, Toshiba, Matsushita, Philips, and Hitachi.
To repeat, the network was not a unified agent. Its holistic effects resulted from partial control by many agents. Competitors perceived the environment and risks differently and decided on different effects.
Overall, physical and psychological maneuvers that target competitors’ critical vulnerabilities and build our strengths are more likely to create and sustain superior combined effects. Integrating capabilities is not enough. We need integrated effects.
Summary
Agents and aggregates in the strategic environment form influential networks that can become volatile and go viral. We must anticipate them and develop agility for synergistic combined effects.
Supply chains are deliberately constructed aggregates for developing, marketing, procuring, and fulfilling goods and services. To be influential, they must add value from the perspective of their targeted audiences. We must analyze them and their control mechanisms to understand how competitors use them for advantage.
Concepts of influence explain how an activity or task affects will and capability to achieve desired effects, while physical and psychological maneuvers produce specific advantages. Combined arms maneuvers create dilemmas while cognitive maneuvers develop understanding. These concepts and methods can arrange activities to influence targets and audiences for superior effects in three ways.
- Create effects that exploit competitors’ vulnerabilities.
- Sustain desired effects with updated capabilities.
- Invest in future technologies and divest ineffective capabilities.
Practical Recommendations
Think and sense big to increase awareness. Collaborate, identify, and anticipate aggregates, including supply chain-related networks and their relative advantages.
Wargame and learn by doing. Design, plan, and conduct activities informed by concepts of influence and maneuvers that exploit competitors’ vulnerabilities. Then, expand operations to combine effects in a hierarchy of aligned efforts and effects.
Adjust and sustain a competitive pace. Answer the following questions:
What are the indicators of intent in your competitors’ chat rooms, other social media, and elsewhere?
How do emerging conditions magnify your and competitors’ intended and unintended effects?
Which activities are you and competitors designing then planning, marketing with a narrative, acquiring in time, fulfilling or sustaining the good or service, and for what intended and subsequent effects?
What are your and competitors’ vulnerabilities, strengths, and future technologies?
How will you integrate influential capabilities into activities that affect will and capability for competitive effects in different contexts?
Are you developing strategically superior combinations of effects with your tactics, operations, and campaigns?