Influence Warfare Volume I: A Blueprint

By Howard Gambrill Clark, Ph.D.

A Narrative Strategies Ink publication. The publishing arm of Narrative Strategies, Inc., a coalition of scholars and military professionals focused on the narrative foundation of large-scale conflict.

For millennia defining strategic influence has felt like chasing ghosts.

This short book defines the 'sport' and 'playing field' of strategic influence in national security.

It looks to doctrine from 11th century BCE through today to define the nature of political and psychological warfare.

Through case studies, it aims to arm the strategist or concerned citizen with a logical framework to recognize, analyze, conduct, counter, and collapse subversive campaigns.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Howard Gambrill Clark, Ph.D.
• Release date: Jan 28, 2021
• ISBN: 9781736589502

Howard Gambrill Clark, Ph.D.

Dr. Howard Gambrill Clark, Ph.D. is a Yale graduate with twenty-three years of experience and research in influence warfare: U.S. Marine Corps intelligence officer and special unit commander (Iraq, Afghanistan, and Philippines); White House National Economic Council counterterrorism analyst; Department of Homeland Security Senior Intelligence Officer for Headquarters Operations Directorate and Senior Intelligence Analyst for Counter Radicalization; and Special Operations Command senior consultant and trainer for countering violent extremism and stability operations as well as service to the U.S. Information Agency and U.S. Senate Defense Appropriations Subcommittee. He received his doctorate from King’s College London War Studies.Dr. Clark currently educates and mentors senior executives and senior military leaders on counterterrorism, countering violent extremism, information warfare, psychological warfare, guerrilla warfare, strategic intelligence, and strategic influence.Dr. Clark’s other books include Defeating Violent Extremists: The Tradecraft (2016) and Revolt Against al-Qa`ida (2010).

Book preview

Influence Warfare

Volume I: A Blueprint

By Dr. Howard Gambrill Clark, Ph.D.

Edited by Dr. Paula Marchesini, Ph.D.

Published by Narrative Strategies Ink

https://www.narrative-strategies.com/

Narrative Strategies comprises a coalition of scholars and military professionals involved in the non-kinetic aspects of counter-terrorism, defeating violent extremism, irregular warfare, large-scale conflict mediation, and peace-building.

The views expressed in this publication are the author’s alone. They do not represent the views of Narrative Strategies Ink or its editor. The views and findings do not imply endorsement by any government or private entity. Nothing in this book represents the views of any government or government-affiliated organization, private corporation, university, college, school, institution, or other entity foreign or domestic, private or public.

Copyright 2021 by Howard Gambrill Clark, Ph.D.

All rights reserved.

No part of this work may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying or recording, or by any information storage or retrieval system without prior written permission from the publisher.

U.S. Library of Congress U.S. Copyright Office registration case number: 1-10108004691

Clark Ph.D., Howard Gambrill, 1978–

Includes bibliographical references.

ISBN-13: XXX-X-XXX-XXXXX-X

1. Psychological Warfare 2. Political Warfare. 3. Influence. 4. Narrative. 5. Great Power Competition

In memory of...

Captain John W. Maloney (U.S. Marine Corps), Lieutenant General William E. Odom (U.S. Army), Professor H. Bradford Westerfield, Watkins R. Reckless

A special thanks to…

Paula Marchesini, Ph.D.; Ajit Maan, Ph.D.; Paul Cobaugh; The Honorable Charles E. Allen; Master Sergeant Jason Dale Epperson (U.S. Air Force, Retired)

Table of Contents

Introduction

Chapter 1: The Meaning of Influence Warfare

Chapter 2: Whispers and Echoes in Eternity

Chapter 3: Contemporary Errant Explanations of Influence

Chapter 4: What Influence Is For

Chapter 5: Influence Myths

Chapter 6: What Influence Is Not

Chapter 7: Influence in Security and Strategic Studies–An Introduction

About the Author

Annex

Endnotes

Introduction

1983. October. DC. Staring at our copy of The Washington Post. That's the moment I knew I would dedicate my life to ending this type of terrorism even as it occurred half a world away. One of the perks of growing up inside Washington, DC where dinner conversations at friends’ parents’ homes got deep quickly. Such topics spilled into discussions even on the playgrounds and alleys of DC, where other children played and where I listened eagerly.

I was incensed by the madness of killing innocents for a belief. I saw extremists as bullies—and I hated bullies. I wanted to carve out a little niche in my life and go after them, more specifically the groups that eventually morphed into al-Qa`ida and then Daesh. Years later, after 9/11, when every DC charlatan became a counterterrorism expert overnight, I remained stubbornly unfazed. The field was super-saturated, but I still wanted to do my part to delete this one stream of violent extremism.

Pursuing this life mission meant that the vast majority of my time would be devoted to the strategic influence game—that is to collapse a terrorist organization enduringly requires influence at a strategic level with regards to populations, geography, and time. I realized early on that most terrorist groups would not end at the hands of bullets, that they could never be defeated from kinetics alone. This was the one thing counterterrorism scholars seemed to agree on. Of the well over thousand and one texts on the shelves of my personal library, even the most die-hard kill-them-all-and-salt-the-earth theorists, strategists, and historians understood that bombs and bullets were never enough. To be sure, capturing and even killing terrorists who were about to attack was vital to national security. But this was not the end of the story. While such actions were necessary and effective in the short-run, only holistic influence campaigns could permanently defeat organizations that employed terrorism as tactic, cutting the disease by the root, instead of merely masking the symptoms. And often this also meant influencing governments, adversaries, competitors, and allies alike—making allies believe the best approach was not with the sword alone, influence them to develop more effective counterterrorism strategies, influence them to stop funding terrorist groups, influence them not to take on the mantle of being a terrorist regime like we see in the genocide today in China. And most recently taking these lessons learned into great power competition especially as we see it unfold in Asia, Eastern Europe, and Africa

This notion, however, remained in the abstract. There was no rulebook on strategic influence to follow, no formula to adopt or even to refute. Scholars were quick to point to The Art of War as the fundamental text on the subject of influence and the indirect, but no one developed on what Sun Tzu was prescribing when he wrote about winning wars without fighting (or without pitched formal battles when they could be avoided). The enthusiasm surrounding influence was mostly unexamined and often puerile. Hundreds of books meditating on Sun Tzu litter the self-help, business, and philosophy floors of the world’s libraries. And I have sat through hundreds of well-meaning military and graduate lectures and courses on what Sun Tzu meant. Yet, at the strategic and practical levels, professors and professionals conclude with platitudes akin to poetry. Not exactly something a general or lawmaker can apply.

Over the years, I began to write my own rulebooks, elucidating the subtle yet very real workings of strategic influence in a wide range of warfare settings: from Rome to Genghis Khan, from General William Tecumseh Sherman to the KGB, from Finland to China. History alone would have sufficed to convince me that the influence approach works. But it was my experience as a national security professional and warfighter that gave me visceral understanding of why and how it does.

In 2005, during my final deployment (thus far) in Iraq, I was forced to take my ideas on influence to higher levels, testing their practical implementation amidst the urgency of war. Overseas, influence campaigns were not a matter of intellectual debate: we employed them out of necessity, out of desperation. A drowning man will clutch at anything that may pull him out of the water. War against a brutal enemy forces Marines to become the most voracious learners—cutting through the platitudes and intellectual masturbation—and to use any means at their disposal.

Summer. Heat like a blow drier. I volunteered to be a temporary combat replacement for a wounded Marine, the first victim of what seemed like an hourly brutal killing of my sisters and brothers. The battalion had the unhappy role of being a force-of-economy mission, stretching from the western suburbs of Baghdad to nearly the Syrian border. In between was Haditha, where I slept, when I slept. And spoiler alert: Al-Qa`ida in Iraq had re-headquartered in our area of operations, for they continuously moved to wherever there were fewest Marines.

We were suffering more casualties than any U.S. battalion, Army or Marines, since Vietnam. All hands on deck. All boots in the field. On some evenings, I took off my shiny officer rank to ease the minds of the hunter-killer Marine teams to translate the local dialect for the private first class and corporal heroes. Rank eventually became unimportant when we faced all but certain death. Ideas and alternative strategies were avidly sought out, and ones that worked were swiftly employed.

As our initial approaches consistently failed, it hit me. I recalled how Saddam Hussein wrestled Iraq, province after province, after the failed uprising post-First Gulf War. Instead of relying on brute force and bribery, his strategy was to reach out indirectly to the tribes and villages outside city centers. The year before, in Iraq, I had come upon thousands of ledgers that documented in detail how the tribes were approached, who approached them, how those approached were scrupulously selected among their peers, and how their desires were

Reviews for Influence Warfare Volume I

[Joshua Wicklund · Rating: 5 out of 5 stars]

My actions: I plowed through this book very fast.

Context on my perspective: I am very interested in strategy, tactics and combination warfare. To me, this book creates another layer of understanding within the context of strategy and tactics and how one, unconsciously or consciously, may use or understand different tools in the framework of warfare.

Quick review of the book: I enjoyed the straightening out of the concept influence, the build up and, lastly, the introduction of “influence warfare” through this author’s perspective.

I am looking forward to volume II. Great work!