Influence Strategy: Consistency and Legitimacy as Key Factors

The U.S. strategy in the current conflicts in Iraq and Afghanistan as well as with al-Qaeda has focused predominantly on heavy U.S. military involvement (with a high proportion of kinetic operations), while using influence components (media, public diplomacy, Civil Affairs (CA), Military Information Support Operations (MISO), and Public Affairs (PA)), for the most part, in a reactive manner. This paper explores influence strategy and theory to identify what the key components of an effective influence strategy are, and how to modify these components to increase strategic effectiveness. First examined is the relationship of influence strategy with grand strategy, then progressed to examining several key influence theories as proposed by Cialdini, Ellul, Pratkanis, and Aronson, Tugwell, McLuhan, and Reilly. From the review, it appears that there are multiple descriptive formulations of the components of influence, but no specific formulations on how to develop an effective influence strategy using these principles. The principles of influence were compared and several hypotheses regarding an effective influence strategy proposed to help achieve the desired political end-state. The authors plan to test these hypotheses in future research using case studies of the Boer War, WWI, WWII, the Cold War, and the current conflict of U.S. versus trans-national Jihadi terrorists.