Overview

Offering a competitive strategy to defeat authoritarians' all-domain warfare, this book suggests a new combined effects and influence framework for democracies to employ before deterrence fails. Breaking new ground in this comprehensive study, retired Brigadier General Thomas A. Drohan reforms an entrenched legacy concept—coercive compellence and deterrence. The book's framework synthesizes brute force, coercion, combined arms, and concepts of operations into combined effects and concepts of influence, including narrative warfare with cognitive exploits. The survey of competitive strategy at the beginning of the book spans a time frame from the thinking of ancient civilizations all the way to artificial intelligence, providing broad historical context for this model. The contemporary cases that test the model focus on complex competition and confrontation during the past 75 years. Combined Effect Strategy and Influence is unique in its critique of democracies' dominant paradigm of international security and its broad, specific framework ready for strategists, analysts, planners, and operators to apply to current threats. Students, researchers, and any leader interested in developing superior strategy will value the book's insights on gaining an advantage against emerging threats.

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9781440880742

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Drohan is a master strategist—a rare find among those whose expertise is capped at combining arms for operational effectiveness. Today's challenges require a broader and deeper vision and the crafting of more nuanced strategies with multiple interacting and synergistic effects. Drohan presents a primer on effects-based strategies and an outline for their application to our primary rising challenges: read and heed. * James M. Smith, Director, USAF Institute for National Security Studies (Retired); Co-Editor of China's Strategic Arsenal: Worldview, Doctrine, and Systems * To many, the end of the Cold War incorrectly implied the end of deterrence, compellence, and other coercive theories seen as incompatible with a liberal, rules-based global order. As in the 1920s and 1930s when alliances were prohibited and war had been declared illegal, the reality of conflict in Europe and East Asia shattered such optimism. Plus ça change, c’est plus la même chose. In this volume, Drohan takes a fresh and very productive look at established coercion theory and applies his expertise, sensitive as he is to cultural contexts. He calls persuasively for 'the defense and security bureaucracy to speak the language of combined effects and concepts of influence' that he deals with extensively in this important book. * Paul Viotti, Professor, University of Denver *

Author Information

Thomas A. Drohan, PhD, Brigadier General-Retired, is professor emeritus of military and strategic studies, USAF Academy, USA, and senior research fellow, Mitchell Institute of Aerospace Studies, USA.

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