Soft power. Non-kinetic effects. Nonstate international actors.
Another example of the intellectual ferment among armed forces thinkers was recently provided by three leading retired officers – James Stavridis, Ervin Rokke, and Terry Pierce – writing in Joint Force Quarterly. Their March 29, 2016, essay was titled “Crafting and Managing Effects: The Evolution of the Profession of Arms.”
A recent event – the cyber attack by North Korea on Sony Pictures after it released a film mocking Kim Jong-Un – prompted much of their thinking. Their article examined (1) the new influence of non-kinetic instruments of power, (2) the influence of non-state actors such as the ISIL, al Qaeda, Hamas, Hezbollah, drug cartels and crime syndicates, and (3) the cyber domain. (When the three refer to “cyber” in the article, they mean not only the electrons but the content.)
It led them to re-examine the concepts in Samuel Huntington’s classic text, The Soldier and the State (1957) and to integrate Joseph Nye’s concept of “soft power” into military thinking, expanding “the battlefield beyond the traditional domains of land, sea, air, and space to accommodate more effectively than ever before the battles of wits.” Some quotes: