By Brig. Gen. Huba Wass de Czege

For American and allied statesmen and generals, winning the complex contests of force of this century, whether they involve warring, policing or both in combination, will increasingly depend on winning the hearts and minds of two different groups of people—those at home and those among whom such contests are waged. This will be true whether the contest is with another state, as those in the recent past with Panama, Haiti, Serbia, Afghanistan and Iraq, or with violent political movements, such as those being encountered in Afghanistan and Iraq today. Statesmen and generals cannot ignore the will of their own polities, and in modern times it has become increasingly prudent to court the people on the other side as well. Populations, friend or foe, can help or hinder. And installing a new government or supporting the counterinsurgent efforts of an ally under siege will require the patient support of the home population and the help of the governed abroad. While this is really an ageless problem, many challenges of winning hearts and minds are unique to our time. Consequently, 21st-century military doctrines must be built on a deeper understanding of how human beings think and how ideas are propagated through societies. The purpose of this article is to introduce some rigorous new ways to think about the art and science of winning hearts and minds.

We will have to reframe the way we go about doing it and will need ways to make our messages contagious to the specific people whose support we seek. We will have to identify the few key people necessary to transform the message into an epidemic mass movement, and we will need to be mindful of and shape the environment into one that will propel rather than choke off the epidemic. This suggests not 20th-century, industrial age, centralized, homogenized and mass-produced approaches, no matter how high-tech and glitzy, but localized, nuanced, decentralized, grass-roots-up and highly focused approaches that concentrate resources on a few key areas. This is what the winners in the 21st-century marketplace are doing, and this is what statesmen, generals, colonels, majors, captains, lieutenants, warrant officers, sergeants, corporals and privates will have to do together in the complex contests of force we now face.

In the 20th century, the strategic aim of conquest was to replace hostile regimes with independent ones—not colonies, but responsible partners in the international system. Such wars imposed huge reconstruction costs on the victors. In the 21st century, powers have become more sensitive to these costs from the outset. They enter war with rules of engagement that try to balance military necessity and political objectives. The notion of winning the hearts and minds of the citizenry, however, is not yet central to early war planning, and seems to occur most often as an afterthought. The experience of the many complex contests of force of this century suggests giving primacy to this effort, as the logic of proper backward planning would suggest.

Successful 20th-century insurgents and counterinsurgents took into account the socio-political effects of their actions on the general populations of the country being contested, and 20th-century warfare among nation-states could succeed without undue concern for the hearts and minds of the people either at home or in the enemy country being “liberated” from tyranny. Citizens of 20th-century democracies, like the United States, Great Britain and France, might debate long over whether to go to war, but once duly constituted authorities took that step, all but a few citizens united behind the effort. Patriotic peer pressures, even in democracies at war, were so much greater then than they are today. It was considered high patriotic duty to trust the national leadership and unify to avenge the wrongs that caused the war. Few citizens had personal contacts in the enemy country. Those who did, especially if they had kin there, were suspected of divided loyalties. In the World War II United States, most ethnic Japanese spent the war in internment camps. For most citizens, the enemy was a distant, strange and dehumanized abstraction.

Once people were mobilized for war against an enemy country, there was little differentiation between the enemy regime and its citizens. In fact, citizens were considered complicit in whatever wrongs were committed. This was particularly true of the two world wars. The Geneva Conventions and the Law of Land Warfare were the only constraints on the treatment of noncombatants by the military. Some national armies were more scrupulous than others, but many millions of noncombatants were killed, injured or maimed as a normal consequence of industrial age war machines, especially in Europe and Asia. Rules of engagement for soldiers, sailors, airmen or marines were rarely stricter than these conventions required.

A phenomenon now commonplace was then only in its infancy. During the long war in Vietnam, while Americans were attempting various ways to win the support of the populations in South Vietnam and counter the will of those in the North, the Communist Vietnamese were trying to win the support of Americans at home as well as turn world opinion against the American effort.

For several significant reasons the enemy is now a far less distant, strange and dehumanized abstraction. It is more commonplace to differentiate between the enemy regime and its citizens, and the contest for hearts and minds has become a crucial, many sided and complex contest. These trends will continue. The most significant reasons for these changes came about as recently as the last decade of the 20th century. They have the potential to bring about surprising political change at pandemic speeds and proportions.

Global satellite, wireless and fiber optic cable technology expanded the scope, intensity, intrusivity and quality of global media coverage. Distant newsworthy events and problems are no longer dehumanized abstractions. Human suffering is recognizable globally for what it is. All sides have rapid access, the ability to capture the attention of billions of people and the savvy to spin their messages in their own interests.

When Cold War barriers fell, personal contacts and business with another one-third of the human race became possible. The population behind the Iron Curtain was educated, sophisticated and eager to reach across the former divide. The Internet provided a way for people of similar interests to form virtual communities regardless of geography or kinship.

The resulting global transparency and the new technical capabilities that facilitate it have intertwined people’s lives radically. This is very apparent in how people make their money, spend it and invest it for retirement, especially in the United States and the most developed democracies in Europe and Asia. (Closed tyrannies are the least affected.) In an increasing number of modernizing countries with open economies and improving governance, the economic enterprises that pay salaries and dividends sell globally, buy materials and services globally, draw investment funds globally and invest their retirement funds globally. Global supply chains mean a wider variety of products, at increasingly lower cost for equivalent quality for virtually all households.

The full political implications of all this are far from clear, but this much is discernible: communities of interest cross national boundaries much more easily and extensively today than in the 1960s when the disaffected anti-war movement in the United States communicated with the Communist Party in Vietnam. During the war between NATO countries and the Serbian Slobodan Milosevic regime over genocide in Kosovo province, many of the most educated Serbs, those of the budding middle class of entrepreneurs and technicians, were more interested in economic development and the dream of eventual political and economic integration with the regime’s enemies than in supporting their national leader. The precise destruction by NATO aircraft of property and the economic infrastructure as well as the threats to their safety caused many Serbs to rally to their natural internal enemy, the nationalist tyrant. In many instances in the future, current trends will favor the developed democracies in transnational transactions.

It will be increasingly important to identify and take into account such transnational affinities. At a minimum, one should not antagonize potential allies needlessly, and military planners have increasingly come to recognize this. Rules of engagement have become more specific and of greater strategic importance. Even when soldiers engage in warfare with other states, they may also make war against stateless allies of the enemy state while they cooperate with some social groups or communities within it, compete with some and maintain neutrality with others.

Population densities are increasing everywhere, especially in underdeveloped and failing states. Knowledge of social dynamics and the cultural mosaic will matter more. What “the people” think, the decisions they make and the actions and mass movements that flow from them will matter more. In fact, success in war will hinge on the ability to influence the decisions of various audiences to support or impede one side or the other. Similarly, success in policing operations, which I wrote about in my last article in ARMY Magazine (July), will depend greatly on influencing various groups to trust their present security and future prospects to the governments we support rather than to extended families, clans or tribes that make their separate accommodations with violent political movements or organized crime.

While it was never easy and Americans rarely mastered it, winning hearts and minds will be more difficult than ever in this information age. There will be no whispering to the home audience without adversaries also listening in. There is more than one people to win or keep neutral. Often there are several peoples with competing agendas, and they all are listening no matter to whom your message may be directed. The people today are much more savvy than those in 20th-century wars. Thus the message has to be far subtler, and the messenger cleverer. Crude and broad appeals are more inclined to backfire. Not only will unsubtle kinetics tend to drown out soft power maneuver and information operations, but even necessary security measures that inflict short-term pain for long-term gain may be impossible to implement (for example, British Gen. Templer’s strategic hamlet program for Chinese squatters during the Malayan emergency).

Finally, there is the problem of clutter. People the world over are becoming immune to high-tech communications and clutter at the very time we in the services are becoming more seized with the need to maximize our high-tech communications advantages and sophisticated information operations. People overwhelmed with new forms of communications tend to pay less attention to it. In a crisis, people are less likely to heed the advice of a stranger, even when that stranger speaks to them in the privacy of the home while safely surrounded by family and friends. We will need to engage people during crisis and cause them to change their behavior. That will remain a tall order.

The good news is that the science of how people think and how social groups are influenced is advancing, and two books by Malcolm Gladwell, Blink and The Tipping Point, make that science readily available to those of us whose predominantly hard science precommissioning education kept us away from such soft sciences.

In The Tipping Point, Gladwell shows us why epidemics are useful metaphors for shaping our thinking about winning hearts and minds. His ideas should affect every thinking military professional with a message to peddle (“surrender to me”) or a campaign to promote (“support a new democratically elected government”). In fact, his ideas should shape the way we all look at every military operation in the 21st century.

This notion of a tipping point seems to apply to social phenomenon particularly. Ideas pass a certain point in popularity or acceptance and then they tip.

We assume, intuitively, that neighborhoods and social problems decline in some kind of steady progression. But sometimes they may not decline steadily at all; at the tipping point, schools can lose control of their students, and family life can disintegrate all at once.

What was gradual arithmetic progress or stasis before, suddenly changes at a dramatic geometric rate. Anyone who has ever been in a combat unit that has panicked, or observed it in the enemy force, has witnessed a virtual epidemic of fear seize the previously brave. It can happen incredibly fast and unexpectedly. Historians have highlighted the dramatic collapse of France in May 1940. We have all stood by as the former Soviet Union collapsed rapidly and inexplicably. Some recently had a hand in the rapid collapse of the Taliban in Afghanistan and the Saddam Hussein regime in Iraq. Many have firsthand experience of the surprising and rapid rise of violent resistance in Iraq. What Gladwell says about tipping points should not surprise us. It is useful to know how and why they occur.

One of Gladwell’s examples is the dramatic drop in murders and other serious crimes in New York between 1992 and 1997.

In 1992, there were 2,154 murders in New York City and 626,182 serious crimes, with the weight of those falling on places like Brownsville and East New York. But then something strange happened. At some critical point, the crime rate began to turn. It tipped. Within five years, murders had dropped 64.3 percent to 770. In Brownsville and East New York, the sidewalks filled up again, the bicycles came back and old folks reappeared on the stoops.

Gladwell points out that when something like this happens, different professions will attribute the change to different causes. Each will make a diagnosis that explains the change from their particular frames of reference, but each diagnosis will reveal causes that would explain only steady arithmetic progress, not the dramatic change in evidence. In the New York example, the police, criminologists and economists all identified different long-term trends. The puzzling gap between the scale of changes and the size of the effect intrigued him. He noted, “Humans are socialized to make rough approximations between cause and effect based on the idea that what goes into any transaction or relationship or system must be directly related, in intensity and dimension, to what comes out. We tend to think in arithmetic progression analogies, not in geometric ones. That little changes can have big effects is a fairly radical idea.”

After examining many such social epidemics, Gladwell concludes that “ideas, products, messages and behaviors spread just like viruses do.” Epidemics of disease are a function of three things: the people who transmit infectious agents; the agent itself; and the environment in which the agent is operating. When this system is jolted out of equilibrium, it tips. Some change (and it may be very small) has happened in one or more of these areas.

What happened in New York is that the small number of people in the small number of situations in which the police or the new social forces had some impact started behaving very differently, and that behavior spread to other would-be criminals in similar situations. Somehow, a large number of people in New York got infected with an anticrime virus in a short time.

The Tipping Point answers two basic questions. Why is it that some ideas or behaviors or products start epidemics and others do not? And what can be done to deliberately start and control positive epidemics of our own? He begins by identifying the fundamental mechanisms at work: the contagious agent (or contagious idea) and the several little changes at the margin that unexpectedly have very big effects in a relatively short time. There is no reason for us to conclude that winning hearts and minds follows any other mechanism or process.

Gladwell argues convincingly that social movements, such as winning hearts and minds, are propagated primarily by word of mouth, and, paradoxically, that word-of-mouth epidemics are becoming more, not less, important. The flood of information coming at people overwhelms their ability to make judgments. Thus they rely more and more on very primitive social contacts, traditional forms of communications and the people in their lives whom they respect, admire and trust. Among the latter there are three kinds of people who play key and very specialized roles—Mavens, Connectors and Salesmen.

Research and experience tells us that people adopt new ideas at widely different rates. These are easily represented on a bell curve. At the near end there are a small handful of innovators or visionaries, followed by a slightly larger group of early adapting opinion leaders. Then follows the big bulge making up the early majority and the late majority. At the tail are the laggards. It is essential to understand the different motivations of each group and the fact that they do not communicate well among themselves. Visionaries want revolutionary change and are willing to take huge risks to achieve it. The early majority are pragmatists. Change must fit into the world of complex arrangements they inhabit, and they must see a pragmatic improvement. The late majority are conservative conformists. If it appears to pan out for the early majority, they do not want to be left behind. The laggards are the archconservatives. The problem is the usual chasm between the visionaries who “get it” quickly and easily with little translation, and the majority who may have trouble even making sense of the new idea, never mind finding it practical or personally advantageous. Mavens, Connectors and Salesmen together make up the bridge between visionaries and the pragmatists. The key lies in finding them and getting their help.

Some people matter more than others in the winning of hearts and minds. We are all familiar with the finding of sociologists that in most organizations, 20 percent of the people do 80 percent of the work. Studies of social epidemics indicate that most of the work is done by a tiny fraction of unusual personality types.

All people do not pass along ideas at an equal rate. Most people live and move within a small circle of fellow workers, close friends and family. Some have more contacts to share ideas. Some few are extraordinary Connectors because their worlds are large and open-ended. They occupy many different worlds and subcultures. This is something intrinsic to their personality, a combination of curiosity, self-confidence, sociability and energy. The best way to get through a door is through a social contact. Connectors network even through weak ties or acquaintances. When an idea gets the approval of these people, many get exposed to it quickly. Connectors possess raw transmission power. They are naturally and irrepressibly social. Finding them within any community should not be difficult. They may find you.

Mavens, the information brokers within their large networks, inordinately influence Connectors. If anyone knows who can be trusted to have sound judgment on any important subject, it will be the Connector. He will know that these people are not necessarily the people with the highest social standing in the community. Just because a person has a high social standing in a specific society does not mean that he or she is an opinion leader in a particular field of knowledge. Interests among people differ widely, and the propensity to be and remain informed on any subject is not evenly distributed. Mavens are people who are naturally intrigued by and naturally pursue knowledge about a particular subject.

Not only are Mavens keenly interested in new knowledge about their favored field, but they are compelled to form judgments and pass them on to all who will listen. Their motivation is purely social—an automatic and reflexive desire to be informed and helpful in sharing knowledge. What makes them important is not only what they know but how they pass it along. The message “The British are coming!” was carried by a volunteer, riding on a cold night, with no personal agenda other than concern for the liberty of his peers. Gladwell concludes that Paul Revere was probably both a Connector and a Maven. As a Connector he knew exactly whom to contact in every village and settlement along the way. As a Maven of Colonial politics, it was natural that the tip-off about the possible British operation would find its way to him, and he was compelled to tell every person he saw along the route. All he needed was confirmation by the lookout and the signal of whether by land or by sea. The result was a very large turnout indeed. For years people thought that the small turnout generated by the parallel ride of William Dawes that very same night was because he passed through Loyalist areas. Not true. He was neither a Maven nor a Connector.

Finding Mavens is more difficult, unless you set Maven traps, as savvy businesses do. The cost of finding and converting these rare people is well worth it. Such traps usually involve a special offer of information on their favorite subject.

Mavens, however, are not persuaders. For social epidemics to start, some people, including the groups identified by studies as early adopting and early majority types, have to change their minds and be persuaded to actually do something. Salesmen have the specialized skills to persuade those who are unconvinced by the messages they hear. A few persuaded Salesmen are essential to starting a hearts and minds epidemic.

Who are these Salesmen, what makes them so good and how do we recognize them? Studies show that Salesmen have a kind of natural exuberance, honestly love helping people and are particularly gifted at making rational, clearly articulated and cogent arguments. To be effective, they have to believe in what they are selling. What separates a great Salesman from an average one is the number and quality of answers to objections commonly raised, and the ability to judge what kind of responses work best with what kinds of people. But there is one more vital factor that makes great Salesmen. They can build a level of trust and rapport more quickly and credibly than others and when they sell something they like or believe in, their nonverbal cues, like smiles and nods, communicate powerfully.

When a Salesman sells, there is no ambiguity in the presentation of the message or its delivery. When two people talk, what really happens is an elaborate and precise dance. Beyond talking and listening in turn, each partner underscores words and meaning with facial expressions and hand, arm and body movements while the other responds in kind and in rhythm. These forge a bond or not. Salesmen have more mastery over this reflex than others. Research reveals that they can draw people into their own rhythms and dictate the terms of the interaction. Research also reveals that an elemental communication among humans is to naturally imitate emotions of support and caring. Emotions are shown to be contagious. Some people are better at sending emotions than others and are thus more influential than others. All such subtle nonverbal cues and communications are as important as verbal messages, sometimes more so, especially when this person is known, loved and trusted already.

Salesmen should not be difficult to recognize in any community. They are the likeable people who exude charm, enthusiasm and that recognizable something more difficult to put your finger on. They are naturally energetic positive thinkers. And, as the example of Paul Revere illustrates, sometimes one person can be more than one of these valuable types of people, but these will be very rare.

But the most important point for soldiers and marines engaged in the current deadly struggles for hearts and minds is that all contenders will vie for the allegiance of the few Connectors, Mavens and Salesmen in every rural village and urban community. The importance of knowing the people among whom these struggles are waged boils down to finding and converting these few.

To start an epidemic, Connectors, Mavens and Salesmen have to have a memorable message to pass on. As much as we would like to believe that the inherent quality of ideas makes them contagious, Gladwell’s research reveals that small and seemingly trivial things make messages stick.

Not only do epidemics tip because of the extraordinary efforts of a few select carriers, but also because something happens to transform the epidemic itself; the strains change to become more resistant to people’s immune system. An idea becomes more appealing to a target audience. Research indicates that there are specific ways of making a message memorable, such as relatively simple changes in presentation and how the information is structured. Gladwell argues that for messages to have the maximum impact on all their intended audiences, inordinate efforts will be required to ensure that busy practical people of a culture foreign to ours not only hear and remember what we are saying to them, but find it attractive enough to take certain risks to act as we desire. We cannot assume that this will be easy or self-evident, because contagiousness is often an unexpected property.

Conventional advertisers believe in speaking loudly and often enough—the rule of six hearings—to make a message memorable. They wage war on competing clutter with humor, splashy graphics and celebrity endorsements. Such methods are less effective than it is believed, and they are often impractical in a combat zone. Worse still, such tactics can also alienate or invite ridicule.

A combat zone has its special kind of clutter. Some of those who are clamoring for attention have hostile intent. This is the first hurdle to overcome before any community will even listen. More on this in the discussion of shaping the context.

To start a hearts and minds epidemic, the message must have five essential qualities. First, it must be credible. Americans, Pushtun villagers and Sadr City residents will not find the same truths equally credible. An incredible message may be true, but it will not be entertained seriously. And as much as we would like to spin a purse out of a sow’s ear, such attempts generally backfire. Therefore, second, the message has to be verifiable locally and by the intended audience. It is essential to think through how local people can verify it. Third, it must be understood in the way it was intended. Local testing for this quality is vital. Fourth, the message must apply to people personally and concretely, not abstractly. For instance, how will supporting this election process at this time affect their lives? And finally, how they can act on it in their local community must be unambiguous. Localized and clearly conveyed instructions are essential.

All this sounds like common sense, and it is, but following such rules without shortcuts is difficult and rarely done. What makes sense to one cultural community may not to another. Cross-cultural communications and communicating with several different cultural communities at once can be very tricky. It takes patience, persistence and some trial and error; however, small and seemingly trivial things make messages either contagious or counterproductive. And then there is the competitive nature of the contest when the opposition is not bound by truth in advertising rules. In fact, to win, all he has to do is cause you to fail.

Epidemics are sensitive to the conditions and circumstances of the times and places in which they occur. In fact, studies have proven that people are extremely sensitive to context. They respond to signals in their physical surroundings and take cues from their social environment.

James Q. Wilson and George L. Kelling are authors of the so-called broken window theory. They say that features of our environment provide a strong impetus to act a certain way. While we tend to explain behavior in terms of personal attributes, the truth is that a troubled person may be tipped toward crime by something as simple as everyday signs of disorder like trash in the streets or graffiti. These send a strong signal that says, “No one cares, and no one is in charge.”

When the crime epidemic in New York City was turned around, key city leaders believed in this theory and put it into practice. Many now believe that in addition to the other positive changes at work, the vigorous implementation of this theory, first in the subway system and then generally throughout the city, tipped the rising crime wave dramatically.

Often it is within our power to change the signals that invite crime or dysfunctional behavior in the first place. The principle is to begin somewhere and show steady, inexorable progress. In New York, officials began reclaiming the subway system one train and one line at a time. Once reclaimed and secured, these areas were not allowed to become unsecured again. Then they moved area by area to what they called quality of life and other petty street crimes. In the process of catching petty criminals, they also swept up perpetrators of more serious crimes. The New York authorities thus sent a clear and unambiguous message of unremitting progress and no prospect of retreat to potential criminals.

This principle has been put to use in Iraq and elsewhere by various commanders and in various ways, within their capacity and resources. But for such approaches to work, commanders require enough resources, strong support from above and a sustained effort over time. And they must first meet the people’s fundamental expectations of any government—it must keep them safe, secure their property and facilitate their livelihood, and not just now and then, but, to a reasonable extent, always. When people fear the consequences of acting on the message being sent, it does not matter how memorable it is, no epidemic will follow.

Small, close-knit groups have the power to magnify the epidemic potential of a message or idea. This is another example of how context affects the course of social epidemics. We are all susceptible to peer pressure and social norms. Psychologists tell us that when people are asked to consider evidence or make decisions in a group, they come to very different conclusions than when they are asked the same question by themselves. The spread of any new and contagious ideology can be accelerated with the skillful use of group power.

People with an idea to sell have long realized the value of creating a community around new converts where those new beliefs can be practiced, expressed and nurtured. This is one effective way to make a fundamental change in people’s beliefs and behavior. One successful strategy for rapidly propagating a contagious message through history has been to collect the most enthusiastic followers in a particular area into close-knit societies. In this way one super Connector/Maven/Salesman, through occasional visits, can tie many groups together, while daily group dynamics reinforce basic tenets of the movement while they are away.



The rule of 150 refers to the largest number of people who can be in a close-knit group. It is supported by a concept in cognitive psychology called channel capacity, the limited amount of space in our brain for certain kinds of important social information. Neocortex size correlates with social group size in primates. The larger the neocortex, the larger average group they live in. Brains enlarge to handle the complexities of large social groups. Not only do social beings have to know everyone in the group, but they also have to know how everyone gets along and relates to everyone else. In a group of five people that makes 10 separate relationships to understand. In groups of 20, the number of separate two-way relationships to know and remember is already 190. Even a small increase in group size creates significant additional social and intellectual burdens. Scientists believe that 150 represents the maximum number of individuals with whom humans can have a genuine social relationship. Anthropological literature confirms this number again and again. In one study, 148.4 were the number of people in the villages of 21 separate hunter and gatherer societies across several continents. The size of companies of soldiers across many nations and centuries has remained steady at no more than 150. At this size, orders can be implemented and unruly behavior controlled on the basis of personal loyalties and direct man-to-man contacts. With larger groups, this becomes impossible. Beyond this number, people become strangers to each other, and division into separate groups appear, loyalties divide, disputes erupt. Smaller groups are more close-knit and share trust.

The rule of 150 has several important implications for winning hearts and minds. Below that number, people are more easily infected by the group or community ethos. Such groups are powerful incubators for ideas because people can more easily agree and act with one voice. They can also coalesce and successfully counteract the poisonous surrounding contextual influences. Unity comes from sharing a common relationship.

Groups that adhere to the rule of 150 also have one other very powerful property called transactive memory. This is more than the sum of ideas and impressions stored in individual brains, but people in close-knit groups also store knowledge about who in the group knows what about what. People create an implicit joint memory.

Since mental energy is limited, people in such groups can concentrate on what each knows best. Truly knowing a person means knowing their skills, abilities and passions—what they like, what they do, what they want to do, what they are truly good at doing. It also means trusting someone else to know things in their specialty. This gives the Mavens in the group much more power to infect others. It’s the recreation at the organizational level of the kind of intimacy that exists in a family.

This kind of intimacy makes groups of less than 150 much more effective and incredibly efficient at adaptation and competition—entrepreneurial. Opponents in the 20th century were made up of large monolithic hierarchies. Today, there is much more likely to be many small and relatively diverse organizations loosely held together by one compelling and contagious idea. These are groups that exploit the bonds of memory and peer pressure.

As Gladwell says, “One paradox of social epidemics is that in order to create one contagious movement, you often have to create many small movements first—all headed roughly in the same direction or focused on one thing.” The important thing for soldiers and marines to bear in mind is that while this is the mechanism implacable foes and warring factions of today employ to win hearts and minds, they can employ this piece of wisdom themselves. A national hearts and minds campaign is won one clan, one village and one community of close-knit people at a time. There is no substitute for winning the confidence and trust of each of these, one by one. It has been done, but far too often once it has, we abandon the village or community altogether for another place, or the handoff to the relieving force is ineffectively done. The second try is always more difficult, by far.

We still have much to learn about the successful application of military forces in the 21st century. We need to reframe the way we think about the world and the problems to which statesmen and generals will apply military forces.

First, these problems will primarily be social ones. The ways we have simplified and bounded problems in the past will not be practical. And as in all military operations since Urgent Fury in Grenada, with the one possible exception of Operations Desert Shield and Storm, winning hearts and minds in support of the strategic aim will be the essential core around which operations should be planned and executed, rather than an afterthought, as even recently. The corollary to this is: all elements of national and coalition power, not only the military, should be leveraged in support.

Second, recognizing the difficulty of winning hearts and minds, there are new questions we should ask before statesmen make decisions to act. New kinds of foreknowledge become salient.

Third, centralized and homogenized hearts and minds campaigns and approaches aimed at the population in general simply miss the target. Focused, nuanced and decentralized approaches that concentrate resources on a few key areas to do a lot with a little should replace broad brush, homogenized and centralized efforts that now do a little with a lot. But the prize is great for those who grasp these fundamental ideas because people can radically transform their behavior or beliefs in the face of the right kind of impetus.

Fourth, I have given far too little space in this article to the other side of the coin in the many sided and complex contest for hearts and minds—maintaining support of the people at home. Gladwell’s ideas serve as a useful guide for those crucial efforts as well. Nothing is as popular as success, and early success followed by steady competent progress is of course the simple and timeless formula that satisfied the democratic citizens of ancient Athens as well as those of any other free society. Such societies should be even more hesitant to launch operations on their own initiative without the essential knowledge of the challenges ahead and the means to see them through. When Athens did so during the Peloponnesian War, the mistake was fatal.

The final point is this: the science of the military art and science refers to far more than how to get accurate and lethal steel on target and how to achieve a sudden, devastating positional advantage. It includes a wide array of soft social sciences equally pertinent to getting the mission accomplished. These will require greater attention in the future without compromising standards of knowledge in the other fields.