Introduction

Civil affairs (CA) wields a unique form of influence through long-term overt network engagements with indigenous populations. However, existing doctrine and joint force training concepts do not fully operationalize CA’s strategic influence capabilities, and that needs to change. Without a concept to define, train and validate, this form of influence will remain underutilized. In an operating environment characterized by the fragmentation of traditional alliances and institutions,¹ the concept of nation-state-based public diplomacy and strategic influence is being challenged. Strategic influence must, like expeditionary diplomacy, include actions at local levels and must involve shaping the behaviors and decisions of a wide variety of nonstate actors.

The current doctrinal foundation based on information operations (IO) is focused on support to traditional warfare; the term “information” is nebulous, conflating message delivery platforms with network influencers. Current IO doctrine does not translate easily into strategic influence. It is oriented more toward the linear integration of messaging and does not provide a framework to incorporate the understanding of narratives that is crucial to shaping attitudes and behaviors. Similarly, joint force training exercises limit influence to the role of an enabler for maneuver capabilities. Army exercises, in a similar vein, are designed to validate commanders and their staffs on current warfighting functions. Because of these priorities, influence operations and engagements remain largely notional, relegating CA to other support functions within the exercise construct.

Organizational changes within CA and better integration with joint, interagency, interorganizational and multinational (JIM) partners, while necessary, are not sufficient to operationalize influence in competition. In his analytical memoir, The American Way of Irregular War, Lieutenant General Charles Cleveland, USA, Ret., makes the point that America lacks “concepts, doctrine, and canon” for population-centric warfare.² The United States is currently facing overmatch by adversaries using irregular warfare in the competition phase. To prevail in competition, CA must define its network engagement capabilities in terms of strategic influence, expand special warfare doctrine to operationalize it and train and validate these concepts through appropriate warfighting functions.

That said, the overall purpose of this paper is to identify some institutional and operational gaps that hinder CA’s effectiveness, while illuminating a pathway to renew and update historic concepts of strategic influence. Resilience, defined in the Resistance Operating Concept and discussed further on, will be utilized as a case study for the further development of CA influence capabilities that should be nested within an updated special warfare doctrine. Finally, changes will be recommended that will impact: Army (and Marine) CA doctrine; the manner in which its staff is employed; and how the joint force needs to adapt its training models to reflect the realities found within nonlinear competitive systems.

Great-Power Competition and the Renewal of Military Capabilities

The term “great-power competition” has been bandied about in the national security circles in recent years, but it has often been misinterpreted to mean large-scale conventional warfare. Competition is not conflict; it does require an adversarial force but only in the context where two or more participants do not share the same interests. Competition is nonlinear, occurring across time and space and involving several state and non-state actors in such fields as diplomacy, foreign military sales, maritime commerce and international banking—and it is the core of any sports activities. In defining what competition means to the joint force, DoD recently released Joint Doctrine Note 1-19, Competition Continuum, which describes the current climate as one of enduring competition conducted through a mixture of cooperation, competition below armed conflict and armed conflict.³ Furthermore, it suggests that the world is neither at peace nor at war, but in a state of perpetual competition, where any action or inaction could escalate a situation from competition into armed conflict. The joint force, and, more narrowly, the Army (and Marines), must be ready to compete and win. To do so, they must look at current capabilities and reassess what has worked, what has not worked and what capabilities are required to compete and win in an irregular, competitive, international system.

The 2017 National Security Strategy states that the joint force strength remains a vital component to the competition for influence and to retain overmatch, which strengthens diplomacy, allowing the United States to shape the international environment and to protect its interests.⁴ This requires the joint force to reassess and renew the capabilities required to achieve and maintain overmatch against revisionist and rogue state actors as well as regional, opportunistic and highly-violent non-state actors seeking to destabilize U.S. foreign policy. Further, the Irregular Warfare Annex to the 2018 National Defense Strategy illuminates how irregular warfare is a persistent and enduring operational reality that non-state actors and (increasingly) state actors employ in competition with the United States and its allies.⁵ Thus, military leadership cannot dismiss the relationship between irregular warfare and competition in their interpretation of “great-power competition”—and, to achieve and retain irregular overmatch, these capabilities must be renewed.

The problem with renewing certain capabilities, such as defining influence and identifying influence-related capabilities, is the potential pushback from the institutions that are chartered to nurture and grow these requirements. The institutional barriers within the conventional force are likely too deeply rooted for it to embrace influence as a distinct warfighting capability in the foreseeable future. CA requires a forcing function; it does have a means of creating this through theory and doctrine. For example, both the United States Army Special Operations Command and the United States Special Operations Command (USSOCOM) are nodes of influence that can advocate and advance it. Also, it is far more effective when its capabilities are spread across the Army warfighting functions; however, IO is not a warfighting function. Thus, the problem of leveraging influence to achieve non-kinetic effects will remain a shortfall for CA in the operational environment, and this requires advocacy.

Using influence as a tool for effective warfighting faces institutional and cultural barriers. As we have argued in previous issue papers, the joint force culture is deeply rooted in a kinetic concept of warfare that is based on firepower and maneuver stemming from World War II.⁶ Author Sean McFate calls this “strategic atrophy” and posits that it usually takes a catastrophic defeat to change this paradigm.⁷ The cultural barriers keep the military focused on the tactical and operational levels of conflict; they also shift the conceptualization of great-power competition toward large-scale combat operations (LSCO) rather than the political warfare that characterized most of great-power competition during the Cold War.

Constraints on Influence in Great-Power Competition

IO is defined in terms of operations that “influence, disrupt, coerce or usurp the decisionmaking of adversaries,” making it decidedly adversary and tactically focused.⁸ When IO doctrine does address the friendly and neutral elements of the civil component, it is oriented toward messaging and defers to civil military operations (CMO) rather than CA operations (CAO), again, not accounting for CA’s reconnaissance and engagement capabilities. It also ignores the two-way nature of influence in that enduring engagements are necessary to understanding narratives. While IO doctrine identifies beliefs as an aspect of target audiences, the concept of strategic narratives and their connection to identity is not addressed and is therefore lost to the practitioners.

American law and culture impose constraints on using influence offensively in the manner, for example, that Russia and China use it. Malign propaganda and disinformation often run into conflict with stated American values and considerations of human rights. Historically, this has limited the effectiveness of covert action and kept it as a narrow and highly-limited capability, with significant executive and legislative oversight. Adversaries can adapt and scale covert action in a way that American forces cannot. Further, opposition among DoD and civilian government agencies to terms such as “unconventional warfare” and “political warfare” makes even overt offensive influence problematic. There is simply not an appetite to go on the offensive with influence operations and narratives, strategic or otherwise. 

Strategic influence will require a reexamination of IO. Ostensibly, it seeks to leverage influence by integrating capabilities. However, IO as such mixes human influence operational capabilities, such as CA and military information support operations (MISO) with technical delivery platforms—e.g., cyber and electromagnetic effects—under the label of “information-related capabilities.” This manifestation of IO muddies the waters and makes leveraging and emphasizing influence more difficult. Moreover, Special Forces is excluded as an information-related capability, even though its central purpose is to engage with and influence partner forces and populations. Throwing CAO and MISO into an information bin with cyber and electromagnetic effects reinforces the concept that these capabilities are one-way delivery mechanisms for messaging. The real value of CAO and MISO exists in the two-way exchange of communication with human networks. Lines of effort (LoEs) with CAO and MISO are intertwined and nonlinear as opposed to the recognizable straight and adjacent arrows in campaign plans, frustrating their inclusion in operational and strategic plans.

While the pathways for the strategic application of kinetic mechanisms are well developed, the means of using non-kinetic methods remain unclear. With little clarity on influence mechanisms and no conceptualization of narrative warfare, the bias remains toward one-way messaging. Neutral and friendly populations are more likely to be addressed in terms of noninterference or compliance, supporting the tactical requirements of maneuver commanders. Just as national security capabilities are imbalanced in terms of kinetic options, influence capabilities are imbalanced in terms of tactical and operational level messaging. This imbalance is largely a failure at the institutional level to identify these shortfalls or to define influence in information warfare doctrine writ large. Yet the special operations community is developing doctrine and structures that could give the concept of influence a new priority, particularly as the joint special operations community refocuses toward a “fourth age” of special operations forces.

Fourth Age of Special Operations Forces

Dr. Isaiah Wilson, President of the Joint Special Operations University, describes four “ages” of special operations forces to conceptualize the history and future evolution of special operations forces.⁹ The first age includes the Office of Strategic Services (OSS) roots of special operations forces in World War II. The second age encompasses the 1960s and 1970s. The third age was defined by the global war on terrorism. The fourth age is “a comprehensive combination of all the skills, techniques/technics, and operational methods of all three preceding ages, amplified by 21st century technological advancements.”¹⁰ This combination is optimized to deal with compound security threats. Developing theory and doctrine for this fourth age of special operations forces can provide the CA corps with the opportunity to address ongoing gaps in both institutional and operational outcomes. Leveraging, optimizing and integrating CAO LoEs into the supported theater Army’s objectives, regardless of special operations or conventional forces, supports the combatant commander’s campaign plan in any region of the world.

The early development of special warfare in the 1950s at the Psychological Warfare Center (second age special operations forces), the forerunner of the U.S. Army John F. Kennedy Special Warfare Center and School (USAJFKSWCS), was grounded in the concept of strategic influence practiced through engagements while conducting unconventional warfare and foreign internal defense.¹¹ During the Vietnam War, the 5th Special Forces (SF) Group had an assigned duty position called “CA/PO” (Civil Affairs/Psychological Operations, also PSYOP) consisting of CA and PSYOP trained officers and NCOs deployed down to the “A” detachment level like small S9 sections, specializing in developing influence plans and advising hamlet and regional leadership on governance issues.¹²

This focus on influence and governance was lost as the Vietnam War progressed. The Army never embraced the influence side of special operations, instead encouraging the special reconnaissance and direct-action capabilities of SF. Since that time, unconventional warfare itself has languished as a capability that struggles to gain both understanding and acceptance within DoD and other agencies. Chalmers Archer, one of the original members of SF who served in Laos and Vietnam, believed that the structure of SF that was developed in the 1950s was intended only as a starting point for a larger capability that leveraged influence through indigenous populations; he believed that further specialization was required.¹³ The recent expansion of CA reconnaissance and engagement capabilities is the natural evolution of early special warfare concepts and a return to the roots of Army special operations forces (SOF).

The third age of special operations forces saw significant growth and refinement for CA in terms of its reconnaissance and engagement capabilities, from the creation of Foreign Internal Defense/Unconventional Warfare (FID/UW) battalions in the 1990s¹⁴ to the establishment of the 95th Civil Affairs Brigade, as well as the implementation of the Civil-Military Engagement Program. However, while many new concepts were developed for CA over this period, as it draws to a close, it is clear that much of the institutional knowledge from the Vietnam-era CA and PSYOP positions and the FID/UW battalions has been lost. As the fourth age of SOF begins, CA still lacks a coherent theory, a clearly-defined identity and narrative and a means to train and validate its strategic influence capabilities. Restoring some of the original, but forgotten, concepts of special warfare will go a long way to restoring that identity and narrative.

For CA, fourth age SOF holds the promise of integrated campaigning in the human domain, in conjunction with other joint special operations forces and in coordination with conventional forces and the interagency. Significant developments in the Army SOF have occurred in recent years through new special warfare doctrine and the establishment of a single command, the 1st Special Forces Command, to house all the Army’s special warfare capabilities. These developments provide a platform for the CA Corps to shape the evolution of strategic influence capabilities for both SOF and joint forces.

Wielding Influence through Strategic Engagement

Current confusion on how to define, organize for and train influence can be traced to the lack of a theory for influence. Such a theory would differ significantly from traditional military theory that focuses on the kinetic aspects of conflict, as influence transcends military concepts and engages civilian elements of national power. Traditional military theory is also focused on physical domains, and a theory of influence must move from material to moral concepts.¹⁵

A good starting point is examining current research toward a unified theory of special operations. One contributor to this body of research, Dr. Robert Rubright, makes the point that a theory of special operations must remain a separate concept from special operations forces.¹⁶ This is particularly relevant to CA as it has a special operations joint proponent, yet it maintains much of its force structure in the conventional force.

A theory for influence should address the concept of influence through engagement. While CA, SF and PSYOP all wield different forms of influence, directed at different components of societies (governance, security, information), their commonality is that their influence is often personality-based and works with intangibles, such as legitimacy and fighting spirit, that characterize the moral dimension of conflict. Recent experiences in Afghanistan and Iraq have demonstrated that training, equipping and resourcing partner militaries for fire and maneuver are insufficient in the absence of legitimacy and will. For this reason, these types of engagements should be categorized as strategic engagements. Engagement could even be considered a form of maneuver.¹⁷

Central to strategic engagement is identifying and understanding narratives. Narratives are the strategic storylines that form collective identity. Subliminal and heavily contextual, these are triggered and operationalized by messaging—which means that narrative is not simply messaging. A strategic understanding of narrative warfare cannot be gained solely through limited transactional engagements or through remote research by analysts. It requires a deep understanding of culture, history and language.¹⁸ Message creation and delivery can be trained, but influencers must be selected based on personal attributes, such as cultural understanding and strategic communication acumen. Historic examples of strategic engagement influencers include T. E. Lawrence during the Arab Revolt and Edward Lansdale during the Hukbalahap Insurgency in the Philippines. It is important to reemphasize here that in strategic influence within anarchic international systems, state and non-state actors share a common history, which imprints how historical events—in this case, cultural symbols—are interpreted.¹⁹ This factor alone puts influence capabilities at odds with the conventional force paradigm of fielding mass-produced forces based on quantifiable metrics. It also presents challenges in how influence is measured, trained and validated.

Case Study: Resistance Operating Concept

The Resistance Operating Concept is a comprehensive effort to study resistance and resilience and to provide a shared understanding for the United States and its allies. A collaborative effort through the USSOCOM–Europe and European partners, the Resistance Operating Concept explores the actions that a nation can take to prepare for and survive a loss of national sovereignty. It has its origins in the Resistance Seminar Series that started in 2014 and examined the concepts of resistance and resilience as a national defense strategy.²⁰

It is based on a concept of total defense, or comprehensive defense. The central feature of this concept is that it consists of both civil resilience and military defense. “This defense concept includes not only governmental agencies and functions from national to municipal level, but also private and commercial enterprises, voluntary organizations, and individuals.”²¹ The idea of resistance as part of a partner-nation strategy prioritizes the legitimacy of resistance forces and mitigates one of the persistent issues in conducting unconventional warfare.²²

The Resistance Operating Concept evolved within the context of actual threats that provide an organizing concept for exercising irregular capabilities. Resilience is significant in that it is the foundation of effective resistance and is highlighted as such within this document.²³ Its further significance for CA is that it illuminates a framework for influence through strategic engagement that can be exercised and validated within a larger joint force exercise.

It also provides a conceptual model for integrating many aspects of U.S. irregular warfare doctrine, including security cooperation and FID/UW. While these activities are delineated from resilience and resistance in terms of definitions, the actions that are taken by U.S. forces to support resilience and resistance do nest within these doctrinal foundations. 

Within these U.S. Department of Defense definitions, the U.S. engages in Security Cooperation and Security Force Assistance when supporting the Partner Nation’s development of an organized resistance capability. If that Partner Nation loses full or partial sovereignty over its territory to a hostile actor, then the U.S. can engage in unconventional warfare to assist resistance forces. If that Partner Nation is under pre- or post-crisis threat from a foreign actor interfering in the Partner Nation domestically, then the U.S. engages in foreign internal defense to help free and protect the partner from foreign subversion or insurgency.²⁴ 

Further, the Resistance Operating Concept is tied to strategy, and the persistent difficulty for the United States has always been leveraging irregular warfare at the strategic level.

While it is newly-published, the basic concepts are not new; they go back to the origins of Army SOF. As mentioned previously, special warfare has struggled for acceptance within the U.S. military. The Resistance Operating Concept has the potential to counteract U.S. military cultural biases. For example, foreign internal defense is often misunderstood and conflated with Security Force Assistance by focusing heavily on military training. In FID/UW doctrine, influence is critical, and foreign internal defense is a whole-of-government effort to support a host-nation internal defense and development program.²⁵ However, while influence is a key component of foreign internal defense, the means to achieving influence is not clearly defined. This lack of clarity has likely contributed to the misinterpretation of foreign internal defense as military training.

The Resistance Operating Concept defines resilience as “the will and ability to withstand external pressure and influences and/or recover from the effects of those pressures or influences.”²⁶ Foreign internal defense is defined as host-nation government activities to free and protect its society from subversion, lawlessness, insurgency, violent extremism, terrorism and other threats to its security.²⁷ While this definition focuses on external pressure and influences, it is equally applicable to internal threats; building resilience is the mechanism through which foreign internal defense is accomplished.

Resilience, as described in the Resistance Operating Concept, focuses heavily on intangible concepts, such as the will of the population. These intangible concepts are exactly the elements influenced by special operations strategic engagement. Further, the Resistance Operating Concept describes concepts, such as national identity, that are tied to narratives. This is the nonlinear complex system that CA is organized, trained and equipped to occupy. The prerequisites to resistance include knowledge of vulnerabilities, vulnerability reduction and external threat identification, all of which are the doctrinal domain of CA.

Resilience also provides a mechanism to evaluate the preparation phase of unconventional warfare doctrine.²⁸ Preparation of the environment activities during the competition phase, including civil-military engagement, ostensibly perform this function; however, resilience illuminates the purpose of these activities and provides a basis to measure progress. The Resistance Operating Concept describes methods for assessing resilience and provides a sample foreign malign influence assessment chart and methodology.²⁹

It holds promise as a conceptual model to train and validate CA engagement activities at the strategic and operational level. Resilience is a prerequisite to resistance. Designing an exercise around resistance necessitates developing scenarios for resilience, including methods of measuring resilience and incorporating it into plans. Incorporating nonlinear concepts into joint exercises has long been problematic. Stabilization has proven easy for the joint force to ignore since the effects of stabilization tend to be visible after LSCO end and exercise participants lose interest. By requiring resilience inputs to feed the main exercise scenario, resilience—and the engagement that develops it—will be highlighted to exercise participants.

Reexamining Exercise Development

Exercising great-power competition will require the development of two-part overlapping exercises. One example would be a special operations forces–/interagency-focused portion that would start before the main exercise and overlap with an LSCO exercise. In this construct, the strategic influence scenario for an LSCO exercise would be developed while it is being trained and validated in the first portion. Failure of combatant commanders to exercise irregular capabilities in the first part of the exercise would place them at a disadvantage in the second part of the exercise. This would provide greater illumination of the effects generated by strategic engagement. 

Current exercises at the joint level neither train nor validate strategic influence. Special operations forces conduct their own validation exercises, but they are generally not integrated with the larger joint force. This is a result of an absence of IO as a warfighting function with clear definitions of strategic influence and engagement. The idea of a special operations force focused on warfighting functions has been debated for several years without resolution. The initial idea evolved into a proposal for engagement warfighting functions that did not gain traction.³⁰ There are currently discussions on an information warfighting function. The lack of information-related warfighting functions is an institutional gap; however, this does not mean that if it is developed that CA should fall exclusively under it. That said, it is important to remember that CA is both an information- and influence-related capability.

The conceptual difficulty is that SOF capabilities work through all warfighting functions and do not fit neatly into a single category, such as engagement or information. As an example, strategic engagement produces input for intelligence, fires and maneuver, as well as information. The key points of engagement may vary based on timing and levels of engagement. Relegating CA to an IO warfighting function along with cyber and electromagnetic effects, limiting its focus to CMO versus CAO, prohibits the ability to leverage CA into having an impact at the operational and strategic levels. The solution is to develop better means for CA to integrate across the warfighting functions, for example, by using task-organized liaison elements instead of fixed S9/G9/J9 sections in conventional formations.³¹

Conclusion and Recommendations

The numerous gaps in influence theory and in CAO doctrine provide the CA Corps a blank slate to conceptualize, write doctrine, develop concepts and ultimately influence the joint force to expand its concepts of warfighting. While the greatest institutional gaps exist in conventional CA force doctrine and integration with information-related capabilities as well as conventional maneuver forces, greater integration alone with conventional maneuver forces, which are designed primarily for LCSO, reinforces the misperception of CA as merely a “combat multiplier.” Culturally, the Army conceptualizes great-power competition as LSCO. The deactivation of the 85th Civil Affairs Brigade, an active component conventional CA force, clearly illustrates this mindset.

The path forward for CA lies within the special operations community, particularly alongside SF and PSYOP, through developing theory and doctrine for strategic engagement and preparing the CA Corps for the fourth age of special operations forces. While CA has a significant part of its force designated as conventional, this should not be a barrier. Other services, such as the Air Force, maintain special operations capabilities, such as the Tactical Air Control Party, that exist in both SOF and conventional formations. A fourth age of SOF will require increased SOF-conventional forces integration, and CA is in a unique position to address this challenge, especially since Security Force Assistance Brigades have become regionally aligned and the integration there would be natural.

The first step for CA is to define strategic engagement within special warfare doctrine and to build on the foundations of Army Doctrine Publication 3-05.³² This will involve expanding on the nonlethal actions and identifying building resilience as the mechanism for conducting foreign internal defense and unconventional warfare. Next, strategic engagement must be trained and validated within the construct of joint exercises. The Resistance Operating Concept provides a model that can create two-part joint exercises, along with a framework for assessing resilience. Finally, special warfare theory, doctrine and assessments from joint exercises must drive revisions of information operations doctrine that address influence at the operational and strategic levels.

The Office of Strategic Services, the model for the First Age of SOF, provided a comprehensive, integrated approach to strategic influence, intelligence, unconventional warfare and support to conventional forces during a very kinetic form of great-power competition. Since the deactivation of the OSS in 1945, the intelligence community and DoD, through USSOCOM, have worked to reconstitute a similar concept, though with capabilities scattered throughout multiple entities and bureaucracies.

A fourth age of SOF may provide the opportunity to renew and reintegrate many of the original concepts of the OSS and special warfare, while incorporating decades of lessons learned and innovation. For CA, this means recognizing the concept of strategic engagement as a mechanism for influence, updating doctrine to reflect it and incorporating it into joint warfighting through training and validation exercises. Strategic engagement by CA, in conjunction with other special operations forces and JIM partners, can address gaps in irregular warfare capacity that limit U.S., allied and partner effectiveness in great-power competition.

Recommendations

Doctrine. “Influence” and “identify influence-related capabilities,” such as CA, MISO, security forces assistance brigades, foreign area officers, etc., must be defined. Relevant Army and joint force doctrine should be updated to illuminate this pathway for SOF and conventional forces.

Organization. CA should be organized into staff functions that correspond with Army warfighting functions. Formalizing an S39/G39/J39 influence staff function across the Army, embedded within maneuver and communicating with operations functions such as intelligence, targeting, fires and force protection, would be optimal. The Civil Military Operations Directorate, often seen as an S9/G9/J9, should be assessed and needs to remain a nondoctrinal staff function. If not, it should be distinct from manning; if so, codify it into doctrine and allocate resources accordingly.

Training. More influence-related scenarios should be incorporated into joint military exercises that are more characteristic of competition and irregular warfare, where CAO can help to enable desirable nonlinear strategic outcomes.

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Sergeant First Class Robert Schafer, USA, Ret., was a Civil Affairs senior NCO with over 24 years of service and numerous deployments worldwide. He currently serves as a strategic plans analyst for the Center for Army Lessons Learned, focusing on security cooperation planning and the evaluation of security cooperation objectives achieved by theater armies. His current research focus remains in the field of security cooperation, exercise development, doctrine revision and special warfare in nonlinear systems.

Lieutenant Colonel Shafi Saiduddin currently serves as an adjunct instructor at the Joint Special Operations University. He previously deployed as a Civil Affairs Team Leader with the Combined, Joint Special Operations Task Force–Afghanistan, as a Current Operations Officer/Future Operations Planner with the Special Operations Command and Control Element–Horn of Africa, a Country Engagement Team member with the Joint Special Operations Task Force–Arabian Peninsula and the Group S-9 at 19th Special Forces Group (Airborne).