Modern War Institute | The Sisyphean Struggle for Influence Campaigning in Competition
Check out this latest article from The Modern War Institute! Jeremy Mushtare argues in “The Sisyphean Struggle for Influence Campaigning in Competition” that U.S. influence efforts fail because they lack prioritization, integration, and alignment with strategic objectives. He explains that combatant commands treat influence as fragmented, bottom-up activities rather than as coherent campaigns tied to theater priorities. The article emphasizes that effective influence campaigning requires deliberate focus on positional advantage, deterrence, and threats, while integrating physical and informational actions. Mushtare also highlights structural challenges such as interagency friction, embassy gatekeeping, and risk-averse decision-making that limit execution. He contends that success in competition depends on precision, targeted audiences, and disciplined campaign design rather than mass messaging. The article ultimately argues that influence must become a core operational function, directed at scale and aligned with clear priorities.
David Maxwell’s recent SWJ article, “America Needs Cognitive Civil Defense,” matches Mushtare’s argument by situating modern influence campaigning within a much longer intellectual tradition. Maxwell places today’s competition in direct conversation with Thucydides, Carl von Clausewitz, Mao Zedong, and Sun Tzu. He argues that while the mediums have evolved, the fundamental drivers of conflict—fear, honor, interest, and the primacy of strategy and perception—remain unchanged and continue to operate within the cognitive domain. Where Mushtare critiques the failure to organize influence as a coherent campaign, this piece highlights that adversaries already wage continuous campaigns to shape belief, legitimacy, and decision-making. Together, they show that modern competition requires disciplined influence campaigns and ongoing strategic conversations about how power works through perception and the human mind.
Highlights from “The Sisyphean Struggle for Influence Campaigning in Competition”
Normalizing Influence to Compete at Scale: “Influence activities, discrete actions designed to shape foreign audience behavior, occupy a unique position within joint force capabilities… Absent deliberate campaign design, this complexity produces friction rather than complementary effects… The department has a structurally fragmented approach to approvals, resourcing, and force management—treating influence capabilities as distinctly siloed… Combatant commands tend to plan influence activities at too high a degree of generality… almost any proposed activity can be defended as supporting campaign objectives, regardless of priority… Without them, combatant commands inadvertently bleed efficiency, inhibit the potential effectiveness of overall operations, and drain finite global resources… the modern need to compete at scale increasingly demands that conventional forces take a greater role in influence campaigning.”
Figure 1 – Influence Campaign Design for Competition
A Design Lens for Influence Campaigning: “Influence campaigning is not simply about messaging—it is about shaping positional advantage and decision calculus in competition by blending physical and cognitive effects… Combatant commands must align the precious few information forces available to them against the most important campaigning efforts… Three interrelated and cross-cutting campaigning priorities… are positional advantage, deterrence, and threats… These priorities are mutually reinforcing and must be undertaken through unified action, blending observable physical actions and influence activities, to produce operational effects… Deterrence is a central strategic organizing obligation for the joint force… influence activities must be prioritized deliberately to shape adversary perceptions and decision-making.”
Why Precision Beats Massed Activity in Competition: “In competition, the inverse is generally true: permissions narrow, resources are spread across multiple combatant commands… thresholds for employing sensitive means remain high… advantage is created less through massed activity than through disciplined prioritization and precision in execution… Behavioral change requires more than exposure to messages… In competition, vulnerability and susceptibility are generally lower, and mass messaging alone is rarely sufficient to move audiences to action… effective influence campaigning during competition should shift toward finite, discrete decision-makers and groups whose choices directly affect positional advantage, deterrence, and threats… measures of effectiveness… are often little more than a chimera, more focused on measuring sentiment than observable behavior.”
The Embassy as a Gatekeeper: “Ambassadors bear personal responsibility for the entirety of US government activity in-country and must weigh host-nation sovereignty, bilateral relationships, domestic political sensitivities… Influence activities outside areas of hostilities require chief of mission concurrence, making embassy engagement unavoidable and inherently political… officers often gravitate toward proposals that reflect the lowest common denominator… this approach delays consideration of priority objectives and diverts limited resources toward peripheral activities… A more effective approach… is deliberate senior leader engagement at the general and flag officer level… Without it, friction accumulates… and embassies… default to slower pace and more bureaucratic controls.”
Figure 2 – Influence Campaign Conditions Across the Competition Continuum
Disciplined Influence Campaigning to Compete at Scale: “Combatant commands have both the responsibility and the leverage to campaign effectively for influence in competition… They should focus on defining a limited set of narrow priority objectives… and deliberately shaping the conditions that make audiences receptive to influence… Influence effectiveness in competition derives less from permissiveness than from disciplined prioritization and deliberate alignment… Ultimately, the ability to wield influence… will not come from expanding authorities, proliferating activities, or chasing mass audiences… It will come from disciplined influence campaigning, focusing on what matters most… The persistent friction… is not a problem of permissions or process… it is the predictable result of incoherent priorities and ambiguous mission lanes… In an era of continuous competition, anything less risks advantaging adversaries who are already campaigning with purpose.”
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