Influence is the quiet power that determines how wars are fought and remembered. Long before tanks move or alliances form, beliefs are shaped, quietly, continuously, and often without awareness. In irregular warfare and resistance movements, this invisible contest decides legitimacy, cohesion, and endurance. Fighters may hold ground for a season, but narratives hold populations for generations.
Influence operates where perception and power intersect. It governs how individuals interpret information, assign meaning to events, and choose allegiance. In practical terms, it is the ability to shape interpretation so that a desired action feels voluntary. Every political speech, viral image, or whispered rumor occupies this space. The most effective operators, state or non-state, treat it as a domain equal to land, sea, air, space, and cyber.
What Influence Is
Influence is more than persuasion. Persuasion seeks agreement; influence engineers environment. It blends psychology, culture, and communication to alter how people construct reality. Within military theory, it underpins psychological operations, information operations, and strategic communication. In resistance contexts, it sustains mobilization, maintains solidarity under pressure, and isolates opponents from their support base. It is the mechanism by which subversion is amplified and by which misinformation achieves operational effect.
Where It Fits in Irregular Warfare
Irregular warfare is, at its core, a contest for legitimacy and popular support. While conventional war prizes firepower and territorial control, irregular campaigns prize the population’s perception of who governs justly and who does not. Influence is the mechanism that tips perception. It is interlocked with espionage (which gathers the intelligence to target messaging), sabotage (which demonstrates an opponent’s vulnerability), and mobilization (which converts sympathizers into active participants). Every kinetic act in an irregular campaign is also an influence event; the question is whether that influence is shaped deliberately or left to chance.
Why It Matters
Without influence, armed movements cannot sustain recruitment, maintain popular cover, or survive the narrative war that accompanies physical conflict. History provides case after case: the Viet Cong’s village-level political infrastructure mattered more than their weapons; Mao’s dictum that the guerrilla must swim among the people like a fish in water was an influence statement disguised as military strategy; T.E. Lawrence built the Arab Revolt not on British arms alone but on the idea of Arab self-determination. In each case, influence was the operational center of gravity.
Since this article was first published, influence operations have become the fastest-evolving domain in irregular warfare. Developments include the proliferation of AI-generated deepfakes in 2024–2026 election interference campaigns, China’s expansion of cognitive warfare doctrine as documented by JSOU, and the maturation of real-time counter-messaging tools deployed by both state actors and resistance movements. The foundational principles outlined here — Bernays’s architecture of framing, repetition, emotion, symbolism, and authority — remain structurally valid; what has changed is the speed, scale, and synthetic quality of the tools available to execute them.
The original analytical framework has been preserved. Internal links, source citations, and contextual references have been updated.
Edward Bernays and the Foundations of Influence
A Thinker Ahead of His Century
Edward Bernays (1891–1995) occupies a unique and uncomfortable place in the history of influence. The nephew of Sigmund Freud, Bernays built the discipline of public relations by fusing his uncle’s insights about the subconscious with emerging mass-media technologies. Where earlier propagandists relied on slogans or censorship, Bernays introduced method. His 1928 book Propaganda did not invent influence, but it turned it into a discipline.
Engineering Consent
Bernays argued that democratic societies, no less than autocracies, require organized persuasion to function. With vast populations exposed to constant information, people inevitably defer to interpreters, politicians, journalists, business leaders, and cultural figures, who filter complexity into simple meaning. He called this system the “invisible government,” not as conspiracy, but as description. Every society, he claimed, is guided by those who understand how to shape consent.
Bernays’s central idea was engineering consent, the deliberate coordination of symbols, messages, and emotions to produce predictable public behavior. He treated influence as infrastructure: something that could be designed, maintained, and scaled. His process rested on audience analysis (understanding latent desires), message design (connecting the objective to those desires), and channel selection (placing the message where it would feel organic rather than imposed). Robert Cialdini’s Influence: The Psychology of Persuasion later codified the psychological mechanisms underlying these techniques into six universal principles — reciprocity, commitment, social proof, authority, liking, and scarcity — that remain the standard reference for practitioners in both commercial and military contexts.
Bridging Civil and Military Domains
Bernays’s work emerged from wartime practice. During World War I, he served on the U.S. Committee on Public Information, a government body tasked with building domestic support for the war. What he learned there, that systematic persuasion could shift national sentiment at scale, became the foundation of his civilian career. This origin matters: the techniques of influence have never been purely civilian or purely military. They migrate freely between domains, adapted but structurally identical.
Ethics and Ambiguity
Bernays acknowledged the ethical tension within his framework. Influence, he argued, is morally neutral; its character depends on who wields it and for what purpose. This ambiguity is central to its application in irregular warfare. The same techniques that build democratic consensus can manufacture authoritarian legitimacy. The same tools that sustain resistance movements can enable repression. Understanding influence without confronting this duality produces technicians, not strategists.
Core Principles of Propaganda
Framing: Defining Reality
Framing is the deliberate selection and emphasis of certain aspects of an issue to shape how information is interpreted. Facts seldom move populations; their meaning does. The same event can be a “liberation” or an “invasion” depending on its frame. Effective influence defines the moral vocabulary of conflict before opponents can.
In resistance or counterinsurgency, framing decides legitimacy. Movements that describe themselves through values, freedom, dignity, self-determination, anchor identity. Those who allow adversaries to define them through labels, terrorist, criminal, separatist, fight on moral ground not of their choosing. Control of language is control of perception.
Repetition: Turning Message into Memory
Bernays understood that exposure breeds acceptance. Humans equate familiarity with truth; the more often an idea appears, the safer it feels. Repetition converts narrative from argument to assumption.
Irregular campaigns exploit this through consistent slogans, imagery, and rhythmic messaging. Every broadcast, graffiti tag, or community meeting reinforces the same theme until it becomes cultural shorthand. Counter-influence campaigns similarly require sustained repetition to compete; a single rebuttal rarely displaces an established narrative. This is one reason the Countering Misinformation toolkit emphasizes narrative inoculation rather than reactive debunking.
Emotion: The Engine of Mobilization
Emotion provides the activation energy for action. While information shapes belief, it is emotion, anger, hope, fear, solidarity, that moves people from passive awareness to active participation. Bernays recognized that logic alone rarely changes behavior; emotional resonance converts audiences into actors.
In social movement contexts, emotion bridges the gap between grievance and mobilization. Shared outrage at injustice, collective pride in identity, or communal fear of extinction can compress years of organizing into moments of spontaneous action. Effective influence does not fabricate emotion, it identifies existing sentiment and channels it. The distinction matters: manufactured outrage fades quickly, while channeled authentic emotion sustains movements across generations.
Symbolism: Compressing Complexity
Symbols compress complex ideas into instantly recognizable images. A flag, a fist, a song, a martyr’s portrait, each carries layers of meaning that bypass rational analysis and connect directly to identity and allegiance. Bernays used symbols to brand commercial products; irregular actors use them to brand movements.
Symbolism works because it is efficient. In environments where literacy is limited, communication channels are restricted, or time is compressed, a single image can communicate what a thousand words cannot. The power of symbolism also makes it a battleground: controlling which symbols circulate, and what they mean, is a constant contest in occupied territories and contested information environments.
Authority and Credibility: The Messenger Over the Message
People evaluate information through the lens of who delivers it. Bernays understood that the source of a message often matters more than its content. A trusted leader, respected institution, or credible witness lends weight that no amount of data can replicate. This is why governments invest in official spokespersons and why resistance movements elevate charismatic figures.
In irregular warfare, authority operates on multiple levels. A tribal elder’s endorsement may be more powerful than a UN resolution in a specific community. A defector’s testimony can undermine an entire regime’s narrative. Effective influence campaigns map the authority structures of their target audience and either leverage or subvert them. Credibility, once lost, is extraordinarily difficult to rebuild, making it both the most powerful and the most fragile element of influence.
Integrated Application
Each principle reinforces the others. Framing sets meaning, repetition embeds it, emotion powers it, symbolism visualizes it, and authority legitimizes it. Together they form a self-sustaining ecosystem of belief. Whether mobilizing resistance or countering it, the operator who masters these mechanisms shapes not only what people think, but how they think about thinking.
Translating Bernays into Irregular Warfare Practice
From Mass Communication to Mission Design
Bernays developed his framework for the commercial and political spheres, but the structure of influence he described mirrors the mechanics of irregular conflict. His insight, that coordinated persuasion can mobilize large populations, applies directly to resistance movements and state countermeasures. The difference lies not in method, but in mission: corporations seek consumers, while irregular actors seek control of legitimacy.
Influence in warfare operates along three interdependent layers: narrative, network, and population. Each layer uses Bernays’s principles, framing, repetition, emotion, symbolism, authority, but adapts them to the operational environment.
1. Narrative Layer – Crafting the Storyline of Legitimacy
Every irregular conflict is also a narrative conflict. The narrative layer defines why a movement exists, who it represents, and what outcome it seeks. It provides meaning to sacrifice, justifies violence, and frames opponents as threats to values the target audience holds dear.
Effective narratives are not slogans; they are interpretive frameworks. They tell a story in which the audience sees themselves, their history, and their future. Che Guevara’s revolutionary narrative connected Latin American poverty to imperialism; the Vietnamese independence movement framed its struggle as the continuation of centuries of resistance to foreign occupation. In each case, the narrative preceded and outlasted the military campaign.
2. Network Layer – Building the Architecture of Influence
Narratives must be distributed. The network layer determines how influence reaches its intended audience. In irregular conflict, this distribution system is rarely centralized; it relies on trusted intermediaries — clerics, teachers, village leaders, trade union officials, social media influencers — who relay the narrative through personal credibility.
Understanding and mapping these human networks is critical for both resistance movements and the states that oppose them. Resistance operators cultivate trusted nodes to extend reach; counterinsurgents attempt to identify and co-opt or neutralize them. The network layer is where influence becomes operational, converting abstract narratives into specific actions within specific communities.
3. Population Layer – Shaping Perception at Scale
The population layer is where influence produces measurable effects: shifts in allegiance, changes in behavior, erosion or consolidation of support. At this level, the audience is not a monolith but a spectrum: committed supporters, sympathizers, neutrals, passive opponents, and active adversaries. Effective influence campaigns segment this spectrum and design tailored messages for each group.
For resistance movements, the priority is typically to expand the sympathizer base and convert neutrals, while insulating committed supporters from counter-messaging. For states conducting counterinsurgency, the priority is the reverse: erode the movement’s popular cover and offer a credible alternative to the grievances that sustain it.
Counter-Application: The State Perspective
States apply the same influence architecture in reverse. Counter-narratives seek to delegitimize resistance movements by reframing them as criminal, foreign-sponsored, or ideologically extreme. Counter-network operations target the intermediaries who distribute the movement’s narrative. Counter-population efforts, civic action programs, economic development, amnesty offers, attempt to compete for the allegiance of uncommitted populations.
The challenge for states is that influence campaigns in the digital age are asymmetric: a well-crafted viral message from a resistance movement can outpace a government’s entire strategic communications apparatus. Speed, authenticity, and emotional resonance favor the insurgent; scale, institutional credibility, and resource depth favor the state. The contest between them is never resolved permanently.
From Theory to Doctrine
Modern information operations, psychological warfare, and strategic communications all trace structural lineage to Bernays’s architecture. His method, audience analysis, message framing, messenger credibility, and sustained repetition, has been absorbed into military doctrine under different labels. Yet the essence remains the same: shaping the decision-making environment so that outcomes emerge naturally from belief.
Irregular warfare practitioners who understand this continuum recognize that influence is not a phase, it is the environment itself. Every operation communicates. Every silence communicates. Success belongs to those who plan for both. For a systematic examination of the techniques used to undermine an opponent’s institutions and cohesion through non-military means, see the companion analysis of subversion in irregular warfare.
Influence as Operational Power
From Concept to Campaign Objective
Influence is not an adjunct activity you add after the plan is written. It is an operational axis that must be designed into campaign objectives from the outset. In irregular warfare, influence determines whether a population shelters a guerrilla column or betrays it, whether a government’s legitimacy survives a crisis or collapses under it, and whether international opinion constrains or enables escalation.
The most effective irregular campaigns, from the French Resistance to the Afghan mujahideen to contemporary movements documented in The Resistance Hub’s ARIS case studies, treated influence as their primary line of effort. Military action served the narrative, not the other way around. Ambushes were planned for their propaganda value as much as their tactical effect. Raids targeted symbols of the opponent’s authority. Reconnaissance gathered not only terrain data but the social intelligence needed to calibrate messaging.
For practitioners, the lesson is structural: influence must be integrated into every phase of planning, from intelligence preparation to after-action assessment. It is not the province of a dedicated information operations cell; it is the responsibility of every operator who understands that what happens on the ground only matters if it changes what happens in the mind.
// Curated Video
JSOU Snapshot: Chinese Influence and Cognitive Warfare
Joint Special Operations University — YouTube
A five-minute overview from JSOU exploring how China conceptualizes and employs influence as a strategic tool against adversaries in the modern operational environment. Relevant to the cognitive warfare dimension of the influence principles outlined above.
Source: Joint Special Operations University, via YouTube. Embedded under YouTube terms.
// Further Reading
Propaganda — Edward Bernays
The 1928 foundational text that turned influence from an art into a discipline. Essential reading for understanding the architecture behind every modern information operation.
Influence: The Psychology of Persuasion — Robert Cialdini
The standard reference on the psychological mechanisms of compliance and persuasion — six universal principles that underpin both commercial marketing and military influence operations.
Masters of Resistance — The Distillery Press
Condensed foundations of irregular warfare — including the role of influence, subversion, and popular mobilization in resistance campaigns.
More on The Resistance Hub