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. Within resistance, it is the primary instrument of power when material means are limited. A movement that cannot influence cannot recruit, organize, or survive.
Influence rests on three interlocking components:
- Narrative control – defining the moral frame through which all actions are judged.
- Credibility – ensuring the messenger embodies trust within the target audience.
- Repetition – embedding messages until they become background truth.
These elements form the operational grammar of modern conflict.
Where It Fits in Irregular Warfare
Irregular warfare targets the political will and social fabric of a population. Its objective is not destruction but decision, forcing adversaries, neutrals, and supporters to choose in predictable ways. Influence provides the architecture for that decision space. Every raid, broadcast, or diplomatic statement contributes to an ongoing narrative contest. Tactical outcomes matter only insofar as they reinforce strategic perception.
In counter-insurgency, influence secures compliance. In resistance, it builds legitimacy. In hybrid confrontation, it shapes the environment before open conflict begins. Across all forms, the decisive point is cognitive, not geographic.
Why It Matters
The twenty-first-century battlespace is saturated with information but starved of trust. Populations navigate complexity through shortcuts, emotion, identity, authority. Those who understand and exploit those shortcuts can mobilize without armies and destabilize without firing a shot. Edward Bernays recognized this dynamic almost a century ago when he wrote Propaganda. He argued that every organized society relies on unseen mechanisms of persuasion to coordinate mass behavior.
His insight endures because technology has multiplied its reach. Influence now travels at network speed, but the psychology behind it remains constant. For resistance movements, irregular forces, and policymakers alike, mastery of influence is not optional, it is survival on the invisible battlefield.
Edward Bernays and the Foundations of Influence
A Thinker Ahead of His Century
Edward Bernays understood before almost anyone else that modern power depended on managing perception. Born in 1891 and trained in psychology, he combined his uncle Sigmund Freud’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.
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.
Engineering 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 three sequential steps:
- Analysis of the audience – identifying desires, fears, and social identities that govern decision-making.
- Design of narrative – linking a cause, product, or policy to those emotional anchors.
- Dissemination through trusted voices – using credible messengers and constant reinforcement until acceptance becomes habit.
The goal was not overt coercion but subtle framing, making the preferred outcome appear self-evident. Bernays used these methods to shift public norms on everything from hygiene campaigns to women’s rights to consumer habits. His success demonstrated that psychological leverage could outperform direct persuasion or force.
Bridging Civil and Military Domains
While Bernays worked in commercial and political contexts, his framework parallels what modern strategists recognize as psychological operations. Both seek to influence perceptions, attitudes, and behavior through carefully structured communication. His insight, that populations can be mobilized through emotional association rather than logical argument, anticipated the behavioral foundations of irregular warfare.
After World War I, militaries and governments observed how morale and messaging determined endurance as much as logistics. Bernays distilled that experience into theory. The resulting architecture, audience analysis, message framing, credibility management, repetition, remains the backbone of every effective influence campaign today, whether in marketing, diplomacy, or insurgent mobilization.
Ethics and Ambiguity
Bernays insisted that propaganda was morally neutral, a tool whose value depended on purpose and restraint. Yet he acknowledged its danger: the same techniques that foster civic cooperation can manufacture compliance. For modern practitioners, that ambiguity is still central. Influence operations must balance effectiveness with legitimacy; once exposed as manipulation, credibility collapses. Bernays’s legacy therefore cuts both ways, he revealed how influence works, and how fragile it becomes when ethics are ignored.
Core Principles of Propaganda
Edward Bernays reduced persuasion to repeatable mechanics. His framework remains recognizable across marketing, governance, and psychological operations alike. Each principle operates independently but reaches full effect when combined, the cumulative architecture of influence.
Framing: Defining Reality
Framing determines 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 counter-insurgency, 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-narratives must therefore disrupt cadence, not volume, introducing variation, satire, or contradiction that forces audiences to think rather than echo.
Emotion: The Engine of Mobilization
Logic explains; emotion compels. Bernays tied persuasion to the subconscious drives identified by Freud, fear, pride, desire, belonging. Appeals to emotion bypass analytic resistance and generate behavior at scale.
Resistance movements rely on emotional architecture to sustain risk. Fear of oppression, hope for justice, anger at corruption, all energize action when logic alone would caution restraint. For state forces, emotional intelligence is equally vital: understanding which sentiments stabilize order and which inflame resistance determines whether operations pacify or radicalize populations.
Symbolism: Compressing Complexity
Symbols distill narratives into immediate recognition. A flag, song, or color scheme conveys allegiance faster than a speech. Bernays mastered symbolic linkage, attaching ideas to imagery already loaded with meaning.
In irregular warfare, symbolism performs both rallying and signaling functions. Clothing styles, hand gestures, even territorial graffiti communicate unity and control without words. Counter-insurgent forces often misread or erase these markers without offering replacements, creating narrative vacuums that adversaries quickly refill. Sustained influence demands symbolic fluency, knowing what visual lexicon resonates locally and why.
Authority and Credibility: The Messenger Over the Message
Bernays observed that people trust figures, not data. Expertise, status, or moral standing grants messages disproportionate weight. Authority provides psychological permission to believe.
Irregular actors exploit local credibility structures, religious leaders, tribal elders, respected veterans, to translate strategy into trust. States, by contrast, frequently lean on formal titles divorced from social legitimacy. The result is asymmetry: one side speaks with institutional power, the other with personal authenticity. Effective influence reconciles both, using authority to validate emotion, not replace it.
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 in contextually distinct ways. Understanding these layers transforms abstract theory into a usable operational model.
1. Narrative Layer – Crafting the Storyline of Legitimacy
Every resistance or counter-insurgency begins as a contest of stories. Bernays would recognize this as the fight to establish the dominant frame. The narrative must answer three questions: Why we fight, whom we represent, and what future we promise.
- Framing: Define the cause in moral and identity terms, freedom, justice, survival.
- Emotion: Infuse it with urgency and dignity rather than vengeance; emotional framing outlives tactical victories.
- Repetition: Sustain the narrative across all communications and actions until it becomes self-referential truth.
When a movement’s story becomes the default vocabulary of its population, influence shifts from persuasion to culture.
2. Network Layer – Building the Architecture of Influence
Bernays emphasized credible messengers and distributed repetition. In irregular warfare, this translates into the deliberate construction of influence networks. These are not purely digital or hierarchical, they combine clandestine, covert, and overt actors who collectively sustain the narrative.
- Clandestine nodes manage messaging under repression, often through encrypted or word-of-mouth channels.
- Covert nodes amplify themes through proxy organizations, media outlets, or sympathetic elites.
- Overt nodes—community leaders, clergy, or veterans—publicly validate the movement’s legitimacy.
Each node reinforces credibility in its domain. If one fails, redundancy preserves continuity, an application of Bernays’s rule of repetition under distributed authority. Influence survives disruption because trust is diversified across social terrain.
3. Population Layer – Shaping Perception at Scale
Bernays treated the public as a psychological organism that responds to stimuli in patterns. Resistance and counter-insurgency both depend on this predictability. Once narratives and networks are in place, the objective becomes behavioral alignment.
- Symbols provide shorthand recognition; they mark territory, identity, and belonging.
- Events translate narrative into action, commemorations, humanitarian acts, or defiance rituals create shared memory.
- Feedback loops measure resonance: propaganda’s success is verified through participation rates, rumor tracking, and sentiment shifts rather than polling data.
The population layer converts belief into movement. It turns followers into transmitters, each individual replicating the narrative through daily interaction.
Counter-Application: The State Perspective
For governments facing insurgent influence campaigns, Bernays’s principles apply in reverse. Counter-narratives must avoid mere denial and instead reconstruct meaning. Repetition alone cannot neutralize deeply embedded frames; legitimacy must be rebuilt through visible ethical conduct, consistent messaging, and integration with credible local voices. The goal is not censorship but competition for trust.
This recognition reframes influence operations from propaganda to governance. Every checkpoint interaction, reconstruction project, or public apology becomes an influence event. Bernays’s logic holds: the population judges truth through perceived sincerity and continuity, not through the volume of official statements.
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.
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 start. Clear influence objectives translate political ends into cognitive effects. Ask: what decision must a target audience make, and when? Answering that turns vague slogans into measurable tasks, for example: shift neutral village councils from passive tolerance to active support within 90 days; reduce recruitment by 40 percent in an adversary’s recruitment pool in six months; induce a local strongman to withhold logistical support for a month.
This is planning language. Goals must be specific, time-bound, and tied to observable indicators. Without that discipline, influence becomes noise.
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.
Designing Effects: Framing, Sequencing, and Synchronization
Influence effects are crafted, sequenced, and synchronized with physical operations. Use three design rules:
- Frame to the Decision — Select a moral or practical frame that makes the desired decision the obvious choice. If the end state is non-violent cooperation, frame actions around shared survival and economic stability rather than framed righteousness or retribution.
- Sequence for Credibility — Early tactical actions must validate early messaging. If you promise security, follow with visible, consistent security activities. When message and action align, credibility grows; when they diverge, trust dies.
- Synchronize Across Domains — Influence messaging, civil affairs work, humanitarian aid, and kinetic operations must operate on the same script. Disconnected actions produce cognitive friction that opponents exploit.
These are not theoretical niceties. They determine whether a checkpoint becomes proof of protection or a symbol of occupation.
Audience Segmentation and Messenger Mapping
A campaign cannot speak to “the population” as if it were a single mind. Segment audiences by grievance, influence channels, and decision levers: core supporters, persuadables, neutral bystanders, active opponents, and external observers (diaspora, international media). For each segment, map credible messengers, local elders, market vendors, teachers, diaspora influencers, and assign message variants calibrated to culture and incentive.
Messengers matter more than messages. Deploy trusted voices early; let formal authorities validate later. In many irregular settings, authenticity outweighs institutional prestige.
Indicators, Metrics, and Adaptation
Operational influence demands metrics that are practical and resilient to deception. Use both quantitative and qualitative indicators:
- Quantitative: attendance at public events, recruitment numbers, economic transactions, incidence of hostile acts, cadence of hostile propaganda.
- Qualitative: tone of local radio, rumor prevalence, influencer sentiment, shifts in village meeting minutes.
Measure change against baseline vectors, not isolated data points. Build rapid feedback loops so planners can pivot narratives, reassign messengers, or adjust sequencing when indicators diverge from expectations. Treat the influence plan as a living product.
Integration with Kinetic and Non-Kinetic Effects
Influence does not replace physical action; it multiplies or erodes its value. A successful raid without narrative utility is a tactical win and strategic loss. Conversely, an influence campaign that isolates adversary logistics can produce effects equivalent to repeated operations. Integrate effects by linking each kinetic action to an immediate narrative reinforcement and follow-on civic action.
Examples of integration patterns:
- Expose-Explain-Recover — After a kinetic strike, immediately expose the adversary’s misconduct, explain lawful intent, and initiate recovery assistance to victims.
- Promise-Provide-Prove — Publicly promise a benefit, deliver it locally, and then prove outcomes with third-party validation.
Red Teams, Legal Guardrails, and Ethical Resilience
Influence campaigns are fragile to exposure and abuse. Run continuous red team exercises aimed specifically at credibility attacks: what happens if your messenger is discredited, or a false atrocity is attributed to you? Prepare rapid rebuttals and alternate messengers. Maintain legal and ethical guardrails to preserve long-term legitimacy. Once the population labels a campaign manipulative, gains are reversals.
For practitioners with compliance and risk aversion priorities, codify limits: what claims may be made, what sources may be used, how deniability is handled. These rules reduce blowback and protect the campaign’s most valuable asset, trust.
Sustainment and Exit Strategy
Influence is long game work. Plan for sustainment, who owns the narrative after external actors withdraw? Build local capacity for messaging, embed narratives in civic institutions, and sequence handover so that local actors retain credibility. An influence campaign without an exit strategy simply hands a script to adversaries.
Influence is an operational domain. Design to outcomes, measure relentlessly, integrate with action, and protect credibility. When done with discipline and restraint, it turns limited resources into durable political effects.
Ethics and Legitimacy
The Tool, the User, and the Moral Boundary
Influence is morally agnostic; the techniques themselves, framing, repetition, symbolism, are neutral instruments. The critical variable is intentionality: who wields influence, to what end, under what constraints. In irregular warfare that distinction is not academic. When a movement secures consent through truthful appeal and tangible improvements, legitimacy grows. When it secures compliance through deception or manufactured crises, legitimacy erodes once the deception is revealed.
Practitioners must therefore codify ethical guardrails before any campaign begins. Those guardrails should include: accuracy thresholds for claims, restrictions on targeting vulnerable populations (e.g., children, those with impaired decision-making), and approvals for any covert amplification that could be plausibly denied. The point is not to neuter effectiveness; it is to sustain it. Trust is the single most fragile and most valuable currency in influence operations. Once spent, it is costly or impossible to rebuild.
Operational Risks and Blowback
Influence operations carry predictable risks:
- Exposure risk: If covert methods are revealed, the resulting scandal often propagates faster than the original message and reverses gains.
- Polarization risk: Heavy-handed frames can harden identities and drive neutral groups into opposition.
- Moral hazard: Short-term tactical gains achieved through manipulation seed long-term instability by degrading institutions and norms.
Risk management requires scenario planning (red-teaming) and legal review. For practitioners who value layered redundancy, build alternate pathways to maintain credibility: multiple independent validators, verifiable third-party reporting, and clear, documentable lines linking promises to deliverables. In contested environments, ethics and efficacy are not opposites; they are mutually reinforcing.
Legitimacy as a Strategic Asset
Legitimacy reduces cost. When populations perceive an actor as legitimate, compliance and cooperation increase; resource requirements fall. Influence campaigns should therefore aim not merely to persuade but to institutionalize legitimacy, embed narratives in governance, civil society, and routine practice. That means pairing rhetoric with demonstrable improvements: security, services, dispute resolution. Bernays showed how perception can be engineered; modern operators must ensure perception aligns with reality.
Modern Application and the Digital Context
Scale, Speed, and Micro-Targeting
The digital age changed the delivery systems without overturning Bernays’s fundamentals. Networks, algorithms, and data analytics permit micro-targeting at unprecedented scale: messages tailored to narrow demographic and psychographic slices, delivered at the precise moment of receptivity. That increases efficiency, but it also increases fragility. Micro-targeted narratives that leak into public view often provoke credibility crises because the audience perceives manipulation.
Practically, digital tools demand three adaptations:
- Granular audience mapping—understand micro-segments and the platforms they inhabit.
- Message cohesion across scales—ensure micro-level variants never contradict macro-level narratives.
- Operational security—protect source data and channels to avoid attribution that corrodes trust.
Platforms, Algorithms, and the Attention Economy
Algorithms reward engagement, not truth. That reshapes incentive structures: sensational content spreads faster than substantiated content. For resistance actors, this offers both opportunity and hazard. Viral outrages can amplify a grievance quickly; they can also cheapen a movement by prioritizing spectacle over substance. Skilled practitioners distill outrage into sustained narratives that convert attention into organization, guiding reaction toward institution-building rather than episodic spectacle.
States and NGOs must also recognize platform dynamics. Censorship often fails because it creates martyrs and conspiracies; well-timed, credible alternative narratives and visible problem-solving tend to be more durable countermeasures.
Information Hygiene and Verification
In a fast-moving information environment, verification is a competitive advantage. Movements that document claims with verifiable timestamps, geolocation, and independent witnesses build durable credibility. Conversely, unverifiable claims create openings for deniers. Influence plans should include simple verification playbooks: how to tag content, how to preserve provenance, and how to coordinate validators.
Diaspora, External Audiences, and International Signals
Influence rarely operates only inside the contested geography. Diaspora communities, international media, and foreign governments form external perception fields that shape material support, sanctions, and diplomatic outcomes. Bernays’s model—messenger selection and layered repetition—extends into these domains: cultivate external advocates, align diaspora narratives with local priorities, and prepare to defend reputations in multiple languages and contexts.
Influence Is the Environment
Influence is not an add-on, it’s the operating environment. Bernays provided a durable vocabulary and a structural logic for how persuasion becomes policy, and how policy becomes habit. For resistance and irregular warfare, his lessons endure because the human substrates of belief, identity, trust, fear, hope, remain constant even as platforms and tools evolve.
Operational mastery requires discipline: define precise cognitive objectives, build layered messenger networks, synchronize action and narrative, measure against resilient indicators, and protect legitimacy with ethical guardrails. When influence is designed with strategy and restraint, limited resources generate outsized political effects; when it is managed carelessly, short-term wins become long-term liabilities.
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