Offering a competitive strategy to defeat authoritarians' all-domain warfare, this book suggests a new combined effects and influence framework for democracies to employ before deterrence fails.

Breaking new ground in this comprehensive study, retired Brigadier General Thomas A. Drohan reforms an entrenched legacy concept-coercive compellence and deterrence. The book's framework synthesizes brute force, coercion, combined arms, and concepts of operations into combined effects and concepts of influence, including narrative warfare with cognitive exploits. The survey of competitive strategy at the beginning of the book spans a time frame from the thinking of ancient civilizations all the way to artificial intelligence, providing broad historical context for this model. The contemporary cases that test the model focus on complex competition and confrontation during the past 75 years.



Combined Effect Strategy and Influence is unique in its critique of democracies' dominant paradigm of international security and its broad, specific framework ready for strategists, analysts, planners, and operators to apply to current threats. Students, researchers, and any leader interested in developing superior strategy will value the book's insights on gaining an advantage against emerging threats.










Presents the enduring historical nature of competitive strategy as holistic, agile, and asymmetric and explains why artificial intelligence will challenge these characteristics in inexplicable ways




Introduces combined effects strategy beyond combined arms doctrine and concepts of influence beyond concepts of operations




Exposes democracies' dangerously restricted "when-deterrence-fails" approach to warfare




Provides a language and executable strategy for all-effects competition and confrontation including conflict/warfare