Strategic Landpower Task Force Research Report by Dr. Steven Metz, Strategic Studies Institute.
The 21st-century security environment compels the United States to develop more effective and efficient ways to promote its national interests. This includes refining methods for developing and applying landpower. One of the most important aspects of improving American landpower is augmenting the ability of the U.S. military in the human domain of conflict.
While discussion of the human domain is new for the U.S. military, it reflects long-standing ideas. Skilled military leaders have always understood that war has both a physical and a psychological dimension. The physical dimension allows an army, navy, and air force to compel enemies and noncombatants to act in a specific way. By contrast, effects in the psychological dimension are indirect, leading both enemies and noncombatants to choose to act in a specific way, either by fear of what will happen to them if they do not or the promise of reward if they do. The two dimensions clearly overlap: physically compelling enemies to do something, or killing them, has psychological effects on anyone who observes or hears about it. But skill in one dimension does not automatically equate to success in the other.
History’s greatest military strategists have capitalized on this intersection to amplify their influence beyond what they can physically affect and to make the most efficient use possible of their resources. As Sun Tzu, the Chinese theorist of war, wrote more than 2,000 years ago, “The supreme art of war is to subdue the enemy without fighting.” Although he used different words, Sun Tzu was talking about the psychological dimension of armed conflict. And the past 10 years have shown that, in 21st-century conflict, the psychological dimension is as important as the physical, and often more so…