The Architecture of Influence: What McChrystal Tells Us About Power, Resilience and Audiences

Andrei Stoiciu | Influence Architects

Some conversations about defence are really conversations about weapons; others, ostensibly concerned with leadership, are better understood as discussions about institutions, incentives and the capacity of large organisations to adapt when the environment changes faster than their procedures. Occasionally, however, a conversation traverses all these levels at once and exposes something more consequential: the mental architecture through which an entire strategic community has learned to interpret power, vulnerability, leadership and the behaviour of its adversaries.

That was what interested me most when I listened to General Stanley McChrystal during the Defense and Democracy Dialogue, organised last week by the Center for the Study of Democracy (CSD).

The institutional setting matters. CSD works across security, democratic resilience, foreign influence, disinformation, governance and institutional integrity. Its dialogue series brings senior military practitioners into conversation with diplomats, researchers and policy professionals. It belongs to an increasingly important space in which defence is no longer treated simply as a matter of forces and equipment, but as an interaction between military capability, technological sovereignty, societal resilience, political legitimacy and the capacity to maintain public support under pressure.

McChrystal is an especially revealing figure in that environment because his career embodies the circulation of strategic knowledge through the Washington ecosystem. A former commander of the Joint Special Operations Command and later of U.S. and NATO forces in Afghanistan, the author of Team of Teams and, subsequently, the founder of a consultancy advising corporate and institutional leaders, he illustrates the pathway through which experience acquired in war becomes doctrine, doctrine enters universities, think tanks and consultancies, and military concepts are eventually translated into the vocabulary of organisational leadership.

This movement between the operational, political, intellectual and commercial worlds is one of the defining characteristics of what Americans simply call “the Beltway”. People move from the Pentagon into consultancies and boardrooms, from intelligence into technology, from government administrations into think tanks, and sometimes back again. Defence companies recruit people who understand government; researchers enter administrations; former practitioners become professors and policy entrepreneurs.

The important point is not merely that people circulate. Frames circulate with them.

An operational concept becomes a policy term; the policy term becomes an analytical category; the category appears in speeches, research programmes, procurement priorities and political narratives. After sufficient repetition, it may cease to feel like an interpretation of reality at all. It becomes the vocabulary through which reality itself is perceived.

The architecture of strategic primacy

One of the deeper assumptions visible beneath the discussion is that American power must remain capable of shaping events across every strategically significant domain. The central debate therefore tends to concern the instruments through which primacy should be maintained: alliances, technological superiority, forward deployment, industrial capacity, intelligence, deterrence, economic leverage, political leadership and greater societal resilience.

Historically, the language was sometimes extraordinarily explicit. In 2000, the U.S. military’s Joint Vision 2020 described “full spectrum dominance” as the ability of American forces, operating alone or with allies, to defeat adversaries and control situations across the full range of military operations. It was the strategic vocabulary of a very particular post-Cold War period, but it expressed with unusual clarity an aspiration made possible by the United States’ unprecedented combination of military reach, technological advantage, economic strength and alliance infrastructure.

At a certain point, a successful strategic model stops presenting itself as a model. The debate becomes a series of questions: How do we preserve leadership? How much must we spend? Where should forces be deployed? Which alliances require reinforcement? Which technologies must be controlled? How do we maintain credibility?

The more fundamental question — whether the strategic architecture itself still corresponds to the environment in which it must operate — receives far less attention.

In On Character, McChrystal has emphasised convictions that survive pressure, but also the obligation to examine and test those convictions rather than simply inherit them. That is an excellent principle for individual leadership. It is at least as important for institutions, because they accumulate beliefs in much the same way individuals do: some remain fundamental principles, while others are adaptations to conditions that may no longer exist.

The strategic challenge is to distinguish one from the other.

Power is not simply the ability to strike

McChrystal has himself complicated the conventional account of American power. Speaking in 2025 about the foundations of U.S. influence after the Second World War, he argued that American strength came not only from military superiority but also from the fact that large parts of the world admired elements of American society, institutions and culture. The willingness of others to associate themselves voluntarily with the American model created influence that could never have been generated by military capability alone.

Power can therefore be understood as operating simultaneously across at least three layers.

There is coercive power: the ability to impose costs and, ultimately, to destroy.

There is structural power: the capacity to organise alliances, institutions, markets and rules in ways that shape the strategic choices available to others.

And there is narrative power: the ability to make others perceive at least part of the order one represents as legitimate, attractive or worth participating in.

This aligns with my HOTE framework: Human, Operational, Technical and Ethical.

The strongest systems combine all these layers. When narrative attraction declines, however, maintaining structural and coercive influence becomes considerably more expensive, because what once emerged partly through consent increasingly has to be negotiated, subsidised or compelled.

This is where the technological point raised during the CSD discussion becomes strategically disruptive.

Global reach in a world where sanctuary is disappearing

McChrystal noted that long-range drones, precision missiles, increasingly persistent ISR and distributed targeting technologies are eroding what militaries once considered sanctuary. Geography alone no longer guarantees security. Bases previously protected by distance can increasingly be detected, tracked and attacked.

For several decades, an important component of Western — and particularly American — military advantage rested on asymmetric exposure. Western forces could identify, reach and strike adversaries whose ability to threaten the logistical, intelligence and command architecture supporting those operations remained much more limited.

That asymmetry is becoming less pronounced.

China possesses the most sophisticated combination of capabilities for threatening American regional infrastructure, but this broader technological development extends beyond China. Russia and Iran, as well as substantially smaller actors, can increasingly combine drones, missiles, commercially available satellite information, electronic warfare, cyber capabilities and distributed sensing in ways that complicate the traditional architecture of power projection.

The contradiction is becoming increasingly difficult to ignore: the aspiration to maintain global strategic reach survives precisely as the physical sanctuary that historically made that reach comparatively safe is eroding.

This is not simply a question of whether defence budgets should rise by another percentage point. It is an architectural problem.

Ukraine and the increasingly networked nature of agency

The discussion about Ukrainian long-range operations points towards another transformation that public language has difficulty describing. Political communication favours clearly identifiable protagonists: Ukraine strikes. Russia retaliates. America supports. NATO responds. China develops.

Contemporary military reality is often more complex.

A single operation may involve weapons developed domestically or abroad, national operators, commercial satellite services, intelligence supplied by partners, communications infrastructure located abroad, software developed by private firms, targeting information from several sources and political permissions negotiated across multiple capitals.

Ukraine operates within a broader Western technological, logistical and intelligence environment. Marco Rubio himself mentioned that the U.S. is not neutral in this conflict but supports Ukraine. U.S. involvement in the war has also been widely reported, including in The New York Times. In an almost ironic sense, this is Team of Teams operating at a geopolitical scale.

The difference between the visible protagonist and the underlying network matters enormously for strategic communication. Public narratives require clear attribution, while operational reality is becoming progressively more distributed.

Yet the most valuable part of the debate was not the discussion about bases, drones or long-range strikes.

It was McChrystal’s recollection of a much older lesson.

When brutality looked self-defeating — and was not always experienced that way

During the campaign against al-Qaeda in Iraq, American officers were confronted with a form of propaganda that, through Western eyes, appeared almost incomprehensibly self-destructive.

Abu Musab al-Zarqawi’s organisation did not hide its violence. It publicised it.

In May 2004, American contractor Nicholas Berg was murdered in a filmed beheading, and the video was distributed online. Zarqawi’s network went on to be associated with other kidnappings, beheadings, suicide bombings and extraordinarily violent attacks, while using the internet far more aggressively than the older al-Qaeda leadership had done.

The brutality was not incidental to the communication. It was part of the communication.

A decade later, ISIS would industrialise and aestheticise the technique.

Its media apparatus combined battlefield footage, executions, highly produced recruitment videos, nasheeds, imagery of comradeship and adventure, and scenes of extreme violence designed to shock global audiences while demonstrating ruthlessness and power to selected constituencies.

Perhaps the most infamous example was the killing of Jordanian Air Force pilot Muath al-Kasasbeh. Captured after his aircraft went down over Syria in December 2014, he was murdered by ISIS in early 2015. The organisation released a carefully produced, 22-minute video showing him confined inside a metal cage and burned alive. The production deliberately incorporated imagery of coalition airstrikes and portrayed the killing as retaliation. It horrified Jordan, triggered widespread condemnation from Muslim clerics and generated demands for retaliation.

The obvious conclusion was that such barbarity must inevitably destroy the organisation’s appeal.

For many people, it did.

But that was not the whole story.

McChrystal’s insight is more uncomfortable: a communication act can repel the majority and still perform extremely effectively for the minority it was designed to mobilise.

McChrystal made this point with remarkable clarity, noting that Zarqawi’s willingness to go further than almost anyone else demonstrated an intensity of conviction that could appeal to people searching for a particular kind of leadership. For those audiences, fanaticism itself became evidence of authenticity.

ISIS subsequently understood this dynamic exceptionally well. Research on its propaganda shows how it combined violence with images of brotherhood, adventure, status, purpose and participation in a supposedly historic project. Its social media operation was particularly effective at reaching younger audiences, including alienated young men who were not consuming the long theological lectures traditionally associated with older al-Qaeda propaganda.

For an angry, alienated young Arab man who regarded existing political elites as cowardly, corrupt, hypocritical or incapable of defending the dignity of his community, the same image that communicated savagery to a European viewer could communicate something different: uncompromising action, revenge, courage, belonging, absolute conviction and the rejection of humiliating compromise.

That is the point McChrystal’s anecdote helps illuminate.

We thought we were evaluating the message. In reality, we had misunderstood the audience.

The message may not be failing. You may simply not be its audience.

This error is not confined to terrorism. It is one of the most persistent analytical failures in politics, diplomacy, business and public communication.

We see a speech and call it ridiculous because it does not persuade us.

We hear a slogan and conclude that it is primitive because it contains no sophisticated policy argument.

We watch an adversary repeat claims that contradict evidence readily available to us and assume that only incompetence or irrationality can explain the behaviour.

A political slogan that looks embarrassingly simplistic to a policy professional may have no intention of explaining policy. Its purpose may be to compress identity, resentment, status and coalition membership into five memorable words.

A CEO announcing a painful restructuring may sound unnecessarily harsh to employees while communicating discipline and decisiveness to investors.

A luxury brand can appear offensively exclusive to 95 per cent of the market while communicating perfectly with the five per cent for whom exclusion itself produces status.

A protest movement may use tactics that reduce its popularity with the general public while increasing prestige and commitment within the activist subculture on which its mobilisation depends.

A government can repeat a historical narrative that an outside academic can dismantle with archives and footnotes, while the narrative’s domestic function is to provide continuity, dignity, collective innocence, grievance and an explanation for sacrifice.

Even condemnation can be useful.

When a movement defines itself through opposition to an establishment, denunciation by that establishment may become evidence of authenticity. Being called dangerous by the enemy can increase status among followers precisely because it appears to prove that the movement matters.

This is why cognitive warfare cannot be reduced to a competition over who possesses better facts.

Facts matter enormously. But human beings do not process them in an empty cognitive space. They process them through identity, status, memory, humiliation, aspiration, belonging and fear.

I describe recurring psychological architectures through which people organise questions of power, status, belonging, risk and influence.

Before analysing a message, therefore, we need to reconstruct the system receiving it.

What does this audience fear? What humiliates it, and what restores its dignity? What constitutes strength? What looks like cowardice? Where does status reside? Who possesses the legitimacy to speak? Which compromises are interpreted as prudence, and which are experienced as betrayal? Which losses can be tolerated? Which identities cannot be surrendered?

Without that layer, communication analysis becomes sophisticated projection. We evaluate somebody else’s narrative using our own hierarchy of evidence, our own moral vocabulary and our own assumptions about prestige, then congratulate ourselves for proving that the other side is irrational.

Narratives do not enter empty minds. They enter pre-existing architectures of identity.

Effective influence requires understanding those architectures.

Cognitive warfare begins with cognitive humility

The easiest strategic communication question is: How do we make them believe our narrative?

But the useful one is: Why does their existing narrative work for them?

Perhaps it provides belonging or status. Perhaps it turns humiliation into moral superiority, offers an identifiable enemy in an otherwise chaotic environment, explains personal or collective failure, restores agency or transforms suffering into evidence that sacrifice has meaning. Once a narrative performs one of those functions, correcting three factual inaccuracies may achieve almost nothing. Sometimes direct confrontation even reinforces the architecture sustaining the belief.

Ridicule can confirm that outsiders despise the group. Censorship can transform nonsense into supposedly forbidden knowledge. Condemnation can confer prestige. External pressure can generate precisely the internal cohesion it was supposed to fracture.

Serious influence work therefore requires something more difficult than better slogans or talking points. It requires the ability to enter another system of meaning deeply enough to understand how it works, without confusing understanding with endorsement.

This is not moral relativism.

It is analytical discipline.

You cannot influence a system you refuse to understand.

About the Author

Dr. Andrei Stoiciu is a senior expert in strategic communication, currently serving as Team Leader for Strategic Communication & Multilateral Public Diplomacy within the Global Gateway Strateg.. He is a long-term observer with the OSCE/ODIHR, an evaluator for European Commission People-to-People programs, author of „Influence- Architects 52 Human blueprints. Dr. Stoiciu holds a PhD in Behavioral Sciences and works as a licensed profiler and associated researcher on FIMI and information warfare, with a focus on mapping social trends, persuasion dynamics, and disruptive social games. He has also served as a trainer for law enforcement officials and prosecutors in interrogation and intelligence gathering.