Naval War College Review. Dangerous Narratives: Warfare, Strategy, Statecraft

Dangerous Narratives: Warfare, Strategy, State- craft, ed Ajit K Maan. Washington, DC: Narrative Strategies Ink, 2020 188 pages. $45

BOOK REVIEWS 161

Published by U.S. Naval War College Digital Commons, 2021 162 NAVAL WAR COLLEGE REVIEW

Naval War College Review, Vol. 74 [2021], No. 4, Art. 21

In Dangerous Narratives, Ajit Maan and her coauthors argue that the cognitive and narrative domains of conflict, if not always strategic centers of gravity themselves, certainly have pro- duced strategic effects on those centers. Only recently, though, through a combination of information operations against the United States and recent foreign- policy failures, has the national-security community recognized the growing significance of this domain Professionals, researchers, and students interested in the strategic, policy, and national-security implications of how narratives can create meaning will find Dangerous Narratives a thought-provoking exploration of what the future of conflict will look like Dangerous Narratives is a contributed volume by Dr Ajit Maan and nine additional security practitioners and scholars, each of whom contributes a chapter that develops Maan’s conceptual foundations of “narrative identity theory” and “narrative warfare”; together they examine these concepts’ application to the realms of kinetic warfare, strategy, history, education, and law enforcement Maan, a narrative scholar and the chief executive officer of Narrative Strategies (NS), a consulting firm, introduces us to the concept of narrative warfare: a struggle not over the truth value of information but over the meaning of information. Even though research has shown the importance of the narrative and cognitive spaces in human behavior, Maan argues that this knowledge is not being applied to its fullest in the field of national security.

In section 1, Dr Howard Gambrill Clark, the president of NS and a counter extremism specialist, and Lieutenant Colonel Brian L Steed, USA (Ret), associate professor of military history at the US Army Command and General Staff College, examine the seeming disconnect between various narratives and their associated kinetic conflicts. Drawing on historical conflicts and the relevant strategies of past military leaders, Clark describes ways in which conflicts have been and can be resolved through nonkinetic means via narrative-led subversion—the advantage of such a strategy being that it is limited only by an individual’s creativity. Steed artfully translates the concept of the narrative landscape by comparing it to a physical one that can be eroded, controlled, and exploited, in this case by actors and crafty “narrative entrepreneurs” who use social cleavages to gain a narrative advantage.

Section 2 features case studies and analyses of weaponized narratives, both past and present. Brigadier General Tom Drohan, USAF (Ret), professor emeritus at the US Air Force Academy, provides two in-depth analyses, of China’s and of Russia’s narrative strategies, including how a well-designed narrative can target opponents using Colonel John Boyd’s observe-orient-decide-act (ie, OODA) loop—to disastrous effect China’s strategic use of information condenses the observe and orient steps into one, enabling faster decision-making and more-predictable actions Russian narratives distort how a target orients itself and influence its will and capacity to observe, affecting how the target decides and acts within the loop. Paul Cobaugh, a retired Army warrant officer and special- operations expert, imparts three insightful personal learning experiences from his deployments to Afghanistan. He explains how identity, content, structure, and story create a narrative, and how it can be used strategically to advance successful military operations Dr Aleksandra Nesic, a visit- ing faculty member at both the Army’s John F Kennedy Special Warfare Center and School and the Joint Special Operations University, closes out the section with a fascinating exercise in historical- narrative analysis of the 1389 Battle of Kosovo, including how political elites in Bosnia recontextualize and weaponize it in different ways for strategic purposes.

The final section turns toward the narrative’s effect on statecraft and stability Colonel Christopher Holshek, USA (Ret), critically assesses US forces’ need to institutionalize the effective training and deployment of informational power via a whole-of-nation strategy, citing the success of the Marshall Plan in cultivating a durable narrative in Europe against the Soviet Union Dr Frank G Straub, director of the National Police Foundation’s Center for Mass Violence Response Studies, follows with an assessment of how narrative can influence police-citizen relations. Through neighborhood-level efforts at cooperative and community- involved policing, departments can use narrative to build up trust and legitimacy to better protect citizens. The book closes with a cerebral, future-forward piece on the predicted standardization of soft- power theory through the “noosphere,” written by retired RAND political scientist Dr David Ronfeldt and Naval Postgraduate School professor Dr John Arquilla. They argue that true soft power has been misconceived and therefore does not have the same breadth of theory for application as is found for hard power, resulting in the former’s underuse. They hypothesize that the eventual development of education and training in “noopolitik” will be critical for the strategists of the future.

Dangerous Narratives is an eclectic work that covers a surprising range of topics that one might not consider at first glance to be connected. The book is a testament to the far-reaching interest that the psychological and cognitive realms attract across the field of national-security policy. As I read each chapter, I consistently was captivated by the diversity of thought that such a specific conceptual framework was able to generate. This no doubt was because of the skill with which all the authors took a deceptively complex concept and, in their own terms and in the context of their own experiences, described it clearly. The result is an excellent introductory handbook for the student-practitioner who seeks to understand the impacts of narrative on national-security strategy.

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