Bill Rivera
In February 2019, the author, with Arnel David, argued in these pages that the United States military’s understanding of lethality was dangerously incomplete. The concept had become a defining priority of the Department of Defense (DoD)—appearing across modernization strategies, acquisition frameworks, and doctrinal literature—yet it was treated almost exclusively as a physical phenomenon: the ability to find, fix, and destroy enemy forces. We argued then that this was insufficient. To view lethality only through a physical lens limits its full potential. Lethality at the strategic level, we contended, must also include the capacity to break an adversary’s will to fight. And that capacity is increasingly exercised not through firepower, but through influence. We have used influence to support kinetic action. This paper argues that this order of events is inverted: kinetic action should operate within the framework of strategic influence, not the other way around.
The strategic competition between the United States and its rivals has intensified. The cost of kinetic warfare—in blood, treasure, and strategic credibility—has grown exponentially. Meanwhile, peer and near-peer competitors have continued to invest heavily in influence-based strategies, reshaping political environments, undermining alliances, and projecting power without firing a shot. The gap between what the United States understands as lethality and what its adversaries practice as strategy has not closed. If anything, it has widened.
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