Beyond Competitive Strategies

Why the United States Must Prepare for an Era of Compound Security Competition.

Recent commentary revisiting the legacy of Andrew Marshall, George Kennan, and Cold War competitive statecraft reflects an important instinct.

As strategic competition with China, Russia, Iran, and other revisionist actors intensifies, there is understandable interest in recovering approaches that once enabled the United States to compete successfully over the long term.

That instinct is sound.

Yet it also raises a more fundamental question.

What if the challenge confronting the United States is not simply the need to recover competitive strategies, but rather the need to recognize that the character of geopolitical competition itself has fundamentally changed?

If that is true, then many of today’s strategic debates are asking the right questions within an increasingly outdated frame of reference.

This is not to suggest that the insights of the likes of Kennan, Marshall, Sun Tzu, Corbett, Boyd, Clausewitz, or others have somehow become obsolete.

Far from it.

Their work remains foundational to the study and practice of strategy.

Rather, the issue is that they developed their theories within a geopolitical environment whose organizing assumptions differed significantly from today’s.

The Cold War, despite its complexity, remained principally a competition among states operating across relatively distinguishable domains. Military competition, economic competition, diplomacy, intelligence, ideology, and commercial power certainly interacted, but they remained conceptually separable and institutionally manageable.

That world no longer exists.

Today, geopolitical competition unfolds across tightly interconnected political, economic, technological, informational, financial, environmental, demographic, commercial, and military systems. Events in one domain rapidly generate second-, third-, and fourth-order consequences across many others. A cyber intrusion disrupts global supply chains. Climate insecurity accelerates migration. Migration reshapes domestic politics. Domestic political polarization alters alliance cohesion. Commercial infrastructure becomes strategic infrastructure. Artificial intelligence transforms military capability while simultaneously changing labor markets, information ecosystems, and economic competitiveness.

These are not separate security challenges.

They are manifestations of a common strategic condition.

Over the past three decades I have described this condition as the Compound Security Dilemma and the resulting environment as one of Compound Security Competition, or CsC.

The defining characteristic of this environment is not simply that there are more threats. History has never suffered from a shortage of threats.

The defining characteristic is that threats increasingly converge, reinforce one another, and generate cumulative strategic effects across multiple systems simultaneously. Security problems no longer emerge sequentially. They emerge coincidently and interactively. Military coercion, economic leverage, commercial investment, technological innovation, information operations, criminal networks, climate pressures, pandemics, migration, and political instability increasingly function as components of continuous campaigns rather than isolated events.

This distinction matters because strategy is ultimately about matching institutions, concepts, and instruments of power to the character of the environment in which competition occurs.

Throughout history, major strategic failures have often resulted not from a shortage of military capability, but from conceptual lag—the persistence of inherited frameworks after the competitive environment has changed.

That danger confronts the United States today.

Much of our strategic architecture remains organized around industrial-age distinctions between peace and war, domestic and foreign policy, military and civilian institutions, public and private sectors, defense and commerce. Those distinctions continue to structure budgets, organizations, professional military education, planning processes, and even the language through which we describe security itself.

Our principal competitors increasingly organize very differently.

China’s Belt and Road Initiative is simultaneously an economic program, a geopolitical strategy, a commercial network, a technological platform, a diplomatic instrument, and a long-term military enabler.

Iran’s regional activities blend proxy warfare, ideological mobilization, commercial finance, maritime disruption, political influence, and calibrated military coercion into one persistent campaign.

Russia combines conventional force, cyber operations, energy policy, financial pressure, information operations, organized crime, and diplomacy into integrated competitive behavior that resists categorization within traditional strategic frameworks.

Even violent extremist organizations demonstrated this evolution decades ago by recognizing that modest tactical actions could trigger disproportionate political, economic, military, and psychological effects across interconnected societies.

These actors are not merely adapting.

They are operating according to a different governing logic.

That realization suggests that our central challenge is larger than recovering competitive strategies.

It is evolving them.

Competitive strategy has traditionally asked: How do we exploit our adversary’s comparative weaknesses over time?

Compound Security Competition asks an additional question: How do we shape an entire competitive ecosystem so that resilience accumulates among allies while interconnected costs, constraints, and strategic dilemmas accumulate for competitors?

This is a fundamentally different conception of campaigning.

Its principal objective is not simply battlefield success.

Nor even deterrence in its traditional forms.

Its objective is to shape the evolving competitive environment itself.

I. Competitive Strategies Were Never Wrong—Only Incomplete

Andrew Marshall’s enduring contribution was not simply that he encouraged long-term thinking. Others had done that before him. Nor was it merely his insistence that strategy should seek comparative rather than absolute advantage.

His real contribution was methodological.

He compelled strategists to ask a deceptively simple question:

Where should we compete?

Not every arena of competition serves American interests equally. Not every technological race deserves to be entered. Not every military imbalance requires symmetrical response.

Strategy, properly understood, is fundamentally about choice—about selecting the arenas, timelines, and forms of competition that maximize one’s comparative advantages while magnifying an adversary’s structural weaknesses.

George Kennan reached similar conclusions decades earlier.

Containment was never simply military deterrence. It represented an exercise in strategic patience. Kennan recognized that Soviet power rested upon profound political and economic contradictions that could not easily be resolved. The objective therefore was not immediate victory but disciplined competition over time—maintaining sufficient strength to prevent expansion while allowing those contradictions gradually to erode Soviet power from within.

The Cold War’s outcome is often described as the consequence of an arms race that bankrupted the Soviet Union.

This interpretation captures only part of the story.

The United States did not prevail because it consistently outspent the Soviet Union.

Rather, it competed in ways that encouraged the Soviet Union to spend disproportionately on maintaining an increasingly unsustainable strategic position while the United States continued benefiting from innovation, productivity, alliances, and the adaptive capacities of open societies.

That distinction remains profoundly important today.

Competitive strategy has always sought asymmetry rather than symmetry.

Its purpose has never been to match competitors system-for-system, but to steer competition toward areas where one’s comparative strengths produce cumulative advantage over time.

In this respect, contemporary discussions urging a return to competitive strategies are entirely correct.

Yet they remain incomplete.

They assume that today’s strategic environment is fundamentally analogous to that of the late Cold War.

It is not.

Andy Marshall’s analytical framework emerged within a geopolitical environment where state competitors remained the dominant actors; where military, economic, technological, diplomatic, and ideological competition, while interacting, remained sufficiently distinct to permit relatively discrete policy responses; where geography retained comparatively stable strategic meanings; and where escalation, although dangerous, generally followed recognizable pathways.

Today’s environment exhibits different governing characteristics.

Competition increasingly unfolds simultaneously across multiple interconnected systems.

Economic policy immediately affects technological competitiveness.

Commercial investment reshapes geopolitical alignments.

Energy transitions alter industrial capacity.

Climate insecurity influences migration.

Migration reshapes domestic politics.

Domestic political fragmentation influences alliance cohesion.

Artificial intelligence transforms military effectiveness while simultaneously altering labor markets, financial systems, information ecosystems, education, and political legitimacy.

Maritime chokepoints influence inflation.

Pandemics rapidly become national security crises.

Supply chains become instruments of coercion.

Data becomes strategic terrain.

These developments do not merely coexist.

They reinforce one another.

The result is an environment characterized less by isolated competitions than by continuously interacting competitive systems.

This distinction has profound implications for strategy.

Competitive strategy traditionally encourages decision-makers to identify an opponent’s center of gravity, structural weakness, or comparative disadvantage.

Compound Security Competition begins from a different premise.

It asks how multiple competitive systems interact to create cascading strategic effects that no single instrument of national power can adequately explain—or manage—in isolation.

The strategic object therefore changes.

Instead of concentrating exclusively upon defeating opposing military capabilities or exhausting opposing economies, successful statecraft increasingly depends upon shaping the broader ecosystem within which all competitors operate.

Resilience becomes as strategically significant as coercion.

Commercial investment becomes as consequential as force posture.

Infrastructure becomes deterrence.

Technology becomes diplomacy.

Education becomes national security.

Campaigning increasingly consists not of episodic military operations but of the continuous orchestration of military, diplomatic, developmental, commercial, financial, informational, technological, and societal instruments to influence the evolving architecture of competition itself.

The challenge confronting the United States, therefore, is not recovering the strategic wisdom of Marshall or Kennan.

It is extending that wisdom into an era whose governing dynamics neither could have fully anticipated.

Competitive strategy remains necessary.

Compound Security Competition seeks to explain why it is no longer sufficient.

II. The Governing Dynamics of Compound Security Competition

If strategy begins with understanding the character of the environment, then the first task before today’s strategists is analytical rather than operational. We must first understand the governing dynamics shaping contemporary competition before deciding how best to compete within it.

The central proposition of Compound Security Competition is straightforward:

The defining characteristic of contemporary competition is not the multiplication of threats but their convergence.

This distinction is more significant than it first appears.

For most of the twentieth century, strategists tended to examine security problems as relatively discrete phenomena. Military planners studied military balances. Economists examined markets and production. Diplomats negotiated alliances. Public health officials managed disease. Environmental scientists studied climate. Intelligence agencies focused on foreign actors. Each community possessed its own institutions, analytic frameworks, professional cultures, and planning horizons.

That division of labor was both understandable and effective for much of the industrial era.

It is becoming progressively less useful.

Today, the boundaries separating these domains have become increasingly permeable. Decisions made within one system routinely generate cascading effects across many others. Strategic outcomes emerge not from individual actions alone but from the interaction of multiple systems operating simultaneously.

This is the defining condition of Compound Security Competition.

It is governed by several reinforcing dynamics.

Convergence

The first dynamic is convergence.

Military competition increasingly converges with commercial competition.

Technology converges with finance.

Climate converges with migration.

Migration converges with domestic political stability.

Artificial intelligence converges with economic productivity, military capability, and information integrity.

Commercial ports become strategic infrastructure.

Supply chains become instruments of coercion.

Energy networks become geopolitical leverage.

Financial markets become operational terrain.

None of these relationships are entirely new.

What is new is their increasing simultaneity and mutual dependence.

Rather than producing isolated strategic problems, these interactions create reinforcing systems whose cumulative effects often exceed the intentions of any individual actor.

Coincidence

The second governing dynamic is coincidence.

Strategists have traditionally examined threats sequentially.

Today’s competitors increasingly present them simultaneously.

A regional military crisis unfolds while supply chains remain disrupted.

A pandemic coincides with strategic competition over critical minerals.

Climate disasters occur alongside cyber attacks.

Financial instability reinforces political extremism.

Maritime disruption accelerates inflation.

None of these developments need be centrally coordinated to produce strategic advantage for competitors.

Their coincidence alone generates cumulative stress upon decision-makers, institutions, and societies.

This distinction fundamentally alters campaigning.

Instead of responding to isolated crises, successful competitors increasingly seek to create persistent strategic dilemmas requiring continuous allocation of limited political attention, fiscal resources, and institutional capacity.

Strategic exhaustion replaces decisive battle as an operational objective.

Cascading Effects

The third governing dynamic is amplification.

Interactions among systems rarely remain localized.

Small actions increasingly generate disproportionate strategic consequences because they propagate across tightly connected political, economic, technological, informational, and societal networks.

The global financial crisis demonstrated this.

COVID-19 demonstrated this.

Disruptions in the Red Sea demonstrated this.

A cyber attack upon critical infrastructure may rapidly influence energy markets, insurance costs, public confidence, alliance cohesion, inflation, electoral politics, and military readiness simultaneously.

Likewise, a modest investment in strategic infrastructure may generate decades of diplomatic influence, commercial dependence, technological integration, military access, and political leverage.

Power increasingly resides not simply in controlling individual domains but in understanding how effects propagate across them.

Polycentric Competition

The fourth dynamic concerns agency.

Twentieth-century strategic thought generally treated states as the dominant actors.

Today’s environment is considerably more distributed.

States remain indispensable.

Yet multinational corporations, sovereign wealth funds, criminal organizations, terrorist networks, technology firms, financial institutions, cities, universities, non-governmental organizations, media platforms, diaspora communities, and private investors increasingly influence strategic outcomes alongside governments.

Competition therefore becomes polycentric.

Power disperses across multiple interacting centers of influence.

Statecraft correspondingly requires new methods of coordination.

Governments must increasingly shape ecosystems rather than merely direct bureaucracies.

Leadership becomes less about centralized control than strategic orchestration.

Temporal Compression

Finally, Compound Security Competition alters time itself.

Strategic competition remains fundamentally long-term.

Operational decision-making does not.

Artificial intelligence, algorithmic finance, cyber operations, social media, autonomous systems, and global communications have dramatically compressed decision cycles.

Leaders now confront a paradox.

The strategic competition extends across decades.

The operational tempo increasingly unfolds in minutes.

Maintaining strategic patience under conditions of operational acceleration may become one of the defining leadership challenges of the twenty-first century.

Institutions optimized either for rapid tactical reaction or deliberate strategic planning increasingly struggle to reconcile both simultaneously.

This widening gap between strategic duration and operational tempo represents one of the least appreciated dimensions of contemporary competition.

Taken together, these governing dynamics produce an environment fundamentally different from that confronting Kennan or Marshall.

Their theories remain valid.

The competitive system has changed.

The principal implication follows directly.

The objective of strategy can no longer be understood solely as defeating adversaries, deterring aggression, or preserving favorable balances of power.

Those remain essential tasks.

Increasingly, however, successful strategy must also shape the evolving architecture of competition itself.

This is why campaigning—not isolated operations—once again assumes central importance.

Campaigns become the means through which states synchronize military, diplomatic, developmental, commercial, financial, technological, informational, and societal instruments into coherent efforts capable of influencing multiple interacting systems simultaneously.

Campaigning therefore becomes less an operational activity than the principal expression of national strategy in an age of Compound Security Competition.

III. Campaigning as the Organizing Logic of Compound Security Competition

If the defining characteristic of contemporary competition is the interaction of multiple strategic systems, then it follows that strategy itself requires a different organizing logic.

That logic is campaigning.

Unfortunately, campaigning has become one of the most misunderstood concepts in modern strategic thought.

Within military doctrine, campaigning is frequently reduced to operational sequencing—a method for linking battles and operations to strategic objectives over time. While useful, this understanding remains unnecessarily narrow.

Campaigning is considerably more than operational design.

Campaigning is the continuous orchestration of national and multinational power to shape the evolving conditions of competition.

Its purpose is not simply to defeat opposing military forces.

Its purpose is to influence the strategic environment itself.

This distinction becomes increasingly important under conditions of Compound Security Competition.

Military victory alone rarely resolves contemporary security problems.

The United States and its allies have repeatedly demonstrated extraordinary operational competence while achieving only mixed strategic outcomes.

The campaigns in Iraq and Afghanistan revealed this paradox most clearly.

American forces routinely prevailed tactically.

Yet tactical success repeatedly failed to generate durable strategic advantage because military operations were insufficiently integrated with political development, economic reconstruction, governance, commercial investment, regional diplomacy, information operations, institutional resilience, and local legitimacy.

Operations succeeded.

Campaigns often did not.

The lesson extends well beyond counterinsurgency.

China’s Belt and Road Initiative is fundamentally a campaign.

It links infrastructure financing, commercial investment, technology transfer, political relationships, educational exchanges, logistics, digital connectivity, energy development, and eventually military access into one long-term effort to reshape Eurasian and global geopolitical geography.

Likewise, Russia’s activities across Europe, the Middle East, and Africa cannot be adequately understood as disconnected military operations or influence campaigns.

They constitute persistent efforts to shape the strategic environment by exploiting interactions among political instability, energy dependence, information manipulation, corruption, private military organizations, cyber capabilities, and diplomatic leverage.

Iran’s regional approach similarly reflects campaigning rather than episodic proxy warfare.

Even democratic societies often fail to recognize that competitors are campaigning because we continue evaluating events individually rather than systemically.

We ask whether an infrastructure project is economic.

Whether a cyber attack is technological.

Whether migration is humanitarian.

Whether inflation is economic.

Whether port investments are commercial.

Whether rare-earth minerals are industrial policy.

Our competitors ask a different question.

How do these activities reinforce one another?

That difference in perspective increasingly determines strategic success.

Campaigning therefore begins not with force deployment but with strategic diagnosis.

It seeks to understand how geography, economics, technology, governance, culture, commerce, finance, information, and security interact across time and space.

Only then does it determine how individual instruments of national power should contribute to cumulative strategic effects.

Campaigns become adaptive rather than linear.

They continuously learn.

They continuously integrate.

They continuously reprioritize.

Success depends less upon executing predetermined plans than upon maintaining favorable trajectories within evolving systems.

Campaigning is therefore fundamentally anticipatory.

Rather than reacting to crises after they emerge, effective campaigns seek to influence the conditions from which future crises arise.

This distinction separates prevention from response.

Traditional deterrence sought primarily to prevent adversaries from taking specific actions.

Campaigning seeks to influence the broader competitive environment such that adversaries encounter progressively fewer favorable opportunities while allies accumulate increasing resilience and strategic confidence.

This is where the relationship between campaigning and resilience becomes especially important.

Resilience is often misunderstood as passive endurance.

Strategically, resilience is active competitive advantage.

Resilient societies recover faster.

Resilient economies absorb shocks.

Resilient alliances maintain cohesion.

Resilient institutions adapt without losing legitimacy.

Resilient commercial networks continue functioning under pressure.

Resilient infrastructure denies competitors opportunities for coercion.

Consequently, investments in resilience are not simply domestic policy.

They are strategic campaigning.

The same logic applies internationally.

Development assistance.

Commercial investment.

Educational partnerships.

Infrastructure modernization.

Digital connectivity.

Energy diversification.

Supply-chain resilience.

Governance reform.

Institutional capacity building.

These are frequently treated as separate policy domains.

Under conditions of Compound Security Competition they become mutually reinforcing components of continuous campaigns.

This understanding also reshapes deterrence.

Deterrence by punishment remains essential.

Deterrence by denial remains indispensable.

Increasingly, however, effective campaigning depends upon …

‘deterrence through resilience’

Competitors become less likely to pursue coercion when societies, institutions, commercial systems, alliances, and regional architectures possess the capacity to absorb disruption without producing strategic collapse.

Resilience therefore becomes both defensive capability and offensive competitive advantage.

The implications extend beyond government.

Campaigning under conditions of Compound Security Competition requires contributions from public institutions, private enterprise, universities, financial markets, technology firms, civil society, allied governments, regional organizations, and local communities.

Strategy becomes genuinely polycentric.

Leadership correspondingly changes.

The strategist becomes less a commander directing isolated instruments than an orchestrator aligning multiple centers of initiative toward common strategic purposes.

This is why campaigning increasingly represents the principal expression of statecraft.

It integrates rather than separates.

It anticipates rather than reacts.

It shapes rather than merely responds.

Above all, it recognizes that in an era of Compound Security Competition, the object of strategy is no longer simply victory in conflict.

It is the continuous creation and preservation of favorable competitive conditions before, during, and after conflict alike.

That is the essence of campaigning in the twenty-first century.

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