The Stack of Power
A mental model for understanding global conflict
0. The Stack of Power
I credit Shane Parrish’s Farnam Street for first introducing me to the idea of mental models — a conceptual idea of how a thing behaves.
Throughout my time in the military, most notably as a Special Forces veteran, I had a mental model of a patrol as an organism. The helicopter lands, and the organism flows off into the woodline, actively working to perceive its surroundings. The organism extends “tentacles” in the form of people — they walk point, they move into a wedge and slither across the terrain. The organism adapts as terrain and obstacles and threats arise.
Having been an engineer by trade for much of my life, I’ve seen how engineering has its own similar concepts and mental models. When anyone builds software, they have a tech stack — a series of components and technical design choices that form layers of dependencies, where higher layers depend on lower ones, where information flows from one layer to another.
The other key aspect of a technology stack is the conversion of information from one form to another as it flows between layers. A UI layer interacts with a business logic layer, which interacts with storage and persistence layers. As information moves, it changes. Information on a screen are pixels and optical energy; they were, at one point, electrons moving through transistors in a CPU to rest on a hard drive as magnetic notches on a spinning disk.
Power, too, is a stack and power, as an idea, can be expressed in a multitude of ways. What I’ve dubbed The Stack of Power — a mental model to understand how power manifests within modern nation states — is necessary to understand who wins the next great power struggle because modern conflict in its myriad forms includes and extends beyond violence.
The next fights (or should they be “contests”) will be determined by legitimacy and production, not just who has the biggest battleship.
1. Power is a stack
Power is the ability to reliably produce outcomes over time despite resistance. Power, like information or energy, can be stored. But power takes maintenance. Entropy is a fundamental law of the universe — the tendency for things to break down over time — so power dissipates over time like a car battery in the winter unless it is continually refreshed and replenished. Additionally, power, like information in a computer or hydrocarbon energy in a car gas tank, can be converted from one form to another. But in doing so, there’s a conversion loss, whether that’s the electricity required to run the computer or the heat from a combustion engine.
In defense circles, between our Armed Forces and our allies and the commercial entities supporting the national security mission, discussions about power — discussions I’ve often been involved in — manifest themselves, primarily, in the forms of military and industrial might. It’s atoms and bits as the form of power, it’s the pace of resupply as the first derivative.
It is a foundationally insufficient view of and expression of power.
To truly understand the mechanisms through which national power and national security can be bolstered or eroded, we need to evolve the conversation — to talk about power in the most fundamental way.
That is why I’ve crafted The Stack of Power for the nation state, which consists of four basic layers.
There are feedback loops across these layers. Higher layers reduce the need for lower layers. If people believe a rule is legitimate (L4), you need fewer enforcers (L1). At the same time, lower layers can prop up the higher layers, but at a cost — force can impose order, but if it hollows out legitimacy, a nation ends up using more force forever until the system breaks.
Power also “converts” across these layers, like how information “converts” into different forms across the software stack. Legitimacy of government converts into taxation of the citizens (L4 → L2). The capital raised from those taxes can convert into institutions as armies are built (L2 → L3). Those institutions can convert into force projection (L3 → L1).
There is an efficiency associated with these power conversions that can be thought of as an “exchange rate.” Legitimacy, for example, buys compliance cheaply, but coercion buys compliance expensively. These are the foundational concepts that underpin The Stack of Power.
1.1 Examples through history
Prominent institutions throughout human history are the Stack of Power manifest.
1.2 The Church
The Catholic Church demonstrates that if you control legitimacy, you can steer politics without occupying territory. At its peak, the Church functioned as:
A shared set of moral language (L4: Legitimacy)
A global administrative network (L3: Coordination)
A major landholder and economic actor (L2: Production)
And occasionally, an enforcer via coercion through aligned rulers (L1: Coercion)
For most of its history, the Catholic Church hasn’t traditionally needed L1 (coercion and force) because it relied on L4 (legitimacy and narrative). It could define what was pious and lawful, shameful or sacred. It could then institutionalize those definitions (L3: institutions and coordination) through rituals and governance, which, in the Catholic Church manifest as services and congregations, respectively.
The lesson from the Church is that when L4 (legitimacy and narrative) are strong, an institution need not rely on physical coercion.
1.2 Labor Unions
Workers as individuals have limited power. Organized labor shows how coordination (L3) converts into power over capital and production (L2) and then into policy and norms (L1). The labor union serves as a coordination machine.
It synchronizes the individual risk into a collective one: “We act together, so retaliation costs more.”
Unions create negotiating discipline: “We speak with one voice.”
They turn labor from a set of individuals into a strategic choke point that controls the means of production.
Like the Church, labor unions need not rely on L1 in the traditional sense (coercion and force) because it has L3 (institutions and coordination) as its expression of power. Labor unions can then create leverage through the synchronization of risks, asks, and action. That synchronization is the conceptual “Mass” from the Army’s Nine Principles of War.
1.3 Financial markets
Markets look “neutral,” but they are anything but. Financial markets exert disciplining power by constraining the set of options available to participants. When a government issues bonds (national debt) and borrows money to fund armies or wars, it is putting itself dependent on the market as a means to express its power through L1 (coercion & force). But if the interest rates rise and the borrowing costs increase, it may no longer be able to raise adequate debt, and the set of options the government has decreases. The Spanish Empire and its Army of Flanders demonstrates this cleanly.
Markets attempt to operate across the entire Stack of Power:
L4 (legitimacy and narrative): Markets leverage confidence and credit in the form of belief that contracts and commitments will hold and that debt will be repaid.
L3 (institutions and coordination): Institutions like stock exchanges, debt markets, and insurance marketplaces standardize exchange and pricing of risk.
L2 (capital and production): Credit, liquidity, and investments are allocated to fund endeavors
L1 (coercion and force): Capital exists and rising costs
The coercion here is not through physical force — it is through the free action in the market which changes the prices of another actor’s choices. When the bond market loses confidence in the value of a nation’s currency or the nation’s ability to manage inflation, or a lender (which could be the troops of the Army of Flanders lending their time) loses confidence that the debt will be repaid, it changes the cost of borrowing for the nation state. If an institution can raise the price of someone’s choices, it can govern them without ever “ruling” over them in the traditional sense.
2. The nation state as the full-stack power actor
The modern state is distinctive because it integrates the entire stack in the traditional senses — unique even from financial markets, which can appear to be a full stack actor. Nation states manifest themselves across The Stack of Power in the following ways:
L4 Legitimacy: Law, civic identity, moral claims
L3 Coordination: Bureaucracy, courts, agencies
L2 Production: Taxation, industry, monetary and trade policy
L1 Coercion: Police and military
Max Weber is attributed with the idea that the nation state claims a monopoly on the legitimate use of force in a territory. We tend to focus on the force in this idea. The word “legitimate” is equally important and it is the connection between the two that is most significant. Force without legitimacy is a recurring drain on power. Force with legitimacy is a backstop, not a dependency.
That’s why, when people think of national security as military and defense apparati through force, they are wrong.
True national security is the protection of every layer of the Stack of Power against adversarial pressure internal or external; it is the ability of a society to continue to choose its own future, maintain its own sovereignty, to chart its path.
That definition of national security requires far more than territorial defense through force (L1), but also:
The legitimacy to prevent internal fracturing (L4)
The institutions to sustain alliances and a nation’s own credibility (L3)
The mechanisms to protect critical domestic production (L2)
2.1 Military and defense
Critics may posit that no, national security is tantamount to a powerful military, to soldiers and tanks and weapons. The reason why that is not true — why national security extends to the entire Stack of Power — is because, to reliably, repeatedly, and at scale produce outcomes to resist an enemy through physical force, elements from each layer of the Stack of Power must work in tandem in a complex dependency chain. Such elements include:
Trained personnel: Is your national population growing or shrinking? Are your people healthy?
Consistent doctrine: Are your training institutions strong? Does it rapidly integrate and update learning?
Intelligence: Do you have a truth seeking culture, predicated on facts not stories?
Command and control: Is there clear authority and legitimacy of leaders? Are your troops disciplined and execute lawful orders?
Logistics and sustainment: Can you fund your armies? Can you convert from capital to munition efficiently?
Industrial production and innovation: Is your defense market attractive to participants? Does your country develop and attract engineering and scientific talent?
Political authorization and legitimacy: Do people believe in what you are doing? Will they enlist? Will they support the politicians that aim to use force?
The soldiers and tanks and weapons are the visible and foundational force at the base layer (L1) of the Stack of Power — they are what constitutes force and coercion, the sharp end of the sword, not the blade.
In fact, these visible elements of militaries are wholly reliant on other layers of The Stack of Power. A military is not a standalone instrument; it is a downstream consumer of legitimacy, coordination, and production upon which it relies for its existence.
Legitimacy determines if the taxable public will sustain costs, allies will trust commitments, and lenders will be repaid.
Institutions determine whether a strategy turns into plans that turn into execution
Capital and production determines whether the plans can be supplied, maintained and replenished.
If any one of these layers fail, so too will the ability of a nation state’s ability to exert force without a high cost or damage to itself. Any country can have elite personnel and powerful weapons; if the layers that constitute legitimacy, coordination, and production corrode, that nation will be strategically weak — legitimacy falls, institutions fight amongst themselves, production stutters, logistics fail, readiness drops, deterrence collapses, and war risk rises as the perceived costs of conflict fall for rivals.
Carl von Clausewitz’s basic point that war is a continuation of politics by other means highlights the dependency chain articulated above.
If the political aims aren’t coherent or sustainable (if they do not hold legitimacy), then even a tactical success can still become a strategic failure as national power is channeled through force and coercion to a futile end.
3. Modern conflict: Fighting across the stack
Now that we’ve established that the modern nation state must act across every layer in The Stack of Power, we can understand how a modern nation state’s full-stack strategy can enable it to defeat or defend against rivals.
It is plain to see that, to undermine a nation state’s national security, they need not defeat a military first — they can aim at the upper layers to make the military irrelevant, unaffordable, or politically unusable.
Modern conflict is typified by an increase in pressure applied in mixed forms like narrative shaping, cyber disruption, economic coercion, and proxy conflicts. Look no further than China’s well-documented history of grey zone activities — “coercive actions that are shy of armed conflict but beyond normal diplomatic, economic, and other activities”, Russia’s bots in the UK’s Brexit campaign, and Russia’s sponsorship of climate NGOs in Germany to drive energy dependence on Russian Gas Imports.
Such actions are not part of a separate domain, but are coordinated and integrated attacks against a nation’s national security when national security is defined across the entire Stack of Power.
Full stack coercion could look something like this: Misinformation campaigns degrade legitimacy, internal institutional conflict ensues, production shocks result in turn, and then, once deterrent credibility is weakened, threaten kinetic force.
If a nation does not have the power to defend each layer of the Stack of Power, it is exhibiting weakness. Military defense through coercion and force is a necessary component of power, but it is only a component.
True national security extends across The Stack of Power to keep each layer resilient under pressure so L1 (coercion & force) is a last result, not a default mode of governance between nations.
It is through this lens — through the total Stack of Power — that the United States must view its national security strategy. Political authorization and legitimacy matter as much as trained personnel; logistics and sustainment for kinetic operations matter as much as industrial supply and innovation which matter as much as the strength of America’s monetary system.
Until we raise our gaze to include but extend beyond force and deterrence and coercion as the sole expressions of national security, America and her allies will remain at risk from near-peer adversaries who seek to readily disrupt the West by levying attacks at each layer in the Stack of Power.