Support to Resistance and Resilience (SRR) is focused on people—both for the populations who are building resilience and resistance skills, and on the SOF professionals who advise and assist those populations. Understanding, defining, and measuring the will to resist is a complex topic. What is the relationship between the people and their will to resist, and what is SOF’s role in shaping that will? Is there a difference between the will to win and the will to fight?
For military planners struggling for numerical data to evaluate, the quantifiable effectiveness of these asymmetric approaches to conflict can prove challenging. Should capturing a willingness to resist be focused on the group or individual level? How can you measure a given group or individual’s will to resist, especially when that will is likely to vary over time? What are the specific measures of effectiveness and measures of performance for SRR in an irregular or conventional threat environment?
One method of evaluating a region or country is through analyses of political, military, economic, social, information, infrastructure, physical environment, and time (PMESII-PT) metrics. Can PMESII-PT or other doctrinal analytical tools usefully measure the capabilities of a resistance movement, the physical resilience of a nation-state, and the psychological will to resist? Are there lessons from the application of these analytical tools to counterinsurgency that could be applied to SRR? Ultimately, if we can better measure the will to resist using these frameworks, might that inform where the next resistance movement will be likely to occur?
- Bailey, Lt. Col. Koaalii C., "Department of War: Defining the Warrior Ethos," AWC SSP, 2026.
- Bailey addresses this by defining the "will to fight" as a disciplined identity that cannot be simply issued through policy, but must instead be forged individually through shared physical hardship and friction. He argues that controlled weekly combatives training serves as a universal laboratory where individual service members can repeatedly confront fear, navigate cognitive overload, and make tactical decisions against a resisting opponent. This iterative exposure to adversity builds the psychological resilience and individual hardiness necessary to sustain a collective fighting solidarity and an authentic will to fight.
- Jenkins II, Maj. Kenneth M., "In Search of Will: How Has the Concept of Will Evolved in Conflict," SAASS thesis, 2025, 72 pgs.
- Jenkins answers this by establishing a comprehensive definition of "will" synthesized from British and Italian military theorists from WWI and WWII, defining it as the psychological and material capacity of individuals, military forces, and nations to endure hardship, resist external pressures, and persist in pursuing strategic objectives. He explains that will operates simultaneously across multiple levels: at the national level as a collective moral force, at the operational level as strategic decision-making, and at the tactical level as individual resilience and unit cohesion. Ultimately, Jenkins identifies the individual as the common denominator for will, arguing that attributes like resilience, morale, material support, resolve, and general cognition must be understood in order to shape and measure an adversary's or population's will to resist.
- Kissinger, Lt. Col. Michael, "Avoiding Strategic Failure: Understanding Strategic Resolve," AWC paper, 2025, 18 pgs.