Chapter 8: The Modes of Conflict

We know what conflict is — the opposition of wills. We know what it is for — the imposition of one will upon another. We know when it is justified — only under divine authority. Now we must ask: how does conflict express itself? Through what channels does the opposition of wills become visible, audible, and physical?

Conflict has three modes. Not stages. Not phases. Modes — simultaneous, non-linear, and capable of operating independently or in any combination. Only one of them is required for conflict to exist. The other two are expressions of it.

But across all three modes, the mechanism is the same. All warfare is attrition warfare. The resource all conflict seeks to attrite is the will of the opposing party. Every tactic, every strategy, every mode of engagement exists to accomplish one thing: make the adversary's will to continue fighting more costly than the alternative. The moment one party decides that anything — agreement, retreat, surrender, death — is preferable to continuing, the conflict ends. Sometimes peacefully: the will is persuaded, and the parties come to terms. Sometimes violently: the will is destroyed, because the person who held it no longer exists. But the terminal event is always the same. One will ceases to oppose the other. Everything else is method.

The Mental/Spiritual Mode

The first mode — the means of conflict, as distinguished from its expressions — is intellectual and spiritual. In order for conflict to occur, you must be aware that your will differs from another's. At that point of awareness, you are in conflict. It does not require anything from the other party. You may be at war with someone who does not know you exist. The conflict lives inside your own will.

Jesus made this explicit in the Sermon on the Mount:

You have heard that it was said to those of old, "You shall not murder; and whoever murders will be liable to judgment." But I say to you that everyone who is angry with his brother will be liable to judgment.^8.1

Read that carefully. Jesus does not say anger is like murder. He says anger carries the same moral gravity — because the conflict that produces murder already existed when the anger arose. The knife did not create the conflict. The will created the conflict. The knife was merely its physical expression. The mental/spiritual mode is where every conflict begins and where many conflicts end — silently, invisibly, and with consequences that only God can see.

This has a critical implication: you cannot classify conflict by its visible expression alone. A man sitting silently in a room may be at war. A nation smiling at the negotiating table may have already decided on invasion. A believer on their knees may be locked in the fiercest combat of their life. The mental/spiritual mode is the substrate on which everything else operates, and it is the only mode that must be present for conflict to exist.

The eliminative materialists — Paul and Patricia Churchland prominent among them — would deny that mental states are real at all.^8.2 On their account, "will" and "intention" are folk-psychological fictions that neuroscience will eventually replace with descriptions of neural activity. There is no mental/spiritual mode. There is only the brain — a physical organ producing physical effects. Conflict, on this view, is always and only physical: neurons firing, hormones released, bodies moving.

This view cannot account for its own claims. The argument against mental states is itself a mental act — a proposition asserted by what the Churchlands must insist is merely a brain state arguing that brain states are all there is. Eliminative materialism saws off the branch it sits on. It asserts, using the very faculties it denies, that those faculties do not exist. If the Churchlands are right, their argument is not "true" in any meaningful sense — it is simply the output of neurons that happen to have fired in a pattern we interpret as persuasive. They have not escaped the mental/spiritual mode. They have merely denied it while standing in it.

More practically: even if one reduces the mind entirely to the brain, the taxonomy still holds. The brain-state mode is categorically distinct from the verbal and physical modes in its observability, its independence from external expression, and its primacy in initiating the others. Call it what you like — mental, neurological, spiritual, or "complex electrochemical activity" — the interior mode remains prior to and distinct from what emerges from it.

The mental/spiritual mode is attrition of conviction. The will under attack here is not being beaten or shouted down — it is being eroded from within. Conviction fades through doubt, distraction, isolation, exhaustion, or the slow drip of unanswered questions. A man loses a mental/spiritual conflict when he no longer believes what he believed — when his conviction that his position is worth holding has been attrited below the threshold of action. This can happen through a crisis of faith, through prolonged suffering that grinds down resolve, through the accumulation of small compromises that collectively reverse a position, or through the simple passage of time in which a conviction that is not reinforced gradually starves. The believer who stops praying has not been defeated in battle. His conviction has been attrited by neglect — and neglect is one of the Enemy's most efficient weapons.

The Verbal Mode

When internal conflict seeks expression, it reaches first for words.

The verbal mode is the appeal to the mind of the other party — through persuasion, deception, argumentation, command, entreaty, or any form of communication that aims to shift the other's will without physical force. It is the first expression of conflict, though not its origin. And it is far more powerful than most people give it credit for.

Language is not a neutral carrier of information. It is creative power.^8.18 God spoke creation into existence: "And God said, 'Let there be light,' and there was light."^8.3 His speech is not a description of action. It is the action. The Word does the work. And human beings, made in His image, carry a dim reflection of this creative force. Our words do not make stars, but they make and destroy something God considers equally significant: other human wills.

Death and life are in the power of the tongue, and those who love it will eat its fruits.^8.4

This is not poetry. It is ontology. The tongue deals in life and death. Not influence, not persuasion in the weak sense — life and death. James understood: "The tongue is a fire, a world of unrighteousness. The tongue is set among our members, staining the whole body, setting on fire the entire course of life, and set on fire by hell."^8.5 Jesus confirmed it: "On the day of judgment people will give account for every careless word they speak, for by your words you will be justified, and by your words you will be condemned."^8.6

The verbal mode contains a spectrum. At one end: honest discourse between two parties who respect each other's right to their position — argument in the classical sense, where reason appeals to reason. At the other end: propaganda, manipulation, psychological operations — words deployed as weapons, where the verbal is a thin veil over the physical, or a substitute for it. The difference between debate and deception is the difference between persuading a will and subverting one.

Norman Fairclough, the founder of critical discourse analysis, would push back on my framing. Fairclough argues that language is not merely a medium of power but a site of power.^8.7 Discourse does not just express conflict — it constitutes conflict. Power exists in language, not behind it. Ideology is maintained and contested through the very words we use, the categories we accept, the framings we take for granted.

Fairclough's insight is partially correct, and it sharpens my argument. Language does carry power. But Fairclough's framework struggles to explain why some discourse fails. If power is in the language, why do some words fall flat while others transform nations? Why did Patrick Henry's "Give me liberty, or give me death!" ignite a revolution while a thousand equally eloquent speeches vanished into silence? Because the mental/spiritual mode — the will, conviction, and authority behind the words — is the variable that Fairclough acknowledges but cannot fully account for.

God said "Let there be light," and there was light. I can say the same words and the room stays dark. The difference is not linguistic. It is ontological — a matter of who is speaking and what authority they carry. Bruce Lee made the same point from the opposite direction: "Otherwise, his motion is empty and empty motion is like an empty word — no meaning."^8.8 Empty words and empty motion are the same failure — action without the backing of the will. The verbal mode only carries force when the mental/spiritual mode is engaged behind it.

The verbal mode is attrition of certainty. The will under attack here is being destabilized through the medium of language — its confidence in its own position is being degraded. A man loses a verbal conflict when he is no longer certain he is right, or when defending his position becomes socially costlier than abandoning it. This can happen through legitimate persuasion: a sound argument changes a mind, and the conflict ends in agreement — the most peaceful resolution available. It can happen through embarrassment: a position held privately becomes publicly indefensible, and the holder abandons it to preserve reputation. It can happen through exhaustion: the sheer volume and persistence of verbal pressure wears down resistance the way water wears stone. It can happen through manipulation: the adversary reframes the terms so that the target's own values appear to demand capitulation. And it can happen through shaming, mockery, social ostracism, or the quiet withdrawal of approval by people whose opinion the target values. In every case, the mechanism is the same: the target's certainty that his position is worth defending has been attrited below the point where he is willing to continue.

But the verbal mode is not exclusively adversarial. There is a form of verbal conflict that most people experience far more often than debate or propaganda: the cooperative confrontation — two people who both want resolution but whose wills are still colliding. A husband and wife. Two friends after a betrayal. Elders in a church disagreement. The conflict is real — wills are in genuine opposition — but the desired outcome is not the defeat of the other party. It is alignment.

This changes the combat dynamics without abolishing them. The principles still apply — Chapter 14 will show how — but the enemy is redefined. In cooperative verbal conflict, the enemy is not the other person. It is the misunderstanding, the pride, the fear, the unspoken grievance that has wedged itself between two people who belong together. The schwerpunkt in a marriage argument is almost never the presenting complaint. It is the unspoken need or fear underneath it. The person who identifies and names that fear has found the decisive point — and the conflict often collapses once it is exposed to honest light. Initiative in this setting looks like going first in vulnerability: "I was wrong about this." Distance control means choosing the right time and place — not ambushing the conversation when one party is exhausted. No wasted motion means not dredging up old, resolved grievances. And resolve means committing fully to the process of reconciliation, because half-hearted repair teaches the other person that your words mean nothing.

The verbal mode encompasses the full range — from propaganda to prayer, from hostile interrogation to a whispered apology in the dark. Its power is the same at every point on the spectrum: life and death are in the power of the tongue.

The Physical Mode

When words fail or are deemed insufficient, the conflict escalates to the body.

The physical mode asks a single, brutal question: How much do you really believe what you believe? It is an appeal to attrition — the imposition of cost on the other party's will until that will breaks or the attacker's resources are exhausted. Physical conflict strips away everything except conviction. You can lie with words. You cannot lie with blood.

This is where the spiritual dimension becomes most urgent. Physical conflict reveals what the other two modes can conceal: the true depth of a person's commitment. The man who speaks bravely may flee when the blade appears. The man who says nothing may die on his feet. The physical mode is the crucible in which character is tested — and the test is pass/fail.

Thomas Hobbes would argue that the physical mode is not merely one option among three but the foundational reality beneath the others.^8.9 In Hobbes's state of nature, life is "solitary, poor, nasty, brutish, and short." The social contract exists because physical force is the ultimate arbiter. Words only matter because the threat of violence gives them weight. The mental mode is merely calculation in service of avoiding the physical.

Hobbes mistakes the most visible mode for the most fundamental. His own argument depends on a mental act — the calculation that cooperation is preferable to annihilation. The fear of violent death is a mental state. The decision to form a social contract is an act of will. Hobbes proves the primacy of the mental/spiritual mode even while arguing against it. The physical mode is real and terrible, but it derives its meaning from the will that drives it and the will that endures it. A body without a will is a corpse. A will without a body can still be at war.

B.F. Skinner, from a different angle, rejected internal mental states entirely.^8.10 Behavior is shaped by reinforcement, not by "will" or "intention." On Skinner's view, the mental/spiritual mode is unscientific — we can observe words and actions but not will. Conflict should be analyzed purely in terms of observable behaviors and their environmental triggers.

Skinner's framework cannot explain why the same environmental stimulus produces radically different responses in different people — or in the same person at different times. A man under torture may break in five minutes or hold out for five years. The external stimulus is identical. The missing variable is the will — the character-desire-will chain that we described in Chapter 2, operating below the threshold of Skinner's instruments. The martyrs broke behaviorism before Skinner was born. A man who has decided to die for his beliefs does not respond to negative reinforcement the way the model predicts. He responds to a will that the model cannot see.

The physical mode is attrition of capacity. The will under attack here is not being persuaded or destabilized — it is being depleted of the resources it needs to continue operating. A man loses a physical conflict when he can no longer sustain it: he is too wounded to fight, too exhausted to stand, too dead to care. A nation loses when the material cost — lives, equipment, treasure, infrastructure — exceeds what the population is willing to bear. This can happen through direct destruction: casualties mount until the army cannot field a force or the homeland cannot absorb another funeral. It can happen through exhaustion of supply: ammunition runs out, food runs out, fuel runs out, and the will that depends on these resources starves alongside them. It can happen through the collapse of morale among those who are not fighting but who sustain those who do — the families, the workers, the taxpayers whose continued support is the invisible logistics chain of every war. And it can happen through the most final attrition of all: death. When the person who holds the opposing will no longer exists, the conflict ends — not because the will was persuaded or broken, but because it was annihilated. The physical mode is the most expensive form of attrition. It is also the most decisive, because its results cannot be reversed.

Not Stages — Modes

These three do not follow a mandatory sequence. There is no inevitable escalation from mental to verbal to physical. A person may leap from interior conflict directly to violence without a word spoken. The ambush does not begin with a conversation. Two nations may wage verbal warfare for decades without physical escalation. The Cold War was largely fought in modes one and two. A fistfight may begin and end in seconds while the underlying mental conflict persists for years.

The modes operate concurrently. In any given conflict, all three may be active at once. A soldier in combat is simultaneously engaged in the physical mode (firefight), the verbal mode (radio communication, battlefield commands, psychological operations), and the mental/spiritual mode (maintaining the will to fight, assessing the enemy's intent, praying). Isolating one mode for analysis is useful. Assuming the others are absent is dangerous.

The Marine Corps understands this intuitively. MCDP 1, Warfighting, identifies three dimensions of war: the moral, the mental, and the physical — and asserts that the moral dimension is the most decisive, followed by the mental, with the physical being the least decisive on its own.^8.11 Clausewitz said it more poetically: "the physical are almost no more than the wooden handle, whilst the moral are the noble metal, the real bright-polished weapon."^8.12

The Army's FM 3-0 incorporates information advantage as a core element of operational art, treating physical dominance (maneuver, fires), verbal dominance (information operations, civil affairs), and mental dominance (decision superiority, tempo) as concurrent requirements — not sequential phases.^8.13 JP 3-13, the joint publication on Information Operations, defines IO as "the integrated employment of information-related capabilities to influence, disrupt, corrupt, or usurp adversary decision-making" — targeting the mental/spiritual mode through the verbal mode, often without ever engaging the physical.^8.14

The doctrinal existence of Information Operations as a distinct warfighting function confirms the argument: the US military recognizes the mental and verbal modes as distinct, targetable domains — not mere adjuncts to kinetic operations. The will is the objective. Always.

The Will as Battlespace

This taxonomy reframes "battlespace" for the remainder of this book.

The primary battlespace is not a hill, a city, or a sea lane. It is the interior of the human will. The verbal and physical domains are theaters of operation, but the campaign is won or lost in the mind. Christ taught this: "What comes out of the mouth proceeds from the heart, and this defiles a person. For out of the heart come evil thoughts, murder, adultery, sexual immorality, theft, false witness, slander."^8.15 The physical and verbal are expressions of the heart's condition. The heart — the seat of desire, the source of will — is the ground that matters.

Paul Watzlawick's first axiom of communication — "One cannot not communicate"^8.16 — means that even silence is a message. Applied to the modes: the absence of verbal or physical conflict does not mean the absence of conflict. The mental/spiritual mode is always active, even when the other party cannot decode it. The man who says nothing and does nothing may be at peace — or may be gathering intelligence, building resolve, and waiting for the moment to strike. You cannot read the absence of expression as the absence of war.

Alexander Solzhenitsyn understood this better than any military theorist. In The Gulag Archipelago, he documented how the Soviet state deployed all three modes simultaneously — physical brutality, verbal propaganda, and the systematic assault on the mental/spiritual will of its prisoners.^8.17 And he documented how the will of individuals who refused to break outlasted the physical apparatus of the state. The Gulag was designed to destroy the mental/spiritual mode. It failed. The state that built it did not survive. The wills it tried to shatter did.

Now that we understand the three modes of conflict, we can examine how conflict moves between them — escalating, de-escalating, and shifting in ways that the Enemy has mastered over millennia.

Sources and notes

8.1
Matthew 5:21-22 (ESV).

↩
8.2
Paul M. Churchland, Matter and Consciousness: A Contemporary Introduction to the Philosophy of Mind, 3rd ed. (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2013). ISBN 978-0-262-51904-2. Patricia S. Churchland, Neurophilosophy: Toward a Unified Science of the Mind-Brain (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1986). ISBN 978-0-262-03116-5. The eliminative materialist position: folk-psychological terms like "will," "belief," and "intention" will be replaced by neuroscientific descriptions as the science matures.

↩
8.3
Genesis 1:3 (ESV).

↩
8.4
Proverbs 18:21 (ESV).

↩
8.5
James 3:6 (ESV). The full passage (James 3:1-12) is the most sustained biblical treatment of the tongue as a weapon system.

↩
8.6
Matthew 12:36-37 (ESV).

↩
8.7
Norman Fairclough, Language and Power, 3rd ed. (London: Routledge, 2015). ISBN 978-1-138-79096-8. Originally published 1989. See also Discourse and Social Change (Cambridge: Polity Press, 1992). ISBN 978-0-7456-1218-5.

↩
8.8
Bruce Lee, Tao of Jeet Kune Do (Burbank, CA: Ohara Publications, 1975), loc. 15. ISBN 0-89750-048-2.

↩
8.9
Thomas Hobbes, Leviathan (1651), Part I, Chapter 13 ("Of the Natural Condition of Mankind"). The standard scholarly edition is Noel Malcolm, ed., Leviathan, 3 vols. (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 2012). ISBN 978-0-19-960261-4. Available at Project Gutenberg: https://www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/3207. The original 1651 text reads "solitary, poore, nasty, brutish, and short"; spelling modernized here.

↩
8.10
B.F. Skinner, Beyond Freedom and Dignity (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1971). ISBN 978-0-394-42555-0. Repr. Indianapolis: Hackett, 2002. ISBN 978-0-87220-611-5.

↩
8.11
U.S. Marine Corps, MCDP 1: Warfighting (Washington, D.C.: Headquarters, United States Marine Corps, 1997), Chapter 1, "The Nature of War." Available at: https://www.marines.mil/Portals/1/Publications/MCDP%201%20Warfighting.pdf

↩
8.12
Carl von Clausewitz, On War, trans. Col. J.J. Graham (London: N. Trübner, 1873), Book III, Chapter 3. Available at Project Gutenberg: https://www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/1946

↩
8.13
U.S. Department of the Army, FM 3-0: Operations (Washington, D.C.: Headquarters, Department of the Army, October 2022). Available at: https://armypubs.army.mil

↩
8.14
Joint Chiefs of Staff, JP 3-13: Information Operations (Washington, D.C.: Joint Chiefs of Staff). Available at: https://www.jcs.mil/Portals/36/Documents/Doctrine/pubs/jp3_13.pdf

↩
8.15
Matthew 15:18-19 (ESV).

↩
8.16
Paul Watzlawick, Janet Beavin Bavelas, and Don D. Jackson, Pragmatics of Human Communication: A Study of Interactional Patterns, Pathologies, and Paradoxes (New York: W.W. Norton, 1967), 49. ISBN 978-0-393-71005-9. The first axiom: "One cannot not communicate."

↩
8.17
Alexander Solzhenitsyn, The Gulag Archipelago, 1918-1956: An Experiment in Literary Investigation, trans. Thomas P. Whitney and Harry Willetts, abridged by Edward E. Ericson Jr. (New York: Harper Perennial, 2007). ISBN 978-0-06-125380-2. Originally published 1973.

↩
8.18
Steven Pinker's argument that language is an innate biological capacity — "a distinct piece of the biological makeup of our brains... a complex, specialized skill, which develops in the child spontaneously, without conscious effort or formal instruction" — has profound implications for the verbal mode of conflict. If language is instinctual, then its weaponization (propaganda, deception, rhetoric) exploits something deeper than culture; it exploits a faculty wired into the human organism at the most fundamental level. See Steven Pinker, The Language Instinct: How the Mind Creates Language (New York: William Morrow, 1994), 18. ISBN 978-0-06-095833-6. For the more technical treatment of language and thought, see Pinker, Language, Cognition, and Human Nature: Selected Articles (New York: Oxford University Press, 2013). ISBN 978-0-19-932873-4.

↩