Shaping, Sustaining, and Decisive: The Three Types of Action

A simple framework to make your activism more effective

Resister holds a sign at a coal train blockade in 2016. Photo by the author.

Welcome to Biocentric, a newsletter about sustainability, greenwashing, and resistance to empire. I’m author and organizer Max Wilbert. If you want to follow, you can subscribe for free. Paid subscribers, in return for supporting this publication and the work you see here, receive access to rare private posts with behind-the-scenes reports and unreleased drafts.

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There are many analytical models of social change that can be used to help us understand and advance the process.

At a direct action training I attended on Wednesday, the trainer, a brilliant friend named Lina Blount who works for the Earth Quaker Action Team, shared the “4 roles of social change.” This framework was introduced by Bill Moyer, who observed that most people and organizations working for social change fall into one of four categories:

1. Helpers are the people and organizations working to provide direct services to those in need. This includes mutual aid groups, food banks, shelters, animal rescue and wildlife rehabilitation organizations, etc.

2. Advocates are the second type; they work inside the existing state to create change. This includes politicians (at least those who are legitimately seeking social reform), movement lobbyists (they do exist, they’re just outnumbered and outspent a thousand to one by corporations), lawyers, folks working via ballot initiatives, and so on.

3. Organizers work within the framework that more people = more power. They work to bring people together through finding common cause, education, and mobilization. Unions fall into this category, as do social change educators.

4. Rebels, the final type, prioritize disruptive action outside “approved” channels. They tend to bend and break rules, eschew mass action in favor of smaller, more agile groups, and don’t like working inside the system.

As Lina explained, the usefulness of this model lies in it helping us to understand and collaborate across strategic differences. I fall into the “rebel” category, yet there is great work done in other arenas as well. Understanding this helps bypass the unfortunately common infighting about which tactics we choose to use; in a healthy movement, these approaches work in parallel toward broadly shared goals.

In this piece, I want to share another simple yet powerful analytical tool that can be useful to our movements, especially for those working in the realm of campaign / movement / revolutionary strategy.

Shaping, sustaining, and decisive action

The concepts of shaping, sustaining, and decisive action originate in the US military. As readers of Biocentric know, the military is not an organization I support; its the biggest polluter on the planet, purveyor of mass death and imperialist war, architect of torture and mass civilian murder, and effectively the armed wing of corporate neo-colonial capitalism.

Nonetheless, the US military is worth learning from. These categories are useful outside of a military context, and even to those engaged in non-violent political organizing; the army, for example, uses these categories of action to organize its bribery and deceit military recruiting campaigns. And, as Ovid wrote two thousand years ago:

“It is right to learn, even from the enemy.” (Fas est et ab hoste doceri.)

Seneca said something much the same, writing that one should “read like a spy in the enemy’s camp.”

With this in mind, let’s look at what Army Field Manual 3-0, Operations (yes, military field manuals are available for free online), says about the three categories of action — shaping, sustaining, and decisive. Since military manuals are written as poorly as you would expect, I’ve edited these slightly for clarity:

Decisive actions

“The decisive operation directly accomplishes the mission. It determines the outcome of a major operation, battle, or engagement and is the focal point. Any element or specific task in the plan can be the decisive piece, depending on what the mission itself is.”

Shaping actions

“A shaping operation creates and preserves conditions for the success of the decisive operation through effects on the enemy, the local population, and terrain.”

Sustaining actions

“A sustaining operation enables the decisive operation or shaping operations by generating and maintaining combat power. Sustaining operations differ from decisive and shaping operations because they are focused internally (on friendly forces) rather than externally (on the enemy or environment). They typically address logistics and protection essential to the success of decisive and shaping operations. However, sustaining operations cannot be decisive themselves.”

Example: global anti-whaling movement

Lets translate this framework into an activist and revolutionary context. Last week’s piece here on Biocentric focused on an eco-sabotage action which took place in 1986, and was part of the broader fight to stop commercial whaling around the world. In the context of the global anti-whaling movement, here are three examples of each type of action that were used:

Decisive (directly accomplish the mission)

• Sink whaling ships and destroy onshore facilities and equipment

• Enact international moratorium on whaling

• Directly intervene by getting between whaling ships and whales

Shaping (create conditions for success)

• Conduct education and media outreach about why whales should be protected

• Work inside national governments, regulatory agencies, and international organizations for whale protection

• Do research and create art on the intelligence, beauty, and ecological importance of whales to shift cultural norms

Sustaining (help the movement to continue and grow)

• Fundraising to sustain whale protection, research, and education groups

• Securing equipment and vessels necessary for oceanic whale protection missions

• Recruiting a steady stream of people to take part in the movement

Example: the movement to stop deep sea mining

We can do the same exercise in regards to deep sea mining; the resulting actions look similar:

Decisive

• Sink ships and destroy onshore facilities and equipment

• Enact international moratorium

• Directly intervene by getting between the mining ships and the locations they want to access

• Prevent mining companies from accessing necessary ancillary services (“pillars of power”) required for their projects (for example: insurance, union workers, equipment suppliers, etc.) via pressure campaigns

Shaping

• Conduct educational work and media outreach about why the deep ocean deserves to be protected, and about alternative pathways for social change that don’t require these minerals

• Work inside national governments, regulatory agencies, and international organizations for deep sea protection

• Do research and create art on the beauty, biodiversity, and ecological importance of the deep sea to shift cultural norms

Sustaining

• Fundraising

• Securing equipment and vessels

• Recruiting new people to take part in the movement

Example: stop a development project

Now lets imagine that we’re applying the same approach to a localized campaign, smaller in scale: a development project which threatens to destroy wildlife habitat and lead to gentrification. The categories of action might look something like this:

Decisive

• Get permits denied by regulatory agencies

• Drive the developer to bankruptcy

• Force them to abandon development plans due to sheer fatigue of constant battle or fear of the consequences of continuing

• Prevent them from accessing necessary ancillary services (“pillars of power”) developers require (for example: insurance, workers, equipment suppliers, etc.) via pressure campaigns

• Physically sabotage or destroy equipment

• Get a court order forcing them to stop

Shaping

• Conduct educational work and media outreach in the community

• Work inside local government and regulatory agencies

• Do research and create art on the beauty, biodiversity, and ecological importance of the site

Sustaining

• Fundraising

• Recruiting new people

• Conduct training

Sequencing and prioritizing action

Effective campaigns require proper sequencing of actions. As this article has showed, the shaping / sustaining / decisive framework can help us to conceptualize the full scope of a campaign and understand how to design the actions needed to move forward. This approach also reminds us that decisive actions are the core of any campaign. As FM 3-0 states:

“Commanders must first visualize the decisive operation, and then design shaping and sustaining operations around it.”

Our movements rarely have commanders, but we do have leaders, organizers, councils, and cooperative structures. Those of us in these roles must focus on the decisive actions that directly achieve our goals. Shaping and sustaining actions are essential, but only in relationship to clearly defined decisive actions. FM 3-0 further states that, in a situation where resources aren’t unlimited — e.g., every activist battle and revolutionary struggle ever fought — conserving those resources by prioritization is essential:

“Some shaping operations, especially those executed simultaneously with the decisive operation, may be economy of force actions [designed to achieve necessary results with minimum allocation of resources]. However, if the force available does not permit simultaneous decisive and shaping operations, the commander sequences shaping operations around the decisive operation.”

In other words: keep your eyes on the prize.

Shaping, sustaining, and decisive action. A simple framework, but a very helpful one.

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