What is Power?

I received a letter from a student who was tasked with answering the question "what is power" He was enterprising enough to reach out to a group of folks whose answer he felt would hold some water. I put the task to our intern, CJ, from the US Naval Academy thinking that I would then liberally edit his writing. However, his response is worthy of this blog and makes me feel certain that our Academies are turning out warrior-scholars worthy to lead our Armed Forces.
Stay aware and be powerful. best, Mark D.
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“What is power?” Now there is a difficult question. To answer it, you first need to define what kind of power you are talking about. In general terms, I define power as the degree of something’s ability to cause an effect on something else. Someone who can lift 400 pounds above his head has a certain degree of power because he can cause an effect- movement- on a target- the weight. His power has limits because he can’t lift, say, 500 pounds. The question is why he can’t and why this is important. Essentially, power can be broken down into three parts: Enablers, Methods, and Targets.

What do we really mean when we say “Knowledge is power?” Knowledge itself does nothing to change our surroundings, and to a student, it can be frustrating to study when the knowledge you collect doesn’t seem to change anything in your life today. What knowledge does is make you aware of opportunities that can help you get what you want and dangers that can prevent you from causing the effect you want. The Underwater Demolition Teams, which later became the SEALS, were created because the Marines and the Navy needed knowledge about tidal patterns, beach gradations, and water depth before they could make effective assaults. Thousands of good Marines, well trained, armed, and ready for action, died at Tarawa in World War II because we didn’t know the tides and the coastline. The most powerful Navy in the world failed because they lacked the necessary intelligence. Knowledge enables power. Equipment enables power. If the effect you are looking for is to get a good grade on the SAT and you don’t have a pencil, you are lacking a critical piece of your success. Training is another enabler. Someone with the best equipment and the best information can fail without the physical and mental ability to make use of that equipment when it matters most. When all the necessary enablers are in place, you can have an incredible ability to make a difference. That potentially makes you incredibly powerful.

Once you have all the information, the equipment, the training, or whatever enabler you need, you have to answer an important question: “What do I do with all this?” Power can be expressed in so many ways I could not possibly begin to write them all. The most obvious method would be to apply active power and leverage your enablers against resistance to meet your goal. An arm-wrestling match is a perfect example of this. Active power is often too violent for the situation, though, and other tools may be necessary. When a police officer tells an offender to get on the ground, they often do so though the officer may not make any physical contact at all. The officer expresses their potential power, using their own equipment, training, and authority to cause an effect out of either fear or respect. A SEAL team in Iraq during the First Gulf War used explosives, gunfire, and clever reconnaissance to convince the enemy the Marines were going to attempt a shore landing, and two Iraqi divisions stayed on the coastline far away from where the initial battles happened. They used deceptive power to achieve an incredible effect. Parents use reward power and coercive power, the ability to reward or to punish, on a daily basis with young children to teach them how to grow up safely. The possibilities are endless so long as one is clever enough to see them.

Finally, and this is too important to miss, power has to be aimed at a target. Barry Bonds may have an incredible swing, but if he misses the ball, what good is it to him? A student can study hard for a test, but if he studies the wrong material, he’s unlikely to get the grade he wants. Power is entirely determined by where it is directed.

A SEAL team, with good intelligence, training, and equipment, using effective methods against a vulnerable target, is an incredibly powerful force and can accomplish things a much larger force might not. A motivated, hard-working, intelligent high school students who effectively leverages his time towards writing a good paper can ace the course. On the individual level, where it really counts, that is power.