Thucydides, Clausewitz, and Colin Gray would have been bemused by the current fascination among academics, strategists, and military theorists with ideas of ‘cognitive domain’ and ‘cognitive warfare’. An unbridgeable break between past strategic wisdom and war has seemingly opened up. Politics, without which government is tyranny, would be in peril if the next war were to be fought in part in the minds of the protagonists.
In plain terms, liberal democracy is premised on, and exists because of, the value placed on individual agency. Liberty comes from a mixture of tolerance for diversity and dissent, and a respect for autonomy of conscience. In other words, from the existence of politics. In a liberal democracy, difference is not an aberration, but the expected and desired outcome; and the messiness of politics is not a failure of the system, but the essential mechanism for sustaining it through argument, debate, and compromise. Before diving into the subject of cognitive warfare, it is important to remember what is at risk.
In the foreword to the report on the first NATO scientific meeting on Cognitive Warfare in 2021, the Deputy Director of the NATO Collaboration Support Office, Major General Philippe Montocchio, wrote “Cognitive Warfare is the most advanced form of human mental manipulation to date, permitting influence over individual or collective behaviour, with the goal of obtaining a tactical or strategic advantage. In this domain of action, the human brain becomes the battlefield”. The summary of the meeting concludes that “Cognitive warfare is waged on the battlefield of the human mind…[and].…shapes not only what people think individually and group-think as social networks, but also influences how they collectively act and interact”. That is, cognitive warfare aims to override individual autonomy and agency.
NATO is concerned to protect the citizens and political systems of its member states from the exploitation of assumed cognitive vulnerabilities. The threat is thought to come from China and Russia, in particular, but also from non-state actors. This is being taken very seriously by NATO’s Allied Command Transformation which is “developing the Cognitive Warfare Concept” with “direct contribution from over 20 NATO member nations”. As Steen Søndergaard, NATO Chief Scientist, puts it “Understanding future war-fighting in a multi-region, multi-dimensional (physical, virtual, and cognitive), and multi-domain operating environment necessitates an understanding of Cognitive Warfare”.
Alongside resilience, social cohesion, and deterrence, cognitive warfare is now considered central to civil defence. The IISS report Civil Defence in Europe: An Initial Assessment (CDinE) says “European countries know they must strengthen civil defence in the cognitive domain” and that “Addressing the structural vulnerabilities of the modern security environment requires a fundamental redesign of European societies and economies”. A far-reaching requirement raising the implicit question of who does the redesigning and under what authority.
The CDinE report advocates for a “paradigm shift” that will “necessitate a new mindset of preparedness that recognises individual citizens as the base unit of total defence; no longer passive objects of protection but active contributors to their own and their community’s security”. That is, a society that is “composed of self-reliant, risk-informed and psychologically resilient citizens who can act as a vital force multiplier”.
Apparently, ’cognitive’ is the adjective du jour for European security elites, and the CDinE report refers variously to cognitive warfare, cognitive trap, cognitive paralysis, cognitive-intrusion tactics, cognitive aggression, and cognitive inoculation. The idea is receiving widespread academic acceptance when an article in the peer-reviewed Administrative Sciences journal can say, without qualification, “When resilience is addressed and analysed, societies also struggle with cognitive warfare. The rise in cognitive warfare has reshaped modern conflict by positioning the human mind as a key battleground”.
In Cybersecurity, Ethics, and Collective Responsibility (2024), Seumas Miller and Terry Bossomaie write that the “Key features of cognitive warfare include its targeting of entire populations…its focus on changing a population’s behaviour by changing its way of thinking…[and]…its reliance on increasingly sophisticated psychological techniques of manipulation, and its aim of destabilising institutions— notably, political institutions, such as democratically elected governments, but also epistemic institutions, such as news media organisations and universities”. in the words of J. William Demarco, the “true battleground today lies in cognition”. Demarco wrote elsewhere “The centre of gravity is no longer fleets or factories but the shared grasp of reality itself”.
Hedvig Ördén writing in Security Dialogue, notes the limitations and risks of this approach. “The expectations articulated in relation to neuroscience and neuro-technologies in security suggest that the drivers motivating humans to act are primarily accessible to external actors utilising technologically refined tools, thus depoliticising the beliefs of individual and collective subjects”. Ördén notes that “seeing the human mind as increasingly vulnerable to external interference, the turn to the brain sciences in security renegotiates the nature of human agency”, and that “these uncertainties about citizens’ cognitive integrity, and the quest for safeguarding collective political will formation, also works to produce new forms of authority”. Crucially, Ördén introduces the reverse Clausewitzian aspect; politics risks becoming the extension of war by other means.
Overwhelmingly the literature on a cognitive warfare is couched in the need for cognitive defence. For example, the CDinE report observes that “effective crisis management depends on the population’s trust that decision-makers are competent and truthful” and on governments generating “widespread belief among citizens that their way of life and national social cohesion is worth protecting”.
Pursuit of the techniques and technologies of cognitive warfare and defence is a double-edged sword. Deep understanding of the means and methods of adversary cognitive aggression is required for defence against them. As Ördén indicates, the same knowledge and tools that can be turned on the adversary can be employed on one’s own population; these techniques in the hands of unpopular governments could also shape public opinion and distort the public’s understanding of reality. The objective could be to manufacture a responsive and obedient population which would simply accept a government’s narrative over that of dissenters as to why war is necessary – and would legitimise the authority of the government to repurpose society and the economy to support war.
If political elites believe, as is emphatic in the literature, that “Maintaining and sustaining public trust in Europe is a critical strategic asset” and “Protecting the operating system of public trust is therefore a strategic imperative on a par with protecting territorial integrity”, the justification for interference in the cognitive domain of a nation’s own citizenry on the grounds of security is established, and the temptation to do so would be nearly irresistible. For tyrants, what better cover for the suppression of politics and liberty. Politics is incompatible with cognitive warfare, and its absence is a surrender to tyranny before conflict begins.
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