The Civic Emergency of Cognitive Warfare
Cognitive Warfare Succeeds by Attacking Trust, Not Truth
In March 2022, a video emerged showing Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy urging his troops to surrender. It was a digital forgery, a deepfake disseminated by Russian networks via Telegram and TV broadcasts. Whilst the face flickered, the voice faltered, the message was clear: confusion was the Russian’s weapon of choice. Zelenskyy himself countered within minutes, but the damage was less about believability and more about plausibility. In an era where trust is in recession, cognitive warfare does not need to deceive to succeed. It only needs to disturb.
Cognitive warfare is not new, but its tools are. Historically nested within propaganda, psychological operations, and strategic deception, today's iteration is turbocharged by artificial intelligence, deep learning, social media, and behavioral psychology.
Defined as “the use of psychological, information, and communication tactics to influence or manipulate an opponent's citizens thoughts, beliefs, and behaviors”
According to NATO's 2025 Virtual Manipulation Brief, Russia's foreign information manipulation and interference (FIMI) operations, now augmented by AI, exhibit synchronization across multiple platforms with engagement rates that outstrip democratic responses threefold.
According to NATO the contemporary understanding of the concept of cognitive warfare is focused more on letting the enemy “destroy himself from within” by influencing the general population by attacking the human brain. Unlike traditional warfare, which seeks territorial gains, cognitive warfare targets belief systems. Its aim is to corrode trust, induce paralysis, and reconfigure the public sphere from within.
Why It Matters Now
Cognitive warfare is not simply a civic emergency. It is now formally recognized by governments as a national security imperative. The UK's 2025 Strategic Defence Review warns that the nature of warfare has changed: adversaries exploit ambiguity through sub-threshold attacks, eroding trust and cohesion without triggering conventional military responses. In this landscape, information is not the prelude to war; it is the battlefield. The return of state-on-state conflict in Europe, underwritten by disinformation campaigns and nuclear brinkmanship, has prompted a strategic pivot. The Review explicitly endorses a “whole-of-society” posture for defense, not as metaphor, but as operational necessity.
Mechanisms of Attack
The repertoire of cognitive warfare is wide, but four tactics recur with particular force. First is the insertion of disinformation and hijacked narratives into the bloodstream of public discourse. The fake Zelenskyy video, followed closely by rumors of his suicide, demonstrates that these operations rely not on believability but on emotional plausibility. The lie doesn't need to be convincing; it needs only to feel like it could be true.
Second is what Burda and NATO StratCom term participatory propaganda. Here, propaganda does not descend from a central authority like an edict; it percolates, mutates, and thrives on interaction. The audience becomes the conduit. A meme, a doctored video, a hashtag, these are not just messages. They are invitations to co-author the narrative.
Third, as the NATO analysis Intelligence and Strategic Communication by Niklas Nilsson shows, cognitive warfare now incorporates strategic intelligence disclosure. Before Russia's invasion of Ukraine, the United States and the United Kingdom preemptively released intelligence about Russian troop movements. This was not a leak but a counter-attack. Intelligence, traditionally silent and opaque, now operates in a register of public drama. Yet as Nilsson reminds us, this is a double-edged sword: the Cuban Missile Crisis revealed the power of timely, credible disclosures; Iraq showed the consequences of epistemic overreach. The currency of credibility, once squandered, is not easily replenished.
And finally, there is the relentless amplification enabled by machine systems. Bots, synthetic personas, algorithmic curation, these do not create belief but they distort its topography. As Andreas Jungherr warns, the sophistication of such systems is undeniable, yet their influence depends on preexisting fractures: polarization, epistemic tribalism, and institutional distrust.
Worse still, efforts to control them can backfire, handing private platforms unprecedented power over public speech. Regulation in this domain is not a government report but a treacherous sledgehammer.
The Moral Dilemma
Can democracies engage in cognitive warfare without betraying their own cognitive integrity? The case of Zelenskyy suggests it is possible. His use of narrative, both emotive and strategic, to mobilize resistance and solidarity is a form of counter-warfare. But as Adam Henschke observes in Cognitive WarfareGrey Matters in Contemporary Political Conflict, the difference between narrative and manipulation lies not in the method but in the motive. One seeks to uphold political autonomy and human dignity; the other to subvert it. Henschke’s taxonomy of white, grey, and black propaganda clarifies this spectrum: Zelenskyy’s messaging, rooted in truth and transparent sourcing, belongs to the “white” end; Russian deepfakes, with falsified origins and malicious deceit, reside in the “black.”
The counteroffensive must begin where the assault lands: in the mind. That requires more than media literacy. It demands epistemic self-defense, a cultivated skepticism and critical thinking that resists both gullibility and nihilism. Society must be trained not only to question but to know what is worth trusting. Yet this imperative collides with democratic risk. As Jungherr warns, excessive control measures can boomerang: content moderation may metastasize into censorship, and platform design tweaks, if unchecked, risk transforming Silicon Valley firms into unelected magistrates of public discourse.
We must therefore tread carefully. Social media architecture must be reimagined not as a gatekeeper but as a civic infrastructure, built for deliberation, not dopamine. Friction is not censorship. It is the architectural opposite of compulsion.
Governments, too, must reform their communication rituals. Intelligence disclosures, if weaponized for perception, must still adhere to a code of epistemic ethics. Selectivity cannot become manipulation. Credibility is not renewable once forfeited.
And finally, we need normative clarity. Persuasion is not always deception. Influence is not always coercion. But if democracies are to remain democracies, their communicative acts must be rooted in a respect for autonomy, not a hunger for dominance.
Cognitive warfare is not the war after next; it is the war now. Its ordnance is intangible but not inconsequential. It assaults coherence, corrodes trust, and cloaks truth in ambiguity. And its frontiers are expanding. The U.S. House Intelligence Committee has opened inquiries into so-called anomalous health incidents (AHIs), raising concerns about directed energy weapons that bypass belief and target the brain's hardware directly. Whether or not these claims hold, they indicate the conceptual drift: from informational to neurological warfare.
To fight back, we must not merely out-code the coders or out-shout the trolls. We must reassert what it means to know, to trust, and to speak.
The defense of minds begins with the dignity of thought. And that, unlike a missile, cannot be outsourced.
Stay curious
Colin
The dilemma for me comes down to, "are the American Intel agencies allies or enemies of the American people?"
The question has no simple answer as far as I'm concerned. Spies by the nature of their occupation cannot be trusted. In many parts of the world they ally themselves with rainbow flavored communists to execute regime change and leverage control. This has lead to the most laughable event the supreme Court has ever seen in my opinion; Brown's answer to "what is a woman"?
When the institutions we rely on to judge what is true and false cannot answer the simplest questions without an appeal to biological expertise they have no foundation of being trustworthy. So are we the people losing the cognitive warfare? Absolutely. Who then, is to blame? And more important, what is to be done now?
This is terrifying. Cognitive warfare seems to target trust even in our own thoughts.
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"Society must be trained not only to question but to know what is worth trusting".
This becomes especially challenging when a significant percentage of society is under the thrall of an authoritarian, or authoritarian "wannabe", such as our own, not so beloved, TrumPox.
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"Social media architecture must be reimagined not as a gatekeeper but as a civic infrastructure, built for deliberation, not dopamine".
Ah, but that's not maximally profitable.
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It appears to be a multi-pronged game, and the players have disparate motives, which usually align, but not always. Ironically, even that misalignment of motives can contribute to the furthering of their goals. Leveraging the advent of the web and AI metastasizes the threat to a level for which there might not be a defense.
Unfortunately, much of society is resistant to epistemic influence and advancement. That is to say, gullible.