Your Mind Is The Target

Cognitive Warfare in the Age of Strategic Disarray

Part 4 of a series of essays on Cognitive Warfare (Part 1, 2 and 3 are here, here and here)

NATO defines the goal of Cognitive Warfare as “to exploit facets of cognition to disrupt, undermine, influence, or modify human decision making”.

At the heart of a recent NATO technical report lies a warning so stark it might have been scripted by a Hollywood screenwriter: the battlefield is no longer a terrain of tanks and trenches, but the unlit corridors of the human mind. Cognitive warfare, once the whispered fever dream of futurists and psychological operations theorists, is now a NATO-recognized reality. But if the mind is the battlefield, then what happens to democracy, deliberation, and the very idea of truth?

One quote from the report is quietly devastating in its clarity:

“User generated content will increase exponentially, creating density and congestion of information... This could lead to the democratization of opinions but could also lead to a mounting increase in biased content and mass disinformation. [...] The weaponization of public opinion through cognitive warfare involves creating narratives and fuelling emotions, perceptions and opinions; the human mind becomes the battlefield.”

This comes not from a sci-fi screenplay, but from NATO’s 2023 Strategic Forecast report. Its implications are severe, and yet they barely ripple across public discourse. To understand why, we must return to the nature of this new form of conflict and why traditional tools of national defense, battalions, bombs, borders, are hopelessly out of step.

The War of Perception

Cognitive warfare is not merely propaganda with a Wi-Fi signal. It is not the same as psychological operations (PSYOPS), which are tethered to military aims. This is deeper: it is about infiltrating perception itself. According to another NATO report, Mitigating and Responding to Cognitive Warfare, the goal of Cognitive Warfare is

“to exploit facets of cognition to disrupt, undermine, influence, or modify human decision making.”

In short, adversaries aim not to persuade, but to corrupt the very architecture of belief.

The 2023 Strategic Foresight Analysis corroborates this with brutal simplicity:

“Cognitive warfare will play a critical role in shaping public perception and decision-making, requiring countermeasures.”

Those countermeasures, however, remain speculative and underdeveloped, perhaps because the scope of the threat destabilizes the very epistemology on which defense planning rests.

In other words, how do you protect a mind that does not want to be protected?

AI, Disinformation, and the Collapse of Anchors

The Strategic Foresight Analysis identifies a central accelerant: the convergence of artificial intelligence and mass information technologies. As generative AI enables the creation of infinite synthetic content, users (and voters, and citizens) are no longer merely consumers but content producers, agents in a swirling storm of unverifiable claims. Here, disinformation is not the exception but the rule. Verification is not delayed; it is drowned.

The Foresight Analysis summarizes the strategic context as one marked by the “5 C’s”: Complex, Congested, Commercialized, Contested, and Confused. It is a taxonomy of entropy. These characteristics do not merely describe the battlespace, they define the modern condition.

This is where NATO's diagnosis turns chilling. The report predicts a world of “ambiguity, challenging the ability to distinguish fact and fiction”, a phrase that sounds less like a warning and more like a eulogy.

The operational result? Strategic competitors, both state and non-state, are enabled to:

“mobilize populations against the values and systems of government through manipulation, subversion, influence and destabilization.”

The objective is no longer ideological conversion but epistemological confusion. To use an analogy NATO avoids but perhaps should not: this is not a clash of civilizations, but a collision of certainties.

Stories as Weapons

The 2025 special issue of Defence Strategic Communications, a publication once known for its cool detachment, reads almost elegiacally. Editor Neville Bolt reminds us that “strategic communications” is not about slogans or press releases, but about narrative authority: who gets to define the story, who gets heard, and who gets believed. Strategic communications is now about narrative sovereignty.

Russia’s use of troll farms and China’s subtle manipulation of fentanyl supply chains, as one essay notes, are not simply tactical maneuvers, they are narrative interventions. They alter the story we tell ourselves about ourselves. The future, as these reports make painfully clear, is not what happens next; it is what we believe happens next.

These hybrid threats, like the weaponization of opioid addiction, operate simultaneously on psychological, physical, and informational planes. They are not digital-only; they are cultural, pharmacological, economic. To call them merely “cognitive” is to miss their breadth.

“..the condition of the mind has always the most decisive influence on the forces employed in war. (Clausewitz)

The Illusion of Resilience

One might think liberal democracies, with their education systems and robust civil societies, are inherently resilient. That assumption may prove fatal. The cognitive warfare reports caution against precisely this illusion. As Dr. Yvonne Masakowski notes,

“The most insidious form of attack is one in which the target does not recognize they are under assault.”

The human mind’s confirmation bias, tribal affiliation, and vulnerability to repetition are not simply features, they are now weaponizable flaws. The mind does not come with a firewall. And yet, NATO’s own recommendations, focused on training, technological countermeasures, and public-private partnerships, feel like sandbags in a digital tsunami.

NATO’s “House Model” offers a more rigorous framework. It rests on three pillars: Cognitive Neuroscience, Cognitive and Behavioral Science, and Social and Cultural Science. Horizontal bars, Modus Operandi, Technology Enablers, and Ethical-Legal Analysis, cut across the structure. This model is more than metaphor; it’s a blueprint for building institutional resilience from the neuron to the nation.

What Must Be Done

If we take the NATO reports seriously, and we must, then the future of conflict will be fought not just in cyberspace but in semantic space. Defence planners must begin to fund epistemic defense: fact-checking infrastructures, civic epistemology programs, and interdisciplinary units that blend data science with anthropology. But we must go further still.

We must operationalize the “House Model”: invest in cognitive science research that explores decision-making under stress; develop behavioral interventions that immunize against manipulation; and embed social scientists within cyber defense teams to track cultural vectors of disinformation in real time.

Yet even that may not be enough. What NATO has glimpsed, though perhaps not said outright, is that a population that no longer believes in truth cannot be defended by any conventional means. We must teach people not what to think, but how to think again. And that requires more than strategy. It requires cultural renewal.

In the end, the deepest threat cognitive warfare poses is not state collapse or military defeat, but the quiet disintegration of shared reality. And that, if unaddressed, is a form of surrender from which no alliance can recover.

Stay curious

Colin

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Sources:

• STO Technical Report TR-HFM-ET-356: Mitigating and Responding to Cognitive Warfare, March 2023

• NATO Allied Command Transformation: Strategic Foresight Analysis 2023

• Defence Strategic Communications, Vol. 15, Spring 2025