Historically, the term “cognitive warfare” has been referred to as the use of the means of action that a state or an influential group makes in order to manipulate the spontaneous mechanisms of the cognition of an enemy or its people, in order to weaken, penetrate, influence, or even subdue or destroy them.
Although it is an integral part of the military art, it is, in this sense, a new disciplinary field that requires to be better identified. It comes from the cyber techniques of information warfare, and from the human aspect of “soft power” (or influence), with the ambitions of manipulation of what we usually call “Psy-Ops” or Psychological Operations. It is most often a question of biased presentation of a reality, most often digitally altered, to facilitate or enhance one’s own goals. The pervasiveness of Information Technology and the lack of attribution offer infinite opportunities, paving the way to new methods and new objectives.
Some of the Alliance’s adversaries have clearly understood the military interest of CW. By nature, it has a global military dimension, and covers both the strategic and operational dimensions. It has undergone a remarkable surge with the advent of digitization of strategic decision support, and the exponential profusion of big data and analytics, for information, wargaming and the conduct of operations. It is progressively invading the entire field of digital usage, and silently allowing the implementation of policies of interference and counter-interference, of cognitive attrition and of defense of the populations that would be subjected to it.
The massive explosion of behavioural data made available by the advent of social media has empowered researchers to make significant advances in the understanding of the dynamics of individuals and large groups online by combining system engineering with social sciences. As this field of research expands, opportunities multiply to use this knowledge to forge powerful new techniques not only to understand but also to shape the behaviour and beliefs of people both individually and globally. “Behavioural economics adapts psychology research to economic models, thus creating more accurate representations of human interactions.”i
It is therefore both a reasoned set of attack processes but also countermeasures and preventive measures.
It could tentatively be defined as “the art of using technologies to alter the cognition of human targets, most often without their knowledge and consent”.
Above all, cognitive warfare is a form of hybrid warfare, which aim is to alter the cognitive processes of the adversary, to exploit biases or mental automatisms, in order to provoke distortions of representations, alterations of the decision or even inhibitions of action, and to bring about disastrous consequences, both at the individual and the collective level.
While it is made possible by the human “hyper-connectivity”, it is often confused with cyber warfare. Yet, it does not focus strictly on the field of “information” but on that of “cognition”, i.e. what the brain does with information. It is therefore not reducible to the simple aspect of the human consequences of a “cyber warfare”, robot and program engineering; the cognitive effect is not a consequence of the action, it is its goal.
The actors of cognitive warfare are very diverse; states or non-state actors, institutions or companies, terrorist organizations, religious movements, political groups are all potential actors with disparate degrees of excellence. It is used and implemented by specialized highly competent units, digital intelligence services, but also by agencies and industrial firms in their competition or in the field of marketing and the definition and manipulation of a potential customers.
Pentagon’s Brain
