The way cognitive warfare is approached by the world’s major powers varies according to their patterns and perspectives, with ethics and value management being fundamental in this regard. Therefore, the application of these concepts will have distinct meanings and repercussions for each of these countries.
As previously mentioned, there is no consensus among the leading global powers on establishing the doctrine and limits of cognitive warfare. For each of these nations, the concepts and their significance revolve around their own interests, which is why they do not share the same terminology and understandings in accordance with their respective doctrines.
While China and Russia are advancing towards a more explicit and offensive integration of cognitive dominance in their military doctrines, the United States incorporates it within the informational dimension, and NATO focuses on understanding the threat and developing countermeasures.
The Course of Brain Research
The development and application of cognitive warfare entails the manipulation of the mind and, thus, raises an ethical dilemma for the West.
Brain research in the United States has focused its efforts on the program called The Brain Research through Advancing Innovative Neurotechnologies (BRAIN), aimed at exploring the activity and functioning of each neuron and, from that information, creating a complete map of the brain.
In China, the Brain Project is also advancing, which seeks to identify the neural principles of cognition to develop new ways for diagnosing and treating significant brain diseases. Likewise, it aims to establish technologies for computational intelligence of the brain.
Russia’s intention is to use cognitive dominance to its advantage and integrate it into its multidomain strategies. For them, cognitive dominance is rooted in social sciences and humanities and does not provide “ready-to-use devices.”
Meanwhile, the European Union (EU) has guided its Human Brain Project (HBP) since the first decade of the 21st century with the goal of modeling and simulating brain functionality using supercomputers.
The United States and Cognitive Warfare
In the United States, the concept of cognitive warfare has not been adopted or incorporated into its jargon and operations due to legal or other reasons. But this should not be interpreted as a lack of application since the definitions have been integrated into operations within the informational dimension.
In the U.S. military realm, cognitive warfare is present in the informational, physical, and human — that is, cognitive — aspects of the environment, describing the different characteristics of objects, activities, or actors in the context of one another and the broader environment.
Thus, the “Global Integrated Operations in the Information Environment” aim to “maximize the cognitive impacts of combined information power and physical force on the perceptions and decision-making of an adversary and other relevant actors.”
Therefore, the United States is focused on coercing behavior, informing about the costs of aggression, providing opportunities for alliance upgrades, and creating new strategic partnerships to protect U.S. interests.
Destabilization of Societies
The United States warns that cognitive warfare directed by its adversaries seeks to destabilize societies, military organizations, and fracture alliances.
The U.S. doctrine employs a process for determining the objectives and effects that must be achieved in military operations, with information forces being the active component of cognitive warfare and reserve, organized, trained, and equipped to create effects in the informational environment.
Information evaluation has shown that correlation between indicators and events is more accurate than establishing specific cause-and-effect relationships.
China’s Three Battles
China implements three types of battles:
Public opinion to influence national and international public opinion.
Psychological to scandalize and demoralize enemy soldiers and civilians.
Legal to gain international support through international law.
For the Chinese, “the struggle in the cognitive environment directly affects the brain, influencing emotions, motives, judgments, and actions, even controlling the enemy’s brain,” and in this sense, they have developed the concept of “Intelligentized Warfare” since 2019, which centers on directly controlling the enemy’s will using AI across multiple domains, including the cognitive.
Chinese specialists believe that the future information war will occur across three domains: physical, informational, and cognitive. Since it directly impacts the leader’s will and public opinion, China acts to affect the cognitive domain, which they consider central.
Military Confrontation Directed at the Brain
For China, cognitive dominance will represent the final domain of military warfare among powers, which will directly affect the brain and influence emotions, motives, judgments, and actions, even seeking to control the enemy’s brain.
The focus of military competition points toward military brain science, with objectives ranging from understanding and monitoring the brain to damaging, interfering with, repairing, and enhancing it, thus creating a new combat style known as “brain warfare” and redefining the battlefield.
China views the brain as the main battlefield of future wars, and control over this is key to engaging in the most critical cognitive domains.
The goal of China’s brain warfare is to understand, monitor, protect, damage, interfere with, repair, and enhance the brain. Simulating it is also among their objectives, with robotic intelligence serving as the means to predict human decisions.
Russia Heads Toward Cognitive Dominance
The goal Russia has set is the utilization of cognitive dominance as part of a multidomain strategy. Their view of the subject is based on social sciences and humanities, lacking “ready-to-use devices” and not limited to decision-makers, but can includes broader segments of the population.
The Russians handle the concept of “reflexive control” as a central axis in their understanding of cognitive warfare, which aims to predetermine an adversary’s decision in favor of Russia by altering key factors in their perception of the world. They see this as a key asymmetric advantage.
In Russia, instead of talking about cyberspace, they refer to “information space,” encompassing both human and computational information processing, covering cognitive dominance. They separate operations into the domains of information technology and information psychology, as the main currents in information warfare.
In Russia, the term “information weapon” includes human cognitive dominance, while reflexive control is the practice of predetermining an adversary’s decision in their favor by altering key factors. It emphasizes that information is the primary non-military cognitive means for waging war.
In cognitive warfare, political, economic, informational, humanitarian, and other non-military measures are soft power instruments that accompany covert military operations, such as information warfare and the use of special forces.
The Russian military doctrine considers military engagement only after exhausting non-military means, including cognitive ones.
NATO: Emerging and Disruptive Technologies
The North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO) recognizes that emerging and disruptive technologies alter the character of conflict and become key scenarios of global competition. They regard hybrid and malicious cyber operations and disinformation as threats.
This organization aims to promote innovation and invest in emerging and disruptive technologies to maintain its military advantage.
In this regard, NATO’s military doctrine encompasses an informational realm that includes information, individuals, and organizations, as well as the physical, virtual, and cognitive spaces where this occurs, rather than a separate cognitive domain.
NATO incorporates cognition as a work area with related topics such as critical thinking, neuroscience, interrupted information, and decision-making, while cognitive warfare is defined as the militarization of public opinion by an external entity to influence policy and destabilize public institutions.
Destabilization is the fundamental objective of cognitive warfare, alongside influencing target populations with a view toward paradigm shifts.
It anticipates the military impact of human and biological enhancement technologies aimed at intervening in cellular function and genetic material. Disruptive research areas of interest to NATO include bioinformatics and biosensors, human enhancement, countermeasures, and medical technologies, as well as synthetic biology.
NATO prioritizes cognitive actions in situations where physical force is inappropriate, aiming to degrade, disrupt, and destroy the cognitive capacity and command and control systems of the enemy.