When Perception Becomes the Battlefield

Abstract

Israel’s experience as a live laboratory for AI-enabled cognitive warfare since October 2023 offers three findings for the Small Wars Journal (SWJ) community. First, AI-driven recontextualization of authentic content has collapsed the cost of cognitive attacks to near zero. Second, Iran’s cognitive operations served a Fabian attrition strategy rather than functioning as a standalone capability. Third, Israel’s forced organizational adaptation under fire, merging spectrum operations, AI analysis, and civil society monitoring, reveals lessons the US can apply before wartime urgency demands them.

Introduction

Frank Hoffman’s November 2025 survey of the cognitive warfare concept in SWJ noted that despite a decade of Chinese, Russian, and NATO writing, “there is no common understanding of Cognitive Warfare” in the US military. The 2026 National Defense Authorization Act (NDAA) has since directed the Secretary of Defense to define it. Jeremiah Lumbaca’s Joint Special Operations University (JSOU) work, also discussed in SWJ, warned that the US is not yet prepared to face adversaries using cognitive warfare tactics. From where I sit in Israel, I can report that this assessment is correct, and that the cost of unpreparedness is visible in ways the doctrine has not yet captured.

This is not a theoretical argument. Since October 7, 2023, Israel has been a live laboratory for AI-enabled cognitive warfare. What Lumbaca called “cognitive contagions” and what Hoffman described as “weaponized social media with algorithmic amplification” have been deployed against Israeli society continuously, by adversaries who read the same PLA and NATO literature that Western militaries study. The difference is that adversaries applied the concepts operationally while the West was still defining terms.

What Israel’s experience adds to the cognitive warfare literature published in SWJ comes down to three observations. They are drawn from tracking the conflict’s information dimension from inside Israel, reviewing Israeli government and civil society monitoring data, and comparing observed adversary behavior against the frameworks that Hoffman, Lumbaca, Cheatham et al., and others have published in SWJ.

The Near-Zero Cost of Recontextualization

The January 2026 piece in these pages on cognitive warfare economics focused on the defender’s cost asymmetry. Data from the Israel-Iran war extends that analysis. A study by the Israeli Internet Association, based on 592 fact-checks by 50 organizations across 23 countries, documented the scope of AI-generated disinformation during twelve days of fighting in June 2025. Roughly one-fifth of false content was AI-generated. But the more revealing figure is that 70 percent was authentic footage stripped of time, place, or framing context. The cost of producing a convincing cognitive attack dropped to near zero, not because fabrication got cheaper, but because recontextualization of existing footage reached industrial scale. As we have documented at FactSignal, this pattern mirrors what we tracked during the Gaza conflict’s first months, when recycled footage from Syria and Libya was repackaged as fresh Gaza coverage.

This matters for the cost asymmetry argument. Detection requires multilingual, cross-platform monitoring across Hebrew, Arabic, English, and Persian. Israel had only two active fact-checking organizations during the Iran war, FakeReporter and Bodkim, both publishing primarily in Hebrew. None appeared in Arabic. A country of nine million people was receiving cognitive attacks in four languages and could verify them in one. That gap is not about cost. It is structural.

Hoffman’s assessment noted that “the national security community is reducing its ability to monitor and respond effectively.” Israel’s experience suggests that the reduction is not merely budgetary. The monitoring infrastructure required to detect cognitive attacks at speed does not exist at sufficient scale in any single nation, including those facing active operations.

Iran Fought a Fabian War, Not a Cognitive One

Lumbaca’s work published in SWJ in February 2026 described cognitive warfare as a strategy for “altering enemy cognitive processes” to achieve “political or military objectives.” Applied to Iran, this framing requires scrutiny. Did Iran pursue cognitive warfare as a primary strategy, or did cognitive operations serve a Fabian strategy of attrition and delay?

The evidence from the June 2025 war points to the latter. Iran’s forward defense was built on proxies meant to prevent confrontation on their own borders. When that architecture collapsed, with Hezbollah degraded and Hamas decapitated, the proxy ring failed. Iran was drawn into the direct war it had spent decades avoiding. Cognitive operations during the war were not a strategy of choice but a tool of necessity, deployed to compensate for conventional inferiority. This aligns with what the Belfer Center analyzed in its assessment of Iran‘s proxy architecture unraveling.

The same Israeli Internet Association study found that 72 percent of false content served Iranian interests and 90 percent of AI-generated content did. Most Iranian disinformation focused on inflating perceptions of military power, what the study called “ballistic fakes.” Videos of missile trucks, fabricated strikes on Israeli infrastructure, and simulated destruction of Israeli landmarks. The content pattern reveals Iran is using psychological warfare techniques aimed at morale, not at decision-making processes or what Lumbaca terms “epistemic closure.”

Iran did not win a cognitive war. Iran lost a conventional one and used cognitive tools to manage the narrative consequences. This distinction matters for the SWJ community because it suggests that cognitive warfare, as Lumbaca and Hoffman define it, may be most dangerous not when adversaries choose it, but when they are forced into it as a substitute for capabilities they lack. The most aggressive cognitive actor may be the one losing on the physical battlefield.

This finding engages with the critique Matt Armstrong published in SWJ in November 2025, that cognitive warfare “fails the cognitive test” as a standalone concept. Israel’s experience suggests a partial answer. Cognitive warfare may not constitute a standalone strategy, but as a component of a broader asymmetric approach, accelerated by AI tools, it creates effects that current doctrinal frameworks are not built to handle at the speed they occur.

Merging the Spectrum, the Algorithm, and the Narrative

The US is not idle on cognitive warfare. The 2026 NDAA mandate to define the concept, the Special Operations Command’s (SOCOM) ongoing Psychological Operation (PSYOP) modernization, the Hudson Institute’s information inoculation training modules, and the Pentagon’s Operations in the Information Environment strategy all represent serious investment. A fair question is what Israel is actually doing that the US and its allies are not. The answer is less about technology and more about organizational adaptation under fire.

Three Components of Israel’s Adaptation

The IDF has restructured its C4I and Cyber Defense Directorate to create dedicated AI and spectrum warfare divisions. The new Sphera unit consolidates spectrum operations, strategic communications, and engineering teams under a single command. Rather than a PSYOP shop attached to a warfighting headquarters, the Sphera unit represents an organizational recognition that the electromagnetic spectrum, AI-enabled analysis, and narrative operations constitute a single battlespace. The US still treats these as separate functional areas under Joint Publication 3-13, Information Operations.

Israel has also developed a distributed monitoring network that integrates military and civil society actors. FakeReporter, an independent NGO, operates as the primary open-source intelligence and disinformation monitoring body in Israel. During the Gaza war’s first week, FakeReporter documented over 200 distinct disinformation narratives. The IDF refers to civil society monitoring in its situational awareness, and civil society monitors feed military intelligence. As opposed to formalized doctrine, Israel adopted the strategy out of necessity. It works because Israel’s small size and high digital penetration make the integration organic. The US, with a vastly larger information environment, would need a different architecture to achieve the same effect. We have tracked this civil-military integration at Allyvia, and it remains poorly understood outside Israel.

The battlefield has forced the IDF to treat AI-generated content as an immediate operational concern rather than a strategic abstraction. During the Iran war, AI-generated videos of Israeli F-35s being shot down, fabricated strikes on Ben-Gurion Airport, and synthetic footage of Israeli soldiers circulated within hours of actual events. The IDF’s response was not to build better detection tools, which remain six to twelve months behind generation capabilities. Instead, the operational adaptation was speed of authoritative response. The military learned to publish verified information, including corrections to its own claims, faster than adversarial narratives could solidify. This is closer to what Cheatham et al. described in these pages as “cognitive resilience as a critical weapon system,” though Israel arrived at it through battlefield iteration rather than institutional planning.

What Transfers and What Doesn’t

Israel’s experience does not yield a template. The US and its allies operate at a scale that makes Israel’s integrated civil-military model difficult to replicate. But three lessons transfer.

The monitoring coverage gap is the critical vulnerability. The US needs multilingual, cross-platform detection infrastructure that operates at the speed of adversarial content production. Israel’s two-organization fact-checking capacity was overwhelmed during twelve days of fighting. A country of 330 million people facing coordinated cognitive operations would be similarly exposed.

Organizational integration matters more than technology. Israel’s decision to merge spectrum, AI, and strategic communications under a single command reflects a lesson that this journal has been advancing for years. Hoffman noted the American “predisposition to kinetic operations” as a cultural barrier. Israel overcame that barrier because wartime urgency demanded it. The US should not wait for the same urgency.

And most relevant to Lumbaca’s call for cognitive warfare cells at all echelons, Israel’s experience confirms that distributed adaptation outperforms centralized response. The most effective Israeli responses to cognitive attacks during the war came from combinations of military intelligence, civil society monitors like FakeReporter and Bodkim, academic researchers, and independent analysts. Lumbaca recommended multi-disciplinary cells including data scientists and behavioral psychologists. Israel’s wartime version included journalists, NGO researchers, and open-source investigators. The principle is the same. Cognitive warfare cannot be defeated by a single agency. It requires what Lumbaca called “cognitive firewalls,” but those firewalls need to be societal, not merely military.

Where the Concept Goes From Here

The cognitive warfare concept, as Hoffman observed, faces an uphill fight for acceptance within the US military. Israel’s experience since October 2023 suggests the fight is already over for anyone paying attention. The tools are deployed, the effects are measurable, and the cost of inaction is visible.

What is less clear is whether cognitive warfare constitutes a standalone domain, as the NDAA mandate implies, or whether it is better understood as a dimension of every existing domain. Israel’s data suggests the latter. Iran’s cognitive operations were subordinate to a Fabian attrition strategy, not independent of it. The most effective cognitive defenses were integrated into conventional military operations, not separated from them. The monitoring that mattered came from civil society, not from a dedicated cognitive command.

For the SWJ community, the Israeli case offers something the existing literature, strong as it is, has lacked. A sustained, real-world test of these concepts against an adaptive adversary using AI tools at operational speed. The results are still being analyzed. But the preliminary finding is clear enough. Cognitive warfare is not coming. It is here. The question is whether the institutional architecture to address it can be built in peacetime, or whether, as in Israel, it will require a war to force the adaptation.