Cognitive Warfare Below the Threshold: AI, Decision Speed, and the Future of Competition
Abstract
The cognitive warfare tools demonstrated in Ukraine and Iran are not exclusively a high-intensity conflict problem. They are reshaping the gray zone as well, and the adversaries employing them below the threshold of kinetic engagement are operating faster than the doctrinal frameworks governing US competition-phase operations. This article applies the Praxis AI Doctrine’s Cognitive Warfare Operationalization Model to the below-threshold information environment and argues that special operations and interagency practitioners need cognitive warfare literacy as urgently as they need kinetic readiness.
The cognitive warfare lessons from Iran and Ukraine are typically framed around high-intensity conventional conflict: AI-enabled targeting at scale, decision-loop compression in contested fires environments, human-machine authority in autonomous engagement. These are the right problems to study. They are not the only problems the cognitive warfare framework illuminates.
Iran’s information operations in the current conflict are as instructive as its missile salvos, and for a different audience. The documented campaign of AI-generated disinformation, fabricated imagery of the USS Abraham Lincoln damaged, deepfake videos of strikes on civilian infrastructure, and AI-manipulated satellite images of US installations distributed within hours of actual events is cognitive warfare below the threshold of kinetic engagement. Its targets are not military formations. They are political will, alliance cohesion, and the information environments in which democratic governments make decisions about whether to sustain a military campaign. One viral post claiming a US carrier was sunk generated eight million views on social media, according to PolitiFact, before being debunked by CENTCOM. The debunking reached a fraction of that audience. In the cognitive domain, the first narrative that achieves mass distribution often wins the engagement regardless of factual accuracy.
The Praxis AI Doctrine defines cognitive warfare as operating across all domains, all echelons, and all warfighting functions. That definition explicitly includes the cognitive domain, the information environment in which adversaries attempt to shape perception, erode will, and undermine the decision quality of opponents and their supporting populations. The Sense-Focus-Act-Adapt framework applies to cognitive domain operations precisely as it applies to kinetic targeting. Sense the information environment. Focus on what narrative or counter-narrative to advance. Act through available information channels. Sustain assessment of effect. The difference is that cognitive domain operations at scale have historically required state-level resources. AI has democratized that capability. Iran’s operational employment in the current conflict demonstrates what democratization looks like in practice.
Russia has been making the same point in Ukraine for three years. The AI-enabled disinformation ecosystem operating in support of Russian information objectives, including fabricated documentation of Ukrainian war crimes, manipulated imagery of civilian casualties attributed to Ukrainian forces, and algorithmically amplified narratives targeting European public opinion, represents a sustained cognitive warfare campaign operating continuously alongside the kinetic fight. It does not win battles. It shapes the political environment in which battles are politically sustainable. That is a different but complementary form of decisive action.
The April 2026 CSIS Wadhwani AI Center report on Russia’s sovereign drone ecosystem adds important context for below-threshold practitioners. Russia’s training architecture is not confined to drone operators and fires specialists. Its three-pillar system, decentralized volunteer networks, institutional military training, and youth pipelines, is building a workforce that treats AI as a normalized tool for both physical and cognitive domain operations. The Voin Center has incorporated drone instruction and machine vision guidance tools into curricula for schoolchildren and university students. The feedback loop between frontline operators, civilian engineers, and institutional training centers that makes Russia’s AI-enabled systems tactically effective also makes its cognitive domain operations technically capable and continuously improving.
For practitioners in the special operations, civil affairs, and interagency communities, these observations are not new in kind. Influence operations, strategic communication, and information environment assessment have been in the special operations toolkit for decades. What is new is the AI-enabled scale, speed, and production quality of adversary cognitive domain operations. The influence operation that previously required a team of operators, translators, and regional experts to develop over weeks can now be produced at volume by a small team with access to generative AI tools in hours. The detection and attribution process that allowed social media platforms to identify and remove coordinated inauthentic behavior has not kept pace with the generation of capability. The window between production and distribution of a disinformation product has collapsed. The window between distribution and attribution has not.
Applying the Framework Below the Threshold
The Cognitive Warfare Operationalization Model has direct application to this problem set. Applied to the competition-phase information environment, the model’s four dimensions map to the below-threshold cognitive campaign. Domain integration asks which information domains the adversary is operating in and how they are integrated into a coherent campaign. Echelon scalability asks whether the campaign is operating only at the strategic level or also at the operational and tactical levels. Warfighting function alignment asks how the cognitive domain campaign supports or undermines the adversary’s kinetic objectives and how our cognitive domain response supports our own. Mission area task execution asks what specific information tasks the adversary must accomplish to achieve its cognitive objectives and which of those tasks can be contested, disrupted, or preempted.
Ukraine’s March 2026 initiative to share battlefield AI training data with international partners is a cognitive warfare action in the competition domain. By building the allied AI training data commons, Ukraine is investing in the long-term cognitive architecture of the alliance. The data itself is a cognitive asset; a training corpus derived from real-world lethal operations that no laboratory simulation can replicate. This is strategic cognitive warfare: not winning a specific engagement but shaping the competitive environment in which future engagements will occur. The alliance that builds its AI training data commons, its cognitive domain sensing and response capability, and its human-machine decision framework for information operations before the next conflict will enter that conflict with a cognitive advantage that no subsequent technology procurement can quickly overcome.
The CSIS report’s central conclusion, that ecosystem coherence, not individual programs, determines success in AI-enabled unmanned warfare, applies equally to the cognitive domain. The adversary is not running isolated disinformation operations. It is running an integrated cognitive campaign that links kinetic effects, information operations, cyber operations, and influence activities into a unified cycle. The Sense-Focus-Act-Adapt framework is the response architecture. Sense the adversary’s cognitive campaign in real time. Focus resources on the decision points in the adversary’s campaign that are most vulnerable to disruption. Act through coordinated counter-narrative, attribution, and preemptive information operations. Adapt continuously through operational feedback.
Implications for Small Wars Practitioners
The implication for small wars practitioners is that cognitive warfare doctrine is not a conventional force problem to be observed and reported. It is a competition framework that applies across the spectrum of conflict, and the AI-enabled tools reshaping it in high-intensity operations are already reshaping it in the gray zone. Units and organizations operating in the competition phase need cognitive warfare literacy, an understanding of the decision architecture of the cognitive domain, and of how AI-enabled adversary operations are targeting it, as much as they need kinetic readiness. The Praxis AI Doctrine provides that framework. The question is whether the special operations and interagency communities will adopt it proactively or discover its necessity through contact.
Author’s Note: I wrote this article for practitioners who have spent careers operating in the gray zone and may not yet see themselves in the cognitive warfare conversation. That conversation has been dominated by conventional force targeting and autonomous systems. The information environment dimension, the AI-enabled disinformation ecosystem that Iran deployed and Russia has sustained for three years in Ukraine, belongs in the small wars and irregular warfare discourse. This article is an attempt to put it there.
