The “Fad Fallacy” of Cognitive Warfare: Why Cognitive Engagement Is More Than Re-Branded Influence Operations
Fad (n.): a practice or interest followed for a time with exaggerated zeal.
Fallacy (n.): a flaw in reasoning that makes an argument invalid, misleading, or deceptive.
Folly (n.): a lack of good sense; foolish action, or an unwise and costly undertaking.
Contemporary discourses have spawned considerable debate within military, intelligence, academic, and policy communities about whether “cognitive warfare” is little more than a fashionable term applied to longstanding practices of psychological operations (PSYOP), Military Information Support Operations (MISO), propaganda, deception and political warfare, or a new—or at least novel—type of engagement. The former view posits that warfare has always sought to affect what adversaries know, believe, fear, desire, and decide; thus, describing cognition as a new type or novel domain or dimension of conflict is an error of conceptual inflation rather than a meaningful military definition. I opine that there is an element of truth in this premise, but not in the conclusion that follows therefrom.
Without doubt, human cognition has been targeted throughout the history of warfare. Deception, intimidation, propaganda, disinformation, coercion, and manipulation are hardly new. Even Sun Tzu recognized the value of defeating an adversary’s will without engaging frank belligerent force. Indeed, such tactical deception and strategic cognitive influence have been integral to military operations for millennia, and twentieth-century military operations demonstrated increasingly sophisticated uses of mass communications, propaganda, PSYOP, and MISO.
But to conclude from this historical record that current developments and engagements of cognitive warfare are simply PSYOP or MISO under another name commits what I call a “fallacy of the fad.” Namely, it confuses continuity of strategic purpose with continuity of operational capability. The objective of affecting human cognition is ancient; the means, precision, scale, speed, persistence, and potential effects by which cognition can now be engaged are increasingly novel. The difference is important.
From Influencing Information to Engaging Cognition
Traditional PSYOP and MISO have predominantly employed information to affect the perceptions, attitudes, reasoning, emotions, and behaviors of targeted audiences. Information is crafted, delivered, and amplified in ways intended to produce particular psychological or behavioral effects. To be sure, cognitive warfare incorporates these methods, but is not reducible to them.
Rather, I hold that cognitive warfare should be understood as the systematic employment of multiple forms of power to affect the processes by which individuals and collectives sense, perceive, attend, interpret, orient, decide, and act. The distinction is subtle but consequential. Information operations generally regard information as the instrument and cognition as the target. Cognitive warfare increasingly treats the cognitive system itself (inclusive of its biological, psychological, social, and technological dimensions) as both a target and potential instrument of engagement.
This has become possible because cognition is no longer an entirely opaque phenomenon. Advances in neuroscience, neurotechnology, behavioral science, computational modeling, psychometrics, biometrics, data analytics, and artificial intelligence (AI) are increasing the ability characterize cognitive states and traits. At present, these technologies do not provide anything approaching “mind reading” per se, and their capabilities should not be exaggerated. But they do increasingly enable probabilistic inference about attention, fatigue, stress, preference, susceptibility, performance, social affiliation, and behavioral dispositions.
Concomitantly, iteratively more complex digital environments provide unprecedented quantities of data about individuals and groups. Search histories, purchasing behavior, social-media activity, geographic movement, social networks, patterns of communication, and interactions with particular types of digital platforms can collectively create exceedingly granular cognitive and behavioral profiles. Thus, the target is not some generalized, anonymous “audience”; it is a computationally characterized individual, cohort, organization, or population.
Convergence Changes the Battlespace
This is where the “fad” critique becomes particularly problematic, as it tends to examine each component of cognitive warfare independently and then argue that none is unprecedented. Without doubt, propaganda is an old instrument of influence; behavioral psychology has existed for decades; neuroscience is not warfare; AI is a tool, and social media is merely another medium and means of communication. When taken individually, all of these statements are factual. Yet collectively, they miss the central issue. The strategically significant development—and difference—is convergence.
As exemplar, consider the coupling of large-scale data acquisition with AI-enabled behavioral analysis. To this, add psychographic and network mapping capable of identifying influential individuals, vulnerable communities, and social fortitude and fault lines. Combine these approaches with generative AI capable of producing persuasive text, imagery, audio, and video at great scale, rapid pace, and negligible marginal cost. Then include automated experimentation capable of empirically assessing which messages can best elicit defined, desired responses in given individuals and specific populations. The result is not simply faster propaganda, but a potentially adaptive system in which target populations can be iteratively characterized, and messaging generated and modified in accordance with responses measured and assessed in almost real-time. In this light, cognitive engagement can be seen as a closed-loop process of sensing, modeling, affecting, assessing, adapting, and re-engaging with revised and enhanced signaling.
The significance becomes ever greater when these capabilities are integrated with developments in neuroscience and neurotechnology. Physiological and neurophysiological measures (e.g. eye tracking, autonomic measures, electroencephalography, and other sensing technologies) can provide useful information about human states and performance. Neuromodulatory technologies, pharmaceutical agents, human-machine interfaces, and other emerging capabilities can be employed to expand the spectrum of means by which cognitive functions can be affected.
Of course, not every such technology constitutes a weapon, and technological possibility should never be conflated with demonstrated operational capability. But military planning cannot ignore trajectories simply because individual technologies remain immature or have not yet been shown to have some operational utility and value. Responsible strategic foresight demands the reassessment of new possibilities once when multiple currently available technologies mature and converge, and newly emerging techniques and tools are more fully (and purposefully) developed.
AI: The Industrialization and Personalization Cognitive Engagement
Historically, influence operations have been constrained by human resources. Messaging required conception, production, translation, dissemination, monitoring and modification by human actors. AI dramatically alters this relationship, and thus represents perhaps one of the most important accelerants of cognitive warfare.
To wit, generative systems can create significant volumes of content that can be tailored to language, culture, demographic characteristics, ideological orientation, and in some cases, individual psychological characteristics. Agentic systems can identify targetable audiences, evaluate narratives and responses, and adapt subsequent communications to maximize effect(s), with ever-diminishing requirements for continuous human intervention in the development and deployment cycle. This creates the possibility of what I term the “industrialization and personalization of cognitive engagement.”
Moreover, the relevant cognitive contest will increasingly involve AI systems confronting other AI systems. Offensive systems will be developed to avoid detection and exploit weaknesses in both human and machine-mediated decision processes. Defensive AI will detect manipulation, synthetic media, coordinated influence activity, and anomalous information patterns. Consequently, cognitive warfare cannot be seen simply as one human (individual or group) persuading another, but instead should be viewed as a complex ecology that conjoins human-human, human-machine, machine-human, and machine-machine interactions to incur tactical and strategic effect(s) and goals. This ecosystem is qualitatively different from conventional PSYOP and/or MISO.
The “fad” argument also tends to assume that cognitive warfare is fundamentally concerned with persuasion. Indubitably, persuasion is an element of cognitive engagement and intended outcome, but it represents only one possible aspect of cognitive effect. An adversary need not convince a population that information or a particular proposition is true. Instead, it may be sufficient and missionally effective to produce uncertainty about whether and to what extent anything is reliably true. To this end, cognitive engagement can be aimed at increasing confusion, fatigue, distraction, distrust, social fragmentation, cognitive overload, indecision, and/or institutional paralysis. The objective being the degradation of cognitive conditions necessary for coherent decision-making. This distinction from PSYOP/MISO is strategically important.
A military organization depends upon attention, situational awareness, trust, communication, command relationships, morale, and the ability to convert information into timely decisions toward operational success. If these cognitive functions can be disrupted, manipulated, or degraded, operational effectiveness could be diminished without physically destroying a single platform.
Analogous vulnerabilities exist at the societal level. Democratic governance, civil-military relationships, public-health systems, financial institutions, and national-security establishments all depend upon shared epistemic foundations and informational resources. Persistent manipulation that erodes confidence in those foundations and resources can produce strategic effects that are disproportionate to the apparent magnitude of individual influence activities. Hence, cognitive warfare can operate below traditional thresholds of armed conflict while nevertheless generating consequences that are germane to influencing national security and power.
Domain, Dimension, or Operational Condition?
Nonetheless, legitimate debate persists over whether cognition should formally be designated a military “domain.” But I believe that the terminology is less important than the operational reality. Declaring cognition to be a domain will not make cognitive warfare real, just as refusing such terminology will not make it disappear. Rather, it may be far more useful to understand cognition as a cross-domain substrate upon and within which every military activity ultimately depends. Land, sea, air, space, and cyber capabilities require humans (and increasingly, human-machine teams) to perceive, understand, decide, and act. Thus, cognition intersects every established operational domain.
This creates an important asymmetry. Physical systems may be hardened against kinetic attack while remaining vulnerable at the point(s) of the humans who operate them. Communications networks can be protected against cyber intrusion, yet the information they convey can be deliberately engineered to distort interpretation. And command systems may remain technically intact, while the confidence, trust, and decision coherence among their users is deteriorated. To meet these realities, cognitive security must become complementary to biosecurity, cybersecurity, operational security, force protection, and information assurance.
Avoiding the Opposite Error: Beyond the Fad Fallacy
Rejecting the fad fallacy should not foster the opposing error of labeling every influence activity, deceptive message, psychological operation, or emerging neurotechnology as “cognitive warfare.” Such conceptual conflation would certainly reduce cognitive warfare to the very fad its critics claim it to be. To reduce the likelihood of over- and/or under-classification, the field will need disciplined definitions, operational taxonomies, metrics, and thresholds. Strategic communication should be distinguished from influence operations; influence operations from targeted cognitive manipulation; psychological effects from neurophysiological effects; and demonstrated capabilities from speculative ones.
This level of rigor is ever more necessary given that cognitive warfare generates profound ethical and legal concerns. Technologies capable of characterizing or affecting cognition implicate violations of privacy, autonomy, agency, consent, responsibility, medical confidentiality, and human rights. Data derived from military personnel create questions of provenance, access, custodianship, secondary use, and potential discrimination. In light of these issues, the United States and its allies should pursue cognitive engagement capabilities without jeopardizing or sacrificing the core principles that such capabilities are intended to defend.
The question, then, is not whether militaries have attempted to influence cognition before; they unquestionably have. Instead, the appropriate question is whether contemporary and emerging technologies are changing how precisely, persistently, rapidly, individually, and adaptively human cognition can be characterized targeted, and affected. In short, the answer is yes.
Cognitive warfare represents an evolutionary continuity of longstanding strategic objectives coupled to potentially revolutionary changes in operational means. Propaganda, PSYOP, and MISO constitute important parts of its heritage and surely remain components of contemporary cognitive engagements. But the increasing convergent uses—neuroscience, neurotechnology, behavioral science, ubiquitous data collection, computational modeling, AI, social media, and human-machine systems—expand the operational space beyond these historical foundations. Thus, dismissing cognitive warfare as a “fad” creates its own strategic vulnerability.
History has demonstrated the danger of interpreting novel capabilities exclusively through familiar conceptual frameworks. A military institution that cavalierly assumes that a new capability is merely an old activity with a new name risks recognizing— and trying to respond to—its significance only after an adversary has demonstrated it to an operationally viable effect.
Apropos such error, the task before the US and its allies is neither to sensationalize cognitive warfare nor to dismiss it, but instead to define, study, detect, characterize its effects, develop means of cognitive defense and resilience, and determine where and how it intersects extant doctrine and operational practice. None the less important will be the establishment of ethico-legal guidelines, constraints, and governances for its use.
Ultimately, warfare has always been a contest of human will. What is changing is the technological ability to access, characterize, and exert influence upon the biological, psychological, informational, and computational processes through which human wills are formed and behaviorally expressed. Such capability and operational viability and means of tactical effect and strategic power do not merely represent a change in terminology. I argue that it would be a potentially dangerous fallacy, if not veritable folly, to treat such fortitude of force as a fad.
Disclaimer: The views and opinions expressed in this essay are those of the author and do not necessarily represent those of the United States government, Department of War, or the National Defense University.
