Doors of Perception: Synergy Between Cognitive Warfare and Human Security

Abstract

Cognitive warfare refers to military and geopolitical contestation over cognitive processes as a means of affecting individual, group, and societal behavior. This essay argues that cognitive warfare shares important synergies with the paradigm of human security, due to the shared emphasis on the psychological processes that drive behaviors and dynamics in the civilian environment. The essay recommends that human security considerations be incorporated into cognitive warfare defense, while providing a call-to-action for further consideration of the implications of this synergy at policy and operational levels.

Introduction

Cognitive warfare is receiving increasing attention in national security and defense communities, including much discussion within the pages of the Small Wars Journal. In contribution to these discussions, this essay identifies an overlap between cognitive warfare and the paradigm of human security, grounded in their shared emphasis on the centrality of the civilian population within the wider operating environment (i.e. ‘the civilian environment’) and particularly the role of psychological factors in shaping it.

The essay argues that for cognitive warfare defenders, the human security paradigm could support understanding of (a) the role that populations’ perceptions of human insecurities can play in shaping decisions and behaviors, and (b) the susceptibility of those insecurities to manipulation and weaponization by adversaries and malign actors. Ultimately, this synergy suggests that human security could be seen as an area of strategic contestation within contemporary cognitive warfare.

Cognitive Warfare

Although the cognitive warfare paradigm remains somewhat ambiguous, two key points bear directly on its synergy with human security. First, as the 2025 North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO) Chief Scientist Research Report (CSRR) states, cognitive warfare is concerned with the manipulation of cognition in order to alter people’s behavior. While the domain of warfare is cognitive, the ultimate goal is behavioral. That is, changing how people act, rather than manipulating cognition for its own sake. To quote Frank Hoffman, “distorting what these individuals think is a precursor to how they think, and thus how they behave.” This suggests that when defining, measuring and evaluating cognitive warfare effects (whether offensive or defensive), the impact on targets’ decision-making and behaviors must be part of the picture, challenges in doing so notwithstanding.

Second, the scope of cognitive warfare extends across military personnel and civilians, and throughout the societal level, group level and individual level. While earlier influence frameworks “targeted limited, tactical military objectives,” cognitive warfare “envisions a much more expansive, unrestricted, and constant hybrid threat aimed at entire populations.” This reflects the reality of our modern world in which “society shapes the security environment,” says the NATO CSRR. Indeed, experts argue that modern technologies have blurred traditional lines between war and peace, military and civilian. In this sense, the civilian environment occupies a growing portion of the operating environment itself. Following those two premises of cognitive warfare—manipulating cognition to alter behavior, and targeting entire populations—the essay now draws attention to the key tenets of human security.

Human Security

Since its emergence in the 1990s, the human security paradigm has shaped research, policy and practice across much of the diplomatic, humanitarian and development communities. It has also influenced military thinking—notably at NATO, which published its human security approach in 2022 and a progress report in 2024, and in the United Kingdom, which published its latest Joint Security Publication (JSP) on human security in 2024. While human security is contested, three core characteristics support this essay’s argument.

First, human security focuses on the security of individuals and communities, rather than that of nation-states. As NATO’s Human Security Agenda states, the paradigm “brings the security of people to the fore” and “focuses on the protection of people and communities.” Why? For NATO and the UK military, the rationale is multi-faceted, from moral and legal necessity, to enhancing operational effectiveness, to stabilization and conflict-escalation, to countering adversarial influence over the civilian environment. The common theme, however, is that civilian populations and the issues that threaten their security are material concerns in contemporary military operations.

Second, the issues that threaten civilian populations’ security are different from those that traditionally affect the security of nation-states, like armed attack by state or non-state actors. The United Nations famously cites seven threat categories—community, economic, environmental, food, health, personal, and political—while NATO uses five cross-cutting themes: human trafficking, children and armed conflict, conflict-related sexual violence, civilian protection, and cultural property protection. The UK military incorporates both the UN and NATO approaches. The human security threat landscape is therefore complex, dynamic, inter-sectional and multi-sectoral.

Third, the reality (or lived experience) of human security reflects complex psychological dynamics. Scholarship has long studied the role of psychology as constitutive of security at the individual level. People’s assessments of their own security are seen as a “cognitive process” involving subjective perceptions and evaluations of “external events and conditions.” Insecurity is therefore “an undesirable psychological state” which requires understanding “the consequences those feelings of insecurity have on [people’s] attitudes and behavior.” UN publications explicitly connect people’s feelings and perceptions of insecurity with instability and violence, while practitioner literature highlights the subjectivity of, and thus inherent difficulty in assessing, human insecurities.

Manipulating Insecurity

As a matter of security analysis, human security’s focus on the security and protection of populations at the individual and community level aligns with cognitive warfare’s emphasis on the targeting and defending of populations at the individual, group and societal levels. More importantly, human security draws attention to how people’s perceptions of insecurity can affect experiences, attitudes, perceptions and behaviors that materially affect the civilian environment. This raises the prospect that those processes could be targeted through cognitive warfare.

Assessments of human security are already challenged by the distinction between objective and subjective threats (“the subjective feeling of safety has no necessary connection with actually being safe,” as political scientist Barry Buzan wrote in 1983), and cognitive warfare complicates this further by adding manipulated ones. Left unresolved, what begins as threat manipulations could drive behaviors that lead to threats in actuality: the manipulated (or manufactured) perception of shortages in food and medical supplies, for example, could drive a run on goods that makes the threat a reality. While addressing human insecurities can endow military forces with support and moral legitimacy amongst civilians, getting the distinction wrong between “authentic” and “manipulated” insecurities—subtle and contested as that distinction may be—could have the opposite effect.

If cognitive warfare is about shaping the cognitive context in which people make sense of what is going on, decide how to respond, and ultimately take action, then people’s perceptions and experiences of insecurity, which motivate behavior especially in times of crisis and uncertainty, are a factor in this equation. When countering cognitive warfare, the human security paradigm should provide cognitive warfare defenders with a framework to help systematically interrogate the range of human insecurities at play, which of those insecurities might be targeted (i.e. manipulated) amongst which populations, and how decisions and behaviors may change as a result.

Recommendations

For democratic societies, it is important that defense of the domestic cognitive space remains primarily a civilian responsibility. Accordingly, human security considerations should be incorporated into the activities of civilian agencies involved in cognitive warfare defense, including regarding societal resilience and crisis preparedness.

In engaging with adversaries beyond the domestic space, cognitive warfare defenders and operators should incorporate human security considerations—especially regarding the psychological factors affecting people’s experiences of insecurity, perceptions, decisions and behaviors—within operational planning and conduct. This means incorporating a human security lens as part of (a) understanding the environment and (b) all efforts to design, deliver, and counter cognitive effects.

NATO’s human security approach should be updated to reflect the synergy with cognitive warfare by explicitly recognizing the potential for cognitive warfare-driven manipulation of human security threat perceptions in the civilian environment. (In the UK approach to human security, the reference to manipulation as part of “Information Insecurity” is a step in the right direction, although cognitive warfare is about more than mis/dis-information.)

Ultimately, effort is required to fully appraise and rationalize the synergy between cognitive warfare and human security. This could include: (a) systemic exploration of the specific psychological and behavioral mechanisms at play; (b) identification, validation and articulation of the synergy’s implications at policy, concept and doctrine levels; and (3) ensuring that the necessary capabilities are available to incorporate human security considerations within cognitive warfare activities.