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The NextGen Information Environment | NATO

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02.08.2026 at 04:56pm
The NextGen Information Environment | NATO Image
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The NextGen Information Environment report by Neville Bolt, Elina Lange-Ionatamishvil for NATO’s Strategic Communications Centre of Excellence (StratCom COE) examines how emerging technologies and immersive platforms are reshaping the global information space and strategic communication. It brings together experts across academia, policy, and technology to assess future trajectories in the information environment and identify early indicators states and alliances should monitor to maintain informational advantage. The report highlights the strategic implications of AI, cyber-enabled platforms, and immersive media on how publics interact with information, offering a foundational framework for understanding the risks and opportunities NATO faces in an increasingly contested information domain. This latest work confirms the COE’s emphasis on anticipating change and building resilient strategic communication capabilities across allied nations.

The report’s emphasis on neuro-warfare, AI-enabled influence, and the shift from content creation to manipulating curation and filtering directly echoes recent Small Wars Journal analyses of cognitive and AI-driven cognitive warfare. For example, The Challenge of AI-Enhanced Cognitive Warfare: A Call to Arms for a Cognitive Defense examines how adversaries use AI to exploit psychological vulnerabilities and manipulate behavior at scale, underscoring the urgency of integrating behavioral, AI, and defense capabilities into cognitive security strategies, precisely what the report identifies as a gap in current institutional frameworks. Similarly, Cognitive Warfare Without a Map: Why Current Targeting Logic Fails in a Fast-Moving Information Ecosystem argues that traditional, kinetic-centric planning models fail to keep pace with the rapid, networked dynamics of cognitive conflict, reinforcing the report’s call for new analytic units and operational approaches capable of countering adversarial use of agentic systems, AI filtering, and rapid influence propagation.

Together, these SWJ works illustrate how AI-driven cognitive warfare transforms influence into a systemic, algorithmically mediated contest, thereby validating the report’s recommendations for anticipatory analysis, offensive strategic communications, and enhanced detection across emerging domains of influence. For a deep dive in how to assess cognitive warfare, read Assessing Cognitive Warfare by Dr. Frank Hoffman!

“POLITICAL ACTION

Based on the project’s findings, we have created thematic clusters of key questions to consider and possible action points for Allied governments.

Security Landscape and Information Warfare

Neuro-warfare represents an emerging field requiring urgent attention. NATO allies should place greater emphasis on creating units dedicated to anticipatory analysis. These should focus on the frontiers of neural data, and address current institutional gaps.
 
A strategic shift is taking place from content creation to influencing curation and filtering. It should be addressed by ensuring the necessary understanding and capabilities, are in place, including detection and countering measures.
 
Western democracies should change the way they think about security from frameworks where counter-narrative inevitably responds to narrative, and instead identify how best to impose costs on adversaries by conducting technology-enabled information operations.
 
Western governments should acknowledge the increased influence of private sector technology leaders and anticipate how to address the implications that arise from misalignment between private and state interests.
 
The proliferation of agentic systems invites urgent attention. As automated agents increasingly interact at scale beyond human oversight, they filter and negotiate the relevance of information in ways that are vulnerable to manipulation.
 
Western states should develop systems to detect and mitigate threatening content designed for AI consumption, and map emerging domains of influence operations that adversaries target.
 
Democracies should safeguard against adversaries who seek to acquire or infiltrate companies that manipulate search engines and reverse-engineer or poison large language models. National security frameworks should assess acquisitions of digital platforms driven by political objectives and information control rather than commercial logic; thus intervene where strategic threats emerge subject to respecting legitimate market freedoms.
 
New governance frameworks are required to address the shift from trust in institutions to AI. AI systems with embedded emotional intelligence create new vulnerabilities to psychological exploitation, particularly where adversaries can infiltrate systems capable of shaping human judgement.Growing competition with China requires Western policy makers and public actors increase their Sino-literacy to address a dangerous asymmetry in information.
 
The liberal democratic West should explain why moral supervision is required over surveillance technologies that function indirectly. Foundational ethical frameworks should be put in place to address social problems that arise from technologies’ tempting appeal before they are adopted.
 
AI systems in authoritarian countries are only partially under the control of political authorities. This opens up strategic vulnerabilities, creating fresh opportunities for liberal democracies. Populations in authoritarian countries could still access AI systems that generate common knowledge which may yet fall outside regime control and offer the opportunity to undermine authoritarian stability from within.
 
NATO’s defence spending commitment of attaining 5 per cent of GDP invites clarification. In particular, how resilience should be newly defined to address new challenges, and how funds should be allocated to build resilience in information environments.
 
NATO’s offensive strategic communications capabilities require a greater presence in virtual information environments. That involves pre-emptively engaging in contexts of ‘cognitive warfare’ with moral frameworks that justify offensive operations in the face of adversaries who use technology to undermine democratic stability.
 
Europe should strengthen its de-platforming and de-funding strategies by employing frameworks like D-RAIL (Directing Responses Against Illicit Influence Operations). At the same time, it will be necessary to prepare for an inevitable policy confrontation with the US over divergent standards of de-platforming.”
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