Cognitive Warfare, a Battle for the Brain

Curator note

With the growing role of technology and information overload, individual cognitive abilities will no longer be sufficient to ensure an informed and timely decision-making, leading to the new concept of Cognitive Warfare, which has become a recurring term in military terminology in recent years.
Cognitive Warfare causes an insidious challenge. It disrupts the ordinary understandings and reactions to events in a gradual and subtle way, but with significant harmful effects over time. Cognitive warfare has universal reach, from the individual to states and multinational organisations. It feeds on the techniques of disinformation and propaganda aimed at psychologically exhausting the receptors of information. Everyone contributes to it, to varying degrees, consciously or sub consciously and it provides invaluable knowledge on society, especially
open societies, such as those in the West. This knowledge can then be easily weaponised. It offers NATO’s adversaries a means of bypassing the traditional battlefield with significant strategic results, which may be utilised to radically transform Western societies.
The instruments of information warfare, along with the addition of “neuro-weapons” adds to future technological perspectives, suggesting that the cognitive field will be one of tomorrow’s battlefields. This perspective is further strengthened in by the rapid advances of NBICs (Nanotechnology, Biotechnology, Information Technology and Cognitive Sciences) and the understanding of the brain. NATO’s adversaries are
already investing heavily in these new technologies.
Hence, the advent of the concept of "cognitive warfare" brings a third major combat dimension to the modern battlefield: to the physical and informational dimensions is now added a cognitive dimension. The latter thus creates a new space of competition, beyond the land, maritime, air, cybernetic and spatial domains, which our adversaries have understood and sometimes already integrated. Warfare in the cognitive domain mobilises a wider range of battle spaces than the physical and informational dimensions can do. Its field of action is global and aimed to seize control of human beings (civilian as well as military), organisations, nations, but also of ideas, psychology, especially behavioural, thoughts, as well as the environment.