When Cognitive Warfare Is Kinetic

Curator note

As autonomy increases and communications become less reliable in contested
environments, control will continue to shift onboard. This shift does not eliminate vulnerability, but it does redefine it. Instead of seizing command links or disabling hardware, adversaries can achieve operational effects by shaping what autonomous systems perceive, believe, and decide. In the case of autonomous drones, this means that perception pipelines, state estimators, and planners become battlespaces in their own right. Manipulating these cognitive layers can redirect weapons, nullify missions, induce fratricide or escalation, and produce deniability by https://www.lawfaremedia.org/article/cognitive-warfare-and-future-conflict.
Critically, the effects of cognitive attacks are both physically real and kinetically consequential. A misclassified object is not merely a software bug; it is a potential civilian casualty. To effectively anticipate, identify, and disrupt these attack vectors, this problem needs to be viewed as a form of cognitive warfare wherein the target is https://www.nato.int/docu/review/articles/2021/05/20/cognitive-warfare/index.html.