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What is published in NATO Review does not constitute the official position or
policy of NATO or member governments.
NATO Review seeks to inform and promote debate on security issues. The views
expressed by authors are their own.
Countering cognitive warfare: awareness and
resilience
 Johns Hopkins University & Imperial College London
 20 May 2021
The Alliance faces a range of challenges in emerging
domains of conflict. These domains can arise from the
introduction of new and disruptive technologies. The
domains of space and cyber, for example, came out of
developments in rocket, satellite, computing,
telecommunications, and internetworking technologies.
The increasingly widespread use of social media, social
networking, social messaging, and mobile device
technologies is now enabling a new domain: cognitive
warfare.
In cognitive warfare, the human mind becomes the
battlefield. The aim is to change not only what people think,
but how they think and act. Waged successfully, it shapes
and influences individual and group beliefs and behaviours
to favour an aggressor’s tactical or strategic objectives. In
its extreme form, it has the potential to fracture and
fragment an entire society, so that it no longer has the
collective will to resist an adversary’s intentions. An
opponent could conceivably subdue a society without
resorting to outright force or coercion.
The aims of cognitive warfare can be limited, with short
time horizons. Or they can be strategic, with campaigns
launched over the course of decades. A single campaign
could focus on the limited aim of preventing a military
manoeuver from taking place as planned, or to force the
alteration of a specific public policy. Several successive
campaigns could be launched with the long-term objective
of disrupting entire societies or alliances, by seeding
doubts about governance, subverting democratic processes,
triggering civil disturbances, or instigating separatist
movements.
Combined arms
In the last century, the innovative integration of mobile
infantry, armour, and air resulted in a new and initially
irresistible kind of manoeuver warfare. Today, cognitive
warfare integrates cyber, information, psychological, and
social engineering capabilities to achieve its ends. It takes
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advantage of the internet and social media to target
influential individuals, specific groups, and large numbers
of citizens selectively and serially in a society.
It seeks to sow doubt, to introduce conflicting narratives, to
polarise opinion, to radicalise groups, and to motivate them
to acts that can disrupt or fragment an otherwise cohesive
society. And the widespread use of social media and smart
device technologies in Alliance member countries may
make them particularly vulnerable to this kind of attack.
The Cognitive Domain is a new space of competition, beyond the land,
maritime, air, cybernetic and spatial domains.
© NATO Innovation Hub
Fake news not required
It is useful to note that false information or fake news are
not required to achieve the aims of cognitive warfare. An
embarrassing government document, hacked from a public
official’s email account, anonymously leaked into a social
media sharing site, or dribbled out selectively to opposition
groups in a social network, is sufficient to cause dissension.
A social messaging campaign that inflames the passions of
online influencers can cause controversies to go viral.
Social media groups may be motivated to organise
demonstrations and to take to the street. Official denials or
ambiguous public responses in these circumstances can
add to confusion and doubt or to entrench conflicting
narratives among segments of the populace.
While fake social media accounts and automated messaging
“bots” can augment this dynamic, they are not required. (A
recent MIT study found that the emotions of suprise and
disgust alone make messages go viral – and regular users,
not bots, rapidly re-send them.)
Our clever devices
A paper copy of your favorite newspaper does not know
what news items you prefer to read. But your tablet
computer does. The advertisement you saw in the paper
does not know that you went to the store to buy what was
advertised; your smartphone does. The editorial you read
does not know that you enthusiastically shared it with some
of your closest friends. Your social network system does.
Our social media applications track what we like and
believe; our smartphones track where we go and who we
spend time with; our social networks track who we
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associate with and whom we exclude. And our search and
e-commerce platforms use these tracking data to turn our
preferences and beliefs into action – by offering stimuli to
encourage us to buy things we might not otherwise have
purchased.
Thus far, consumer societies have seen and accepted the
benefits. The tablet computer serves us news stories that it
knows we will like, because it wants to keep us engaged.
Advertisements are displayed that conform to our tastes,
based on our previous purchases. Coupons appear on our
smartphone to encourage us to stop at the store that, by
some apparent coincidence, is on our current route already.
Social networks present opinions that we heartily agree
with. The friends in our social network circles share these
opinions too, as those who do not are quietly “un-friended”
or leave on their own.
In short, we increasingly find ourselves in comfortable
bubbles, where distasteful or disturbing news items,
opinions, offerings, and persons are rapidly excluded – if
they appear at all. The danger is that the society at large
may fragment into many such bubbles, each blissfully
separate from the others. And, as they drift apart, each is
more likely to be disturbed or shocked whenever they come
into contact.
The regular bustle and commerce of the public square, the
open debate in a public forum, the sense of a common res
publica (public affairs) of a pluralistic society – these
moderating influences may become weakened and
attenuated, and our sensibilities more easily disturbed.
What once was a vibrant open society becomes instead a
collection of multiple closed micro-societies cohabiting the
same territory, subject to fracture and disarray.
Our weakened minds
Our cognitive abilities may also be weakened by social
media and smart devices. Social media use can enhance the
cognitive biases and innate decision errors described in the
Nobel-prize winning behaviourist Daniel Kahneman’s book
Thinking, Fast and Slow.
News feeds and search engines that serve results which
align with our preferences increase confirmation bias,
whereby we interpret new information to confirm our
preconceived beliefs. Social messaging apps rapidly update
users with new information, inducing recency bias,
whereby we overweight the importance of recent events
over those of the past. Social networking sites induce social
proofing, wherein we mimic and affirm others’ actions and
beliefs to fit in with our social groups, which become echo
chambers of conformism and groupthink.
The rapid pace of messaging and news releases, and the
perceived need to quickly react to them, encourages
“thinking fast” (reflexively and emotionally) as opposed to
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“thinking slow” (rationally and judiciously). Even
established and reputable news outlets now post emotional
headlines to encourage viral diffusion of their news articles.
People spend less time reading their content, even as they
increase the frequency in sharing them. Social messaging
systems are optimised to distribute short snippets that
often omit important context and nuance. This can facilitate
the spread of both intentionally and unintentionally
misinterpreted information or slanted narratives. The
brevity of social media posts, in combination with striking
visual images, may prevent readers from understanding
others’ motives and values.
Cognitive warfare integrates cyber, information, psychological, and social
engineering capabilities to achieve its ends.
© Root Info Solutions
The need for awareness
The advantage in cognitive warfare goes to him who moves
first and chooses the time, place, and means of the
offensive. Cognitive warfare can be waged using a variety
of vectors and media. The openness of social media
platforms allows adversaries easily to target individuals,
selected groups, and the public via social messaging, social
media influencing, selective release of documents, video
sharing, etc. Cyber capabilities permit the use of
spearfishing, hacking, and tracking of individuals and social
networks.
A proper defence requires at the very least an awareness
that a cognitive warfare campaign is underway. It requires
the ability to observe and orient before decision-makers can
decide to act. Technology solutions can provide the means
to answer some key questions: Is there a campaign going
on? Where did it originate? Who is waging it? What might
be its aims? Our research indicates that there are patterns
of such campaigns that repeat and can be classified. They
may even provide “signatures” unique to specific actors
that can help to identify them.
A particularly useful technology solution may be a cognitive
warfare monitoring and alert system. Such a system could
help to identify cognitive warfare campaigns as they arise,
and to track them as they progress. It could include a
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dashboard that integrates data from a wide range of social
media, broadcast media, social messaging, and social
networking sites. This would display geographic and social
network maps that show the development of suspected
campaigns over time.
By identifying the locations, both geographic and virtual, in
which social media posts, messages, and news articles
originate, the topics under discussion, sentiment and
linguistic identifiers, pacing of releases, and other factors,
a dashboard could reveal connections and repeating
patterns. Links between social media accounts (for
example, shares, comments, interactions) and their timing
could be observed. The use of machine learning and pattern
recognition algorithms could help quickly to identify and
classify emerging campaigns without the need for human
intervention.
Such a system would allow real-time monitoring and
provide timely alerts to NATO and Alliance decisionmakers, helping them to formulate appropriate responses
to campaigns as they emerge and evolve.
Considerations on resilience
Since the early days of the Alliance, NATO has played an
essential role in promoting and enhancing civil
preparedness among its member states. Article 3 of the
NATO founding treaty establishes the principle of
resilience, which requires all Alliance member states to
“maintain and develop their individual and collective
capacity to resist armed attack.” This includes supporting
the continuity of government, and the provision of essential
services, including resilient civil communications systems.
Some key considerations for NATO at this time are how
best to take the lead in defining cognitive attacks, how to
help Alliance members maintain awareness, and how to
support more robust civil communications infrastructures
and public education frameworks in order to enhance the
capacity to resist and to respond.
This is the fourth article of a mini-series on
innovation, which focuses on technologies Allies are
looking to adopt and the opportunities they will bring
to the defence and security of the NATO Alliance.
Previous articles:
▪ Building a resilient innovation pipeline for the
Alliance
▪ Artificial Intelligence at NATO: dynamic adoption,
responsible use
▪ Cognitive Biotechnology: opportunities and
considerations for the NATO Alliance
What is published in NATO Review does not constitute the official position or
policy of NATO or member governments.
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NATO Review seeks to inform and promote debate on security issues. The views
expressed by authors are their own.
ABOUT THE AUTHOR

Johns Hopkins University: Kathy Cao, Sean
Glaister, Adriana Pena, Danbi Rhee, William Rong,
Alexander Rovalino
Imperial College London: Sam Bishop, Rohan
Khanna, Jatin Singh Saini
Under the Supervision of: Lawrence Aronhime,
Associate Teaching Professor, and Alexander
Cocron, Lecturer, Johns Hopkins University
Whiting School of Engineering
RELATED TAGS
Emerging security threats
Cyber
Defence technology
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