News & Briefings

The PRC’s security goals include denying the United States unchallenged freedom of maneuver under the Arctic ice and the northern approaches to the PRC’s home waters. The PRC is systematically using instruments of national power flexibly to gain access to scientific treaty memberships, enter denied areas via scientific missions, and obtain comprehensive seafloor topographic data through undersea mining, commercial undersea cable ventures, and clandestine mapping missions. The PRC will probably use any intelligence advantage to ensure that, when it chooses conflict, it does so with an undersea presence that is both technologically advanced and informed by extensive knowledge of undersea topography, sensor arrays, currents, and NATO/US tactics.

Memory supplies the past, interpretation supplies the present, and expectation supplies the future. Together, these things produce a judgment about where events are heading.

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.

“Will to Fight is one of the most challenging elements of military capability analysis because of its fundamentally intangible nature,” states the framework, shared exclusively with Breaking Defense ahead of its publication. Unlike the specific number of tanks or the condition of fighter jets that form the basis for so much analysis of military readiness, the framework says “most elements relative to will to fight are not quantitative; nor are they easily observed.”