News & Briefings

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.”

On September 29, Iran’s Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps did something unusual. It published a lengthy open letter addressed not to Washington but to “the honorable people of the United States,” and particularly to American scholars, students and journalists. I checked each of its more than 300 factual assertions. The pattern is more effective than pure fabrication: verifiable facts and genuine grievances are mixed with unsupported, misleading and false claims, and opinion and prediction are repeatedly presented as fact.

In August 2021, Afghan National Security Forces collapsed in a mere eleven days following the withdrawal of the United States military. Two decades of training and advising ended without resistance before a materially inferior Taliban force reclaimed power amid an authority vacuum. The principal problem was a cultural misalignment. The coalition was compatible in the desire to build tactical military capability, yet it could not read Afghanistan at the higher level. It misjudged the country's strategic culture, its faith, and its social fabric. Afghanistan had little in common with Western norms, and little wish to adopt them. It was a failure of coherence among ends, ways, and means.

Russia’s 2014 annexation of Crimea from Ukraine demonstrated how a relatively simple campaign of deception and ambiguity could exploit the deliberate decision-making process of liberal democracies, delaying any meaningful response long enough for the operation to achieve its objective. Over a decade later, advancements in technology, specifically generative artificial intelligence (AI), now threaten to magnify that vulnerability by allowing adversaries to rapidly produce convincing synthetic video, audio, imagery, and other forms of manipulated media at an unprecedented scale. The next “Little Green Man” may not appear as an unmarked soldier, but as an information environment so saturated with competing versions of reality that democratic leaders struggle to determine when and how to respond. This article argues that liberal democracies must prepare now by adapting doctrine, training decision-makers to operate under uncertainty, and developing rapid authentication and attribution capabilities that reduce an adversary’s ability to turn uncertainty into strategic advantage.