A short review of something you don't need to read
I read it so you don't have to
Below is an abbreviated review of a recent article titled, “Why the US is Losing the Cognitive Competition.” In the general genre of “cognitive warfare” and related literature, it’s not terrible, provided you don’t read too closely or possess any historical knowledge of the subject. Bottom line: the article lacked substance. This brief review is published solely because the piece served as a prompt for a broader discussion on “cognitive warfare” in a separate post.
Typical of the genre—whether labeled “cognitive warfare,” “information warfare,” or “bring back USIA”—this article offers reactive, tactical prescriptions while neglecting the broader strategic picture. By failing to engage with the full socio-political and economic spectrum our adversaries target, the author effectively surrenders the initiative. This oversight grants the enemy a strategic monopoly, leaving their primary avenues of approach entirely uncontested.
For example, the introduction of “Why the US is Losing the Cognitive Competition” is striking—not for its insight, but for its profound failure to grasp historical precedent or the full extent of adversarial doctrine and actions.
In order for the US to successfully compete for global influence against its adversaries and to avoid a kinetic fight, we must excel at cognitive warfare; that is military activities designed to affect attitudes and behaviors. This type of warfare is a subset of irregular warfare (IW) and combines sensitive activities to include information operations, cyber, and psychological operations to meet a goal.
Defining “cognitive warfare” as a military activity is virtually akin to straightening picture frames while the house is burning. The competition for “global influence” takes place before military forces, irregular or regular, are engaged, or instead of military force.
The glaring absence of any acknowledgement that “cognitive warfare” is fundamentally about employing means other than military force to achieve political objectives, including undermining an adversary’s willingness and ability to deploy military countermeasures, is stunning.
Though the author made fleeting references to China’s Belt and Road Initiative and Confucius Institutes, these token acknowledgements only highlight the article’s myopia. The glaring absence of the broader economic, resource, cultural, and political dynamics—including, for example, buying an insurance company—that are actually involved in the normal course of waging what the author and others attempt to label as “cognitive warfare” results in proposed solutions that are incomplete and fundamentally flawed.
While it is absurd to suggest the author of “Why the US is Losing the Cognitive Competition” intends for the Pentagon to take over or otherwise oversee the diplomacy, trade, public communications, and the gamut of scientific, cultural, and educational collaborations conducted by the United States government, what other conclusion is possible? Because text fails to frame military action as a subset of a larger national policy, it implicitly argues that the military should become the sole proprietor of US global engagement. The author argued that Special Operations Forces should lead the nation’s response to “cognitive warfare” because SOF members are the military’s “most creative members.”
This absurdity highlights a systemic failure common to this article and the broader genre: the inability to situate the military within a larger national strategy. Preventing a kinetic fight demands instruments far beyond the Department of Defense. The reality is stark: if the military is tasked with leading the defense against “cognitive warfare,” the adversary has already seized the initiative.
For example, the author wrote, “Russia uses IW to attempt to ensure the battle is won before military operations begin and to enhance its conventional forces.” Placing the Defense Department in charge of preemptively denying or reactively reducing Russian “IW” requires a substantial redelegation of authorities among executive departments and agencies.
Like so many others, this article tries to solve a leadership problem by offering tactical band-aids for a failure of strategic leadership. “US architects,” the author wrote, “of [Information Warfare] seem to primarily focus on oversight structures and budget, and less on how to develop an enduring capability.”
The omission of this context is not merely an oversight; it is symptomatic of a pervasive, decades-long myopia within the national security community, including schools, analysts, and policymakers.
The attention on SOF even comes up short. As I pointed out in “Cognitive Warfare Fails the Cognitive Test,” the silence in not calling for Psychological Operations and Civil Affairs troops and Foreign Area officers is deafening. Perhaps, in the author’s view, these fall under the “HUMINT [human intelligence] experts,” but that’s unlikely based on the context, suggests the intelligence community would provide the “regional experts [to] equip SOF operators with the nuanced understanding required to navigate the complexities that make up the ‘prior to bang’ playing field.” In a glaring omission, the author overlooks existing forces, despite calling for the capabilities they possess: “We need expertise to be able to decipher the stories, motives, and aspirations that make cognitive warfare unique.”
The author’s invocation of the Kennedy Administration betrays a shallow grasp of history—a misunderstanding likely born of received wisdom rather than individual ignorance. A review of the 1962 record reveals that the Kennedy White House actively resisted the notion that Russian and Chinese political warfare demanded a preemptive, holistic response. Rather than neutralizing these threats at the root, the administration’s policy effectively allowed problems to metastasize, responding only then with sporadic covert actions. By that point, the struggle for minds and wills had already been lost. Consequently, the military was deployed not as a preventative force, but as a reactive cleanup crew for a crisis that political inaction had allowed to fester.
This historical amnesia traps us in a strategic Groundhog Day, with a crucial distinction: we are unknowingly re-litigating old arguments, blind to the reasons they failed before. Paradoxically, we would be better served by excavating proposals from six and seven decades ago—many of which require only the barest tweaks to address modern challenges.
In short, our adversaries are flanking the US security architecture—a military-centric Maginot Line built by a leadership class that historically fails to grasp the spectrum of modern conflict.
Some years ago, the US Army recognized the issues at work today:
It is necessary to remember, in the first place, that this war is not one that is being fought by the military forces alone. There are economic, psychologic, social, political and even literary forces engaged, and it is necessary for us in order to defeat the enemy, to understand fully the strength of each. Nor can the investigation stop with the forces of the enemy: it must extend to each country in the world and to every people. The question of winning the war is far too complicated and far too delicate to be answered by a study of only the powers and resources of the nations in arms.
The author pointed to an instance of Presidential leadership, but the critical context is ignored. In 1962, President Kennedy did say to West Point graduates that there was “another type of war, new in its intensity, ancient in its origin,” which would require “a whole new kind of strategy, a wholly different kind of force,” and that these forces “are too unconventional to be called conventional forces.” The author did not accurately quote Kennedy, however. Instead, they reordered and mashed together what he said. Here is what Kennedy said (the bold is the author’s source for their mashup):
To cite one final example of the range of responsibilities that will fall upon you: you may hold a position of command with our special forces, forces which are too unconventional to be called conventional, forces which are growing in number and importance and significance, for we now know that it is wholly misleading to call this “the nuclear age,” or to say that our security rests only on the doctrine of massive retaliation.
Korea has not been the only battleground since the end of the Second World War. Men have fought and died in Malaya, in Greece, in the Philippines, in Algeria and Cuba and Cyprus, and almost continuously on the Indo-Chinese Peninsula. No nuclear weapons have been fired. No massive nuclear retaliation has been considered appropriate. This is another type of war, new in its intensity, ancient in its origin--war by guerrillas, subversives, insurgents, assassins, war by ambush instead of by combat; by infiltration, instead of aggression, seeking victory by eroding and exhausting the enemy instead of engaging him. It is a form of warfare uniquely adapted to what has been strangely called “wars of liberation,” to undermine the efforts of new and poor countries to maintain the freedom that they have finally achieved. It preys on economic unrest and ethnic conflicts. It requires in those situations where we must counter it, and these are the kinds of challenges that will be before us in the next decade if freedom is to be saved, a whole new kind of strategy, a wholly different kind of force, and therefore a new and wholly different kind of military training.
But I have spoken thus far only of the military challenges which your education must prepare you for. The nonmilitary problems which you will face will also be most demanding, diplomatic, political, and economic…
Above all, you will have a responsibility to deter war as well as to fight it. For the basic problems facing the world today are not susceptible of a final military solution. While we will long require the services and admire the dedication and commitment of the fighting men of this country, neither our strategy nor our psychology as a nation, and certainly not our economy, must become permanently dependent upon an ever-increasing military establishment…
It is crucial to acknowledge that Kennedy was focused on conflicts that turned hot and a military-based response. He was not discussing a whole-of-government response to “cognitive warfare.” The venue dictated his framing. Kennedy was addressing a military audience at a military facility to inaugurate a school dedicated to military solutions. By stripping away this context, the author misrepresents the scope and intent of the President's words.
Even then, the “type of war” was not new. The US recognized for the prior fifteen years that the Soviet Union—and then China—were waging a sustained campaign of political warfare against the interests of the US and allies. The reference to Kennedy is consistent with the author’s framework, precisely because it is limited to the military and intelligence communities, excluding broader societal and governmental levers.
The snippet below from a much longer discussion on “Military Cold War Education” in May 1962 could seem to buttress the author’s claims above. It doesn’t, however, and not just because of the explicit focus on the military here. At the same time, the Kennedy administration was actively opposing “widening the scope” of training for non-military foreign affairs personnel, a proposal then referred to as the Freedom Academy. Strangely, this program—introduced years prior—had been effectively stiff-armed by the Eisenhower administration, dismissed as a mere distraction. Under Kennedy, however, this rejection escalated. The State Department went so far as to lie, falsely claiming it already provided the training that the proposed Freedom Academy would offer. The most remarkable aspect of this saga is not that the effort existed, but that it has been completely erased from memory. This collective amnesia is baffling, given that the initiative enjoyed significant public backing and years of consistent, favorable coverage on the front pages and editorial sections of the nation’s press. That discuss is for another time.
