I’m a sucker for “cognitive warfare” analyses these days, but mostly because it’s an umbrella for stuff I’m long interested in. Still, as you clarify, it’s a disappointing concept, just the latest in a string, touted mostly by military folks who are not really interested in it, ignored by offices and agencies that should be, all partly because we’re not organized to focus on it, partly because hard power, realism, realpolitik, and geopolitics dismissively govern U.S. strategic thinking.
Deeper problem: inchoate definitions of what’s “cognitive” — to include all “attitudes and behaviors” like its definers have done is so imprecise it misleads. Academic definitions of “cognition” and “cognitive science” are elusively expansive too.
How to think about cognitive warfare and what to do about it would be far better focused if cognitive warfare meant dealing specifically with people’s space-time-agency cognitions (perceptions, orientations). These are the base cognitions people acquire as babies and that, in one form or another, orient them the rest of their lives. All cognitive (political, psychological, noopolitical, etc.) warfare I know about aims to alter people’s sense of what matters spatially, where the future is headed temporally, and what they can and cannot to about it agentically. To me, it’s a no-brainer — but it also appears to be a non-starter for those who are already committed to their own and borrowed definitions.
Good case studies of the measures used to foster the Color Revolutions and Arab Spring would help. They were all about cognitive warfare. Russian and Chinese strategists know this. Good luck finding American strategists and analysts who could do a study.
Great points, David. I have a presentation given by a Russian at a somewhat unique conference held at King's College London in 2017. (I wrote about this in the related post https://mountainrunner.substack.com/p/a-short-review-of-something-you-dont but then cut it out when that post go too long.) The event brought together Russians from Russia (KCL apparently had to pull strings to get their visas approved) who were paired with non-Russians, of which I was one, to discuss "hybrid warfare" (really, political warfare). That conference resulted in a book, and included a chapter by me that I linked to above (that chapter became the basis of my PhD proposal, incidentally). Of the many interesting (perhaps revealing) points of that conference was the Russian study and take-away of the Color Revolutions. They—Russia and China—know these methods well.
You also touch the nerve of what Clausewitz called the “paradoxical trinity”: political reason, institutional friction, and the public’s passions. Western responses to information operations have obsessed over the first pole (government frameworks) while ignoring the other two, especially how domestic narratives and bureaucratic inertia become part of the battlespace.
Furthermore, anything with "warfare" attached onto it is often seen as a military problem, rather than political reason and public's passion. I do feel as though the naming of Cognitive Warfare exposes that weakness at a cost to itself as a concept.
I think your argument gets even stronger when seen this way: the missing piece isn’t another definition of ‘cognitive war,’ it’s political will aligned to coherent ends and means, with all three parts of the trinity in balance.
Man, after all this time, the Prussian is still speaking to us.
Thanks for commenting on my reference to Clausewitz. I'm a bit surprised I haven't seen any other mention of my correction to the accepted translation. But perhaps it's just too early.
Your point about "warfare" is accurate. This was true in 1945 when Congress and the State Department were interested in keeping the US Information Service for peacetime use. Congress wanted it to be a ready tool for, as they wrote, "psychological warfare," but the State Department rejected that language because, well, "warfare."
Hey, when I see something worth commenting on, I make the time too! Plus, I nerd out over Clausewitz as I really feel that his frameworks is a good starting point for the complexity that is warfare.
And our relationships to certain words naturally incite a "codified" reaction too. Which, is fair.
Thanks as always for shedding more light on our government's ability to conduct activities outside the military sphere to advance our goals. The cited article in the The Cipher Brief is, of course, focused on military solutions though the author had a background outside DoD/DoW and should have at least nodded to the need for an alliance with PD and the other instruments of national power to achieve objectives in the 'gray zone.' It is not at all clear to this 25 year veteran of the use of information to achieve military objectives (very specifically MILITARY objectives) that SOF is even the answer to increasing our effectiveness in this domain given their lack of investment in people to advise or perform this function. The author is correct in saying we have way underinvested in HUMINT and having more people on the ground conversing in the native language and learning about the culture, decision-making and motivations of people critical to our understanding of the information environment. But, as you point, out this is missing the point as no amount of HUMINT particularly collected in a military context is going to push our government to create the organizations and tools needed to advance our interests. I am fortunate to have many friends of other nationalities who gladly share their views of our confounding actions and the impact of those activities on the psyche of their governments and populations. One does have to question whether any of our current government leaders ever bother to listen to others outside the tiny bubbles they occupy. I use the scare quotes around gray zone above because I think the term continues to confound any deeper analysis and implies all the other tools of national power become irrelevant once the use of force is applied. The author certainly uses the term to buttress the position that more of this-and-that in DoD/DoW will help in our efforts to combat the political warfare of our adversaries showing yet again the term 'gray zone' obscures and implies a military solution in a competitive environment for the goals we, at one time, valued but now seem out of date. Yes, you're right that this is the heart of the matter now as we demolish any pretense for fighting against our adversaries in the minds of those that will determine the course of future conflicts.
Thanks. There is value in "gray/grey zone," but, to your point, that value is limited and that limitation must be acknowledged. Once one side takes an adverse stance toward another, we're technically in a gray zone, whether we know it or not, or care. Thus, we're potentially always in a gray zone. I'll counter that the gray zone "implies a military solution" only because that's how we view national security, how we teach national security, and how we organize for national security.
Academic squabbles, definitional arguments...not very useful. And yes, the military involvement just muddies the waters.
The subject has been long known, and practiced--especially by the Soviets and Comintern.
They called it Active Measures. These Measures were a specialty of intelligence operators. "Active" differentiated these operations from passive espionage--collecting intelligence.
The early communists, from the birth of the Bolshevik revolution through the Comintern (about 1941), had the best ever experts in Active Measures. They spent untold millions on these operations. Their covert influence operations had the most effects (even though the effects were delayed).
My book, Willing Accomplices, details the Comintern covert influence ops against the USA. It also includes a history and taxonomy of Active Measures.
The current discussion and interest in Active Measures would be much more useful without the trendy attempts at creating new terminology--cognitive warfare, etc. There's nothing new about Active Measures.
The USA has always been bad at such operations--whether run by the military, the CIA, USAID, VOA, or any other government organization. We should learn from the history of the most effective operations in this domain.
Excellent breakdown of the definiton trap. The Burnham quote nails it: political warfare focuses on power dynamics, not methods. Spent time in a policy shop where we got paralyzed debating wether X counted as information operations versus influence, and meanwhile adversaries just kept operatin. The part about fMRI versus instinct is kinda genius because it exposes how absurd the tech-first framing realy is. What haunts me is that political will gap you highlight, nobody wants to admit the apparatus exists but lacks authorization or intent.
The subject of the article is correctly identified. China is attacking us in exactly the ways described. So is Russia. We are in an active cyber conflict, an information war, and a steadily escalating material confrontation. None of this is imaginary. None of it is benign.
The problem is that China is also an economic ally. Our supply chains, capital flows, emissions, and industrial systems have been fused for more than two decades—and in that time, we surrendered essential ground.
We cannot disentangle an enemy from an economic ally without tearing the whole system apart. That is the condition we are living in. It is one we built.
That means neither side can afford this war. Not economically. Not politically. Not as nations, and not as a planet. We cannot sustain a great-power conflict layered on top of accelerating ecological collapse. The margin is gone, and the clock is ticking.
Cold War framing feels good because it gives us what climate change does not: a clear enemy, a moral script, and a sense of righteousness that allows us to reoccupy a fantasy high ground. We get to feel engaged when we are implicated.
Where war has villains, climate has graphs.
Reaching backward is moral confusion born of financial incapacity. It's our inability to conceive of a crisis with no front lines, no surrender, no victory parade.
The Soviet Union collapsed. We won. But this time, we all collapse together.
China must be both enemy and ally, because reality does not care about our categories. The moral failure is not misreading the geopolitical threat. It is insisting on clarity when our survival requires collaboration.
This critique shows how new labels recycle historical patterns without addressing the underlying structural dynamics.
Repackaging old concepts as novelty obscures the real misalignment between intention and systemic change.
I’m a sucker for “cognitive warfare” analyses these days, but mostly because it’s an umbrella for stuff I’m long interested in. Still, as you clarify, it’s a disappointing concept, just the latest in a string, touted mostly by military folks who are not really interested in it, ignored by offices and agencies that should be, all partly because we’re not organized to focus on it, partly because hard power, realism, realpolitik, and geopolitics dismissively govern U.S. strategic thinking.
Deeper problem: inchoate definitions of what’s “cognitive” — to include all “attitudes and behaviors” like its definers have done is so imprecise it misleads. Academic definitions of “cognition” and “cognitive science” are elusively expansive too.
How to think about cognitive warfare and what to do about it would be far better focused if cognitive warfare meant dealing specifically with people’s space-time-agency cognitions (perceptions, orientations). These are the base cognitions people acquire as babies and that, in one form or another, orient them the rest of their lives. All cognitive (political, psychological, noopolitical, etc.) warfare I know about aims to alter people’s sense of what matters spatially, where the future is headed temporally, and what they can and cannot to about it agentically. To me, it’s a no-brainer — but it also appears to be a non-starter for those who are already committed to their own and borrowed definitions.
Good case studies of the measures used to foster the Color Revolutions and Arab Spring would help. They were all about cognitive warfare. Russian and Chinese strategists know this. Good luck finding American strategists and analysts who could do a study.
Great points, David. I have a presentation given by a Russian at a somewhat unique conference held at King's College London in 2017. (I wrote about this in the related post https://mountainrunner.substack.com/p/a-short-review-of-something-you-dont but then cut it out when that post go too long.) The event brought together Russians from Russia (KCL apparently had to pull strings to get their visas approved) who were paired with non-Russians, of which I was one, to discuss "hybrid warfare" (really, political warfare). That conference resulted in a book, and included a chapter by me that I linked to above (that chapter became the basis of my PhD proposal, incidentally). Of the many interesting (perhaps revealing) points of that conference was the Russian study and take-away of the Color Revolutions. They—Russia and China—know these methods well.
You also touch the nerve of what Clausewitz called the “paradoxical trinity”: political reason, institutional friction, and the public’s passions. Western responses to information operations have obsessed over the first pole (government frameworks) while ignoring the other two, especially how domestic narratives and bureaucratic inertia become part of the battlespace.
Furthermore, anything with "warfare" attached onto it is often seen as a military problem, rather than political reason and public's passion. I do feel as though the naming of Cognitive Warfare exposes that weakness at a cost to itself as a concept.
I think your argument gets even stronger when seen this way: the missing piece isn’t another definition of ‘cognitive war,’ it’s political will aligned to coherent ends and means, with all three parts of the trinity in balance.
Man, after all this time, the Prussian is still speaking to us.
Thanks for commenting on my reference to Clausewitz. I'm a bit surprised I haven't seen any other mention of my correction to the accepted translation. But perhaps it's just too early.
Your point about "warfare" is accurate. This was true in 1945 when Congress and the State Department were interested in keeping the US Information Service for peacetime use. Congress wanted it to be a ready tool for, as they wrote, "psychological warfare," but the State Department rejected that language because, well, "warfare."
Hey, when I see something worth commenting on, I make the time too! Plus, I nerd out over Clausewitz as I really feel that his frameworks is a good starting point for the complexity that is warfare.
And our relationships to certain words naturally incite a "codified" reaction too. Which, is fair.
Thanks as always for shedding more light on our government's ability to conduct activities outside the military sphere to advance our goals. The cited article in the The Cipher Brief is, of course, focused on military solutions though the author had a background outside DoD/DoW and should have at least nodded to the need for an alliance with PD and the other instruments of national power to achieve objectives in the 'gray zone.' It is not at all clear to this 25 year veteran of the use of information to achieve military objectives (very specifically MILITARY objectives) that SOF is even the answer to increasing our effectiveness in this domain given their lack of investment in people to advise or perform this function. The author is correct in saying we have way underinvested in HUMINT and having more people on the ground conversing in the native language and learning about the culture, decision-making and motivations of people critical to our understanding of the information environment. But, as you point, out this is missing the point as no amount of HUMINT particularly collected in a military context is going to push our government to create the organizations and tools needed to advance our interests. I am fortunate to have many friends of other nationalities who gladly share their views of our confounding actions and the impact of those activities on the psyche of their governments and populations. One does have to question whether any of our current government leaders ever bother to listen to others outside the tiny bubbles they occupy. I use the scare quotes around gray zone above because I think the term continues to confound any deeper analysis and implies all the other tools of national power become irrelevant once the use of force is applied. The author certainly uses the term to buttress the position that more of this-and-that in DoD/DoW will help in our efforts to combat the political warfare of our adversaries showing yet again the term 'gray zone' obscures and implies a military solution in a competitive environment for the goals we, at one time, valued but now seem out of date. Yes, you're right that this is the heart of the matter now as we demolish any pretense for fighting against our adversaries in the minds of those that will determine the course of future conflicts.
Thanks. There is value in "gray/grey zone," but, to your point, that value is limited and that limitation must be acknowledged. Once one side takes an adverse stance toward another, we're technically in a gray zone, whether we know it or not, or care. Thus, we're potentially always in a gray zone. I'll counter that the gray zone "implies a military solution" only because that's how we view national security, how we teach national security, and how we organize for national security.
Academic squabbles, definitional arguments...not very useful. And yes, the military involvement just muddies the waters.
The subject has been long known, and practiced--especially by the Soviets and Comintern.
They called it Active Measures. These Measures were a specialty of intelligence operators. "Active" differentiated these operations from passive espionage--collecting intelligence.
The early communists, from the birth of the Bolshevik revolution through the Comintern (about 1941), had the best ever experts in Active Measures. They spent untold millions on these operations. Their covert influence operations had the most effects (even though the effects were delayed).
My book, Willing Accomplices, details the Comintern covert influence ops against the USA. It also includes a history and taxonomy of Active Measures.
See this excerpt for details:
https://kentclizbe.substack.com/p/kgbcominternsoviet-active-measures
The current discussion and interest in Active Measures would be much more useful without the trendy attempts at creating new terminology--cognitive warfare, etc. There's nothing new about Active Measures.
The USA has always been bad at such operations--whether run by the military, the CIA, USAID, VOA, or any other government organization. We should learn from the history of the most effective operations in this domain.
Agree it's an age-old "thing" for the Russians. I've written about that before and, in fact, it's central to my PhD thesis.
Excellent breakdown of the definiton trap. The Burnham quote nails it: political warfare focuses on power dynamics, not methods. Spent time in a policy shop where we got paralyzed debating wether X counted as information operations versus influence, and meanwhile adversaries just kept operatin. The part about fMRI versus instinct is kinda genius because it exposes how absurd the tech-first framing realy is. What haunts me is that political will gap you highlight, nobody wants to admit the apparatus exists but lacks authorization or intent.
The subject of the article is correctly identified. China is attacking us in exactly the ways described. So is Russia. We are in an active cyber conflict, an information war, and a steadily escalating material confrontation. None of this is imaginary. None of it is benign.
The problem is that China is also an economic ally. Our supply chains, capital flows, emissions, and industrial systems have been fused for more than two decades—and in that time, we surrendered essential ground.
We cannot disentangle an enemy from an economic ally without tearing the whole system apart. That is the condition we are living in. It is one we built.
That means neither side can afford this war. Not economically. Not politically. Not as nations, and not as a planet. We cannot sustain a great-power conflict layered on top of accelerating ecological collapse. The margin is gone, and the clock is ticking.
Cold War framing feels good because it gives us what climate change does not: a clear enemy, a moral script, and a sense of righteousness that allows us to reoccupy a fantasy high ground. We get to feel engaged when we are implicated.
Where war has villains, climate has graphs.
Reaching backward is moral confusion born of financial incapacity. It's our inability to conceive of a crisis with no front lines, no surrender, no victory parade.
The Soviet Union collapsed. We won. But this time, we all collapse together.
China must be both enemy and ally, because reality does not care about our categories. The moral failure is not misreading the geopolitical threat. It is insisting on clarity when our survival requires collaboration.
We can win this time if we torch our home.
But no one will be at the parade.