Cognitive Warfare

Original cover sheet of the study.
Note the chip and the networking of the brain, as well as a transmitter/receiver module at neck level with the line to the chip highlighted. At the chip, somewhat difficult to read, a prompt: "Type to enter Text >..." to program or read out the chip, the brain.

 

A study conducted by NATO (ACT) from the 'Innovation Hub' (iHub)

June - November 2020

 

 

Cognitive Warfare

 

NATO's autmn 2021 'Innovation Challenge' is hosted by Canada , and is titled “The invisible threat: Tools for countering cognitive warfare".

The Canadian Joint Operations Command, under the direction of Lt.-Gen. Mike Rouleau, has launched the 'information operations campaign' in Canada from April 2020, in the "Covid Year". A copy of the planning papers became public in December 2020.

Cognitive warfare and information warfare were used against the population in many countries during the Corona period. Read the following excerpts from the NATO study and see the connections to the past and the present.

 

"The brain will be the battlefield of the 21st century”

"Cognitive warfare’s objective is to make everyone a weapon."

 

The brain, as the "battlefield of the 21st century" is "very often the main vulnerability and it should be acknowledged in order to protect NATO’s human capital".
In order to "protect" the brains from unwanted 'cognitive warfare', the only option left in the view of the military/governments is to expose their own population to their own cognitive warfare and thus exclude another (independent) way of thinking and acting (following the Chinese model).

 

 

Excerpts from 'Cognitive Warfare' (full pdf. Download)

 

The Human Domain of operations could tentatively be defined as “the sphere of interest in which strategies and operations can be designed and implemented that, by targeting the cognitive capacities of individuals and/or communities with a set of specific tools and techniques, in particular digital ones, will influence their perception and tamper with their reasoning capacities, hence gaining control of their decision making, perception and behaviour levers in order to achieve desired effects.”

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As written in the Warfighting 2040 Paper, the nature of warfare has changed. The majority of current conflicts remain below the threshold of the traditionally accepted definition of warfare, but new forms of warfare have emerged such as Cognitive Warfare (CW), while the human mind is now being considered as a new domain of war.

Cognitive Warfare causes an insidious challenge. It disrupts the ordinary understandings and reactions to events in a gradual and subtle way, but with significant harmful effects overtime.
Cognitive warfare has universal reach, from the individual to states and multinational organisations. It feeds on the Techniques of disinformation and propaganda aimed at psychologically exhausting the receptors of information. Everyone contributes to it, to varying degrees, consciously or sub consciously and it provides invaluable knowledge on society, especially open societies, such as those in the West.

The instruments of information warfare, along with the addition of “neuro-weapons” adds to future technological perspectives, suggesting that the cognitive field will be one of tomorrow’s battlefields. This perspective is further strengthened in by the rapid advances of NBICs (Nanotechnology, Biotechnology, Information Technology and Cognitive Sciences) and the understanding of the brain.

NATO needs to anticipate advances in these technologies by raising the awareness on the true potential of CW. Whatever the nature and object of warfare, it always comes down to a clash of human wills, and therefore what defines victory will be the ability to impose a desired be haviour on a chosen audience. Actions undertaken in the five domains - air, land, sea, space and cyber - are all executed in order to have an effect on the human domain. It is therefore time for NATO to recognise the renewed importance of the sixth operational domain, namely the Human Domain.

 

The advent of Cognitive Warfare

From Information Warfare to Cognitive Warfare

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As former US Navy Commander Stuart Green de scribed it (IW) as, “Information operations, the closest 2 existing American doctrinal concept for cognitive warfare, consists of five ‘core capabilities’, or elements. These include electronic warfare, computer network operations, PsyOps, military deception, and operational security.”
Succinctly, Information Warfare aims at controlling the flow of information.

As defined by Clint Watts, cognitive Warfare opposes the capacities to know and to produce, it actively thwarts knowledge. Cognitive sciences cover all the sciences that concern knowledge and its processes (psychology, linguistics, neurobiology, logic and more).

Cognitive Warfare degrades the capacity to know, produce or thwart knowledge.

Cognitive sciences cover all the sciences that concern knowledge and its processes (psychology, linguistics, neurobiology, logic and more).
Cognitive Warfare is therefore the way of using knowledge for a conflicting purpose. In its broadest sense, cognitive warfare is not limited to the military or institutional world. Since the early 1990s, this capability has tended to be applied to the political, economic, cultural and societal fields.
Any user of modern information technologies is a potential target. It targets the whole of a nation’s human capital.

 

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The most striking shift of this practice from the military, to the civilian, world is the pervasiveness of CW activities across everyday life that sit outside the normal peace-crisis-conflict construct (with harmful effects).
Moreover, cognitive warfare is potentially endless since there can be no peace treaty or surrender for this type of conflict.

Evidence now exists that shows new CW tools & techniques target military personnel directly, not only with classical information weapons but also with a constantly growing and rapidly evolving arsenal of neuro-weapons, targeting the brain.

 

Hacking the individual

Social engineering always starts with a deep dive into the human environment of the target.
The goal is to understand the psychology of the targeted people. This phase is more impor tant than any other as it allows not only the precise targeting of the right people but also to anticipate reactions, and to develop empathy. Understanding the human environment is the key to building the trust that will ultimately lead to the desired results. Humans are an easy target since they all contribute by providing information on themselves, making the adversaries’ sock puppets more powerful.
Cognitive Warfare is a war of ideologies that strives to erode the trust that underpins every society.

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Trust is the target

Cognitive warfare pursues the objective of undermining trust (public trust in electoral processes, trust in institutions, allies, politicians...), therefore the individual becomes the weapon, while the goal is not to attack what individuals think but rather the way they think.
It has the potential to unravel the entire social contract that underpins societies. It is natural to trust the senses, to believe what is seen and read. But the democratisation of automated tools and techniques using AI, no longer requiring a technological background, enables anyone to distort information and to further undermine trust in open societies. The use of fake news, deep fakes, Trojan horses, and digital avatars will create new suspicions which anyone can exploit.

 

Cognitive Warfare, a participatory propaganda

In many ways, cognitive warfare can be compared to propaganda, which can be defined as ...

... “a set of methods employed by an organised group that wants to bring about the active or passive participation in its actions of a mass of individuals, psychologically unified through psychological manipulations and incorporated in an organisation.”

The purpose of propaganda is not to "program" minds, but to influence attitudes and behaviours by getting people to adopt the right attitude, which may consist of doing certain things or, often, stopping doing them.

Disinformation preys on the cognitive vulnerabilities of its targets by taking advantage of pre-existing anxieties or beliefs that predispose them to accept false information.

Where CW differs from propaganda is in the fact that everyone participates, mostly inadver tently, to information processing and knowledge formation in an unprecedented way. This is a subtle but significant change. While individuals were passively submitted to propaganda, they now actively contribute to it.
The exploitation of human cognition has become a massive industry. And it is expected that emerging artificial intelligence (AI) tools will soon provide propagandists radically enhanced capabilities to manipulate human minds and change human behaviour.

 

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Cyberpsychology

Tomorrow’s human beings will have to invent a psychology of their relation to machines. But the challenge is to develop also a psychology of machines, artificial intelligent software or hybrid robots.

 

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Understanding the brain is a key challenge for the future

Over the past two decades, cognitive science and neuro science have taken a new step in the analysis and understanding of the human brain, and have opened up new perspectives in terms of brain research, if not indeed of a hybridisation, then of human and artificial intelligence.

DEFINITION: Cognitive Science	DEFINITION: Neuroscience
Discipline associating psychology, sociology, linguistics, artificial intelligence and neurosciences, and having for object the explicitation of the mechanisms of thought and information processing mobilised for the acquisition, conservation, use and transmission of knowledge.	Trans-disciplinary scientific discipline associating biology, mathematics, computer science, etc., with the aim of studying the organisation and functioning of the nervous system, from the point of view of both its structure and its functioning, from the molecular scale down to the level of the organs.

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The vulnerabilities of the human brain

“In the cognitive war, it’s more important than ever to know thyself.”

In particular, the brain:
- is unable to distinct whether particular information is right or wrong;
- Is led to take shortcuts in determining the trustworthiness of messages in case of information overload;
- is led to believe statements or messages that its already heard as true, even though these may be false;
- accepts statements as true, if backed by evidence, with no regards to the authenticity of the that evidence.

 

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There are many different cognitive biases inherently stemming from the human brain. Most of them are relevant to the information environment. Probably the most common and most damaging cognitive bias is the confirmation bias. This is the effect that leads people to look for evidence that confirms what they already think or suspect, to regard facts and ideas they encounter as further confirmation, and to dismiss or ignore any evidence that seems to support another point of view. In other words, “people see what they want to see”.

Click for bigger pic

 

Personal note: So the "most common and damaging cognitive tendency" is: to look for evidence that confirms what they already think or suspect, and ... to dismiss or ignore all evidence that seems to support a different point of view. On 2), I can agree, through other points of view we can learn. On 1), that is complete nonsense. Looking for evidence of what you suspect is 'scientific research' and inventive genius. 1) is fundamentally important, but must not be linked to 2). No ignoring!

 

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The role of emotions

In the digital realm, what allows the digital industries and their customers (and notably ad vertisers) to distinguish individuals in the crowd, to refine personalisation and behavioural analysis, are emotions. Every social media platform, every website is designed to be addictive and to trigger some emotional bursts, trapping the brain in a cycle of posts. The speed, emotional intensity, and echo-chamber qualities of social media content cause those exposed to it to experience more extreme reactions. Social media is particularly well suited to worsening political and social polarisation because of their ability to disseminate violent images and scary rumours very quickly and intensely. “The more the anger spreads, the more Internet users are susceptible to becoming a troll.”

Coined in 1996 by Professor B.J. Fogg from Stanford University, "captology" is defined as the science of using "computers as technologies of persuasion".

“We are competing with sleep” Reed Hastings CEO of Netflix

 

 

 

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The time has therefore come to adopt the rules of this "attention economy", to master the technologies related to "captology", to understand how these challenges are completely new.
Indeed, this battle is not limited to screens and design, it also takes place in brains, especially in the way they are misled.
The issues at stake now go far beyond the framework of pedagogy, ethics and screen addic tion. The consumption environment, especially marketing, is leading the way.

 

Long-term impacts of technology on the brain

As Dr. James Giordano claims, “the brain will be the battlefield of the 21st century”. And when it comes to shaping the brain, the technological environment plays a key role. There is a growing amount of research that explores how technology affects the brain. Studies show that exposure to technology shapes the cognitive processes and the ability to take in in formation. One of the major findings is the advent of a society of ‘cognitive offloaders’, meaning that no one memorises important information any longer. Instead, the brain tends to remember the location where they retrieved when it is next required. With information and visual overload, the brain tends to scan information and pick out what appears to be important with no regard to the rest.
One of the evolutions already noticed is the loss of critical thinking directly related to screen reading and the increasing inability to read a real book. The way information is processed of fects brain development, leading to neglect of the sophisticated thought processes.

 

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In an era where memory is outsourced to Google, GPS, calendar alerts and calculators, it will necessarily produce a generalised loss of knowledge that is not just memory, but rather motor memory. In other words, a long-term process of disabling connections in your brain is ongoing.

The promises of neurosciences “Social neuroscience holds the promise of understanding people’s thoughts, emotions and intentions through the mere observation of their biology.”
Should scientists be able to establish a close and precise correspondence between biological functions on the one hand and social cognitions and behaviours on the other hand, neuroscientific methods could have tremendous applications for many disciplines and for our society in general. It includes decision-making, exchanges, physical and mental health care, prevention, jurisprudence, and more.

 

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Today, the manipulation of our perception, thoughts and behaviours is taking place on previously unimaginable scales of time, space and intentionality. That, precisely, is the source of one of the greatest vulnerabilities that every individual must learn to deal with. Many actors are likely to exploit these vulnerabilities, while the evolution of technology for producing and disseminating information is increasingly fast. At the same time, as the cost of technology steadily drops, more actors enter the scene. As the technology evolves, so do the vulnerabilities.

 

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The militarisation of brain science

Scientists around the world are asking the question of how to free humanity from the limitations of the body. The line between healing and augmentation becomes blurred. In addition, the logical progression of research is to achieve a perfect human being through new technological standards.

The revolution in NBIC (Nanotechnology, biotechnology, information technology, and cognitive science) including advances in genomics, has the potential for dual-use technology development. A wide range of military applications such as improving the performance of soldiers, developing new weapons such as directed energy weapons are already discussed.

Progress and Viability of Neuroscience and Technology (NeuroS/T): Neuroscience employs a variety of methods and technologies to evaluate and influence neurologic substrates and processes of cognition, emotion, and behaviour.

Applied research seeks to develop translational approaches that can be directly utilised to understand and modify the physiology, psychology, and/or pathology of target organisms, including humans.

Neuroscientific methods and technologies (neuroS/T) can be further categorised as those used to assess, and those used to affect the structures and functions of the nervous system, although these categories and actions are not mutually exclusive. For example, the use of certain drugs, toxins, and probes to elucidate functions of various sites of the central and peripheral nervous system can also affect neural activity.

Of more focal concern are uses of research findings and products to directly facilitate the performance of combatants, the integration of human-machine interfaces to optimise combat capabilities of semi-autonomous vehicles (e.g., drones), and development of biological and chemical weapons (i.e., neuroweapons).

 

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Military and Intelligence Use of NeuroS/T

... with most notable and rapidly maturing research and development conducted by the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) and Intelligence Advanced Research Projects Activity (IARPA). To be sure, many DARPA projects are explicitly directed toward advancing neuropsychiatric treatments and interventions that will improve both military and civilian medicine. Yet, it is important to note the prominent ongoing – and expanding – efforts in this domain by NATO European and trans-Pacific strategic competitor nations.

 

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Neuroscientific techniques and technologies that are being utilised for military efforts include:
1. Neural systems modelling and human/brain-machine interactive networks in intelligence, training
... and operational systems;
2. Neuroscientific and neurotechnological approaches to optimising performance and resilience in combat
... and military support personnel;
3. Direct weaponisation of neuroscience and neurotechnology.
Of note is that each and all may contribute to establishing a role for brain science on the 21st century battlescape.

 

 

Direct Weaponisation of NeuroS/T

The objectives for neuroweapons in warfare may be achieved by augmenting or degrading functions of the nervous system, so as to affect cognitive, emotional and/or motor activity and capability (e.g., perception, judgment, morale, pain tolerance, or physical abilities and stamina).

At present, outcomes and products of computational neuroscience and neuropharmacologic research could be used for more indirect applications Human/brain-machine interfacing neurotechnologies capable of optimising data assimilation and interpretation systems by mediating access to – and manipulation of – signal detection, processing, and/or integration are being explored for their potential to delimit “human weak links” in the intelligence chain.

The weaponised use of neuroscientific tools and products is not new. Historically, such weapons which include nerve gas and various drugs, pharmacologic stimulants (e.g., am phetamines), sedatives, sensory stimuli, have been applied as neuroweapons to incapacitate the enemy, and even sleep deprivation and distribution of emotionally provocative information in psychological operations (i.e., PSYOPS) could rightly be regarded as forms of weaponised applications of neuroscientific and neurocognitive research.

 

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Products of neuroscientific and neurotechnological research can be utilised to affect
1) memory, learning, and cognitive speed;
2) wake-sleep cycles, fatigue and alertness;
3) impulse control;
4) mood, anxiety, and self-perception;
5) decision-making;
6) trust and empathy;
7) and movement and performance (e.g., speed, strength, stamina, motor learning, etc.).
In military/warfare settings, modifying these functions can be utilised to mitigate aggression and foster cognitions and emotions of affiliation or passivity; induce morbidity, disability or suffering; and “neutralise” potential opponents or incur mortality.

 

 

Neurodata

Such capacities in both computational and brain sciences have implications for biosecurity and defense initiatives. Several neurotechnologies can be employed kinetically (i.e., providing means to injure, defeat, or destroy adversaries) or non-kinetically (i.e., providing "means of contending against others,” especially in disruptive ways) engagements.

In this context, the term "neurodata” refers to the accumulation of large volumes of information; handling of large scale and often diverse informational sets; and new methods of data visualisation, assimilation, comparison, syntheses, and analyses. Such information can be used to:
• more finely elucidate the structure and function of human brain;
• and develop data repositories that can serve as descriptive or predictive metrics for neuropsychiatric disorders.
Purloining and/or modifying such information could affect military and intelligence readiness, force conservation, and mission capability, and thus national security.

Manipulation of both civilian and military neurodata would affect the type of medical care that is (or is not)...

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... provided, could influence the ways that individuals are socially regarded and treated, and in these ways disrupt public health and incur socio-economic change.
As the current COVID-19 pandemic has revealed, public – and institutional public health – responses to novel pathogens are highly variable at best, chaotic at worst, and indubitably costly (on many levels) in either case. To be sure, such extant gaps in public health and safety infrastructures and functions could be exploited by employing "precision pathologies” (capable of selectively affecting specific targets such as individuals, communities;, domestic animals, livestock, etc.) and an aggressive program of misinformation to incur disruptive effects on social, economic, political, and military scales that would threaten national stability and security.

Digital biosecurity – a term that describes the intersection of computational systems and biological information and how to effectively prevent or mitigate current and emerging risk arising at this intersection – becomes ever more important and required. The convergence of neurobiology and computational capabilities, while facilitating beneficial advances in brain re search and its translational applications, creates a vulnerable strategic asset that will be sought by adversaries to advance their own goals for neuroscience. Hacking of biological data within the academic, industry, and the health care systems has already occurred – and neurodata are embedded within all of these domains.

 

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Towards a new operational domain

In a world permeated with technology, warfare in the cognitive domain mobilises a wider range of battle spaces than the physical and informational dimensions can do. Its very essence is to seize control of human beings (civilian as well as military), organisations, nations, but also of ideas, psychology, especially behavioural, thoughts, as well as the environment.

Cognition is our "thinking machine”. The function of cognition is to perceive, to pay attention, to memorise, to reason, to produce movements, to express oneself, to decide. To act on cognition means to act on the human being.
Therefore, defining a cognitive domain would be too restrictive; a human domain would therefore be more appropriate.
While actions taken in the five domains are executed in order to have an effect on the human domain , cognitive warfare’s objective is to make everyone a weapon.

 

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It’s about Humans

A cognitive attack is not a threat that can be countered in the air, on land, at sea, in cyberspace, or in space. Rather, it may well be happening in any or all of these domains, for one simple reason: humans are the contested domain. As previously demonstrated, the human is very often the main vulnerability and it should be acknowledged in order to protect NATO’s human capital but also to be able to benefit from our ad versaries’s vulnerabilities.

 

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Legal and ethical aspects

It is essential to ensure that international law and accepted norms will be able to take into account the development of cognitive technologies. Specifically, to ensure that such technologies are capable of being used in accordance with applicable law and accepted international norms. NATO, through its various apparatus, should work at establishing a common under standing of how cognitive weapons might be employed to be compliant with the law and accepted international norms.

 

Ethics:

This area of research - human enhancement and cognitive weapons – is likely to be the subject of major ethical and legal challenges, but we cannot afford to be on the back foot when international actors are already developing strategies and capabilities to employ them.

It is equally important to recognise the potential side effects (such as speech impairment, memory impairment, increased aggression, depression and suicide) of these technologies. For example, if any cognitive enhancement technology were to undermine the capacity of a subject to comply with the law of armed conflict, it would be a source of very serious concern.

 

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Recommendations for NATO

The need for cooperation.
While the objective of Cognitive Warfare is to harm societies and not only the military, this type of warfare resembles to “shadow wars” and requires a whole-of-government approach to warfare. As previously stated, the modern concept of war is not about weapons but about influence. To shape perceptions and control the narrative during this type of war, battle will have to be fought in the cognitive domain with a whole-of-government approach at the national level. This will require improved coordination between the use of force and the other levers of power across government.

For NATO, the development of actions in the cognitive domain also requires a sustained cooperation between Allies in order to ensure an overall coherence, to build credibility and to allow a concerted defense.

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Definition of the Human Domain

Thus defined by NATO’s major adversaries, the mastery of the field of perceptions is an abstract space where understanding of oneself (strengths and weaknesses), of the other (adversary, enemy, human environment), psychological dimension, intelligence collection, search for ascendancy (influence, taking and conservation of the initiative) and capacity to reduce the will of the adversary are mixed.

 

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Conclusion

Because the factors that affect the cognitive domain can be involved in all aspects of human society through the areas of will, concept, psychology and thinking among other, so that particular kind of warfare penetrates into all fields of society. It can be foreseen that the future information warfare will start from the cognitive domain first, to seize the political and diplomatic strategic initiative, but it will also end in the cognitive realm.

Information plays a key role in this indirect form of warfare but the advent of cognitive warfare is different from simple Information Warfare: it is a war through information, the real target being the human mind, and beyond the human per se.

 

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