What Is Cognitive Warfare and Why Does It Matter for You?
Why Read This
What Makes This Article Worth Your Time
Summary
What This Article Is About
David Gisselsson Nord and Alberto Rinaldi introduce cognitive warfare (cog war) as a form of conflict that targets human perception and cognition rather than physical territory. Using techniques like reflexive control—refined by Russia over decades—adversaries manipulate populations’ understanding of reality without them recognizing the manipulation. The authors illustrate this with hypothetical scenarios (orchestrated flu panics) and real examples from the Ukraine conflict, COVID-19 disinformation campaigns, and allegations about bioweapons labs.
The article argues that cognitive warfare operates in a legal vacuum because traditional laws of war focus on physical force, leaving psychological manipulation unregulated despite its capacity to cause genuine casualties through secondary effects. The authors propose three solutions: redefining “threats” to include non-physical attacks, recognizing psychological harm as legitimate war injury, and leveraging human rights frameworks that protect freedom of thought and prohibit war propaganda. They warn that emerging brain-machine interfaces and AI-driven microtargeting pose unprecedented threats to human autonomy, demanding urgent legal adaptation.
Key Points
Main Takeaways
Warfare Beyond Physical Domains
Cognitive warfare targets human perception and cognition to gain geopolitical advantage, operating below traditional war thresholds while potentially causing real casualties.
Reflexive Control Technique
Russia’s refined art of shaping adversary perceptions to their benefit without targets understanding they’ve been manipulated, exemplified in Ukraine narratives.
AI-Driven Microtargeting
Machine intelligence enables tailored disinformation campaigns based on digital footprints, with AI-generated personas delivering content without human-created media.
Physical Consequences from Information
Disinformation campaigns caused actual deaths during COVID-19 when people refused protective measures or used harmful remedies based on false narratives.
Legal Grey Zone
Current laws of war assume physical force as primary concern, leaving cognitive warfare unregulated despite its capacity for mass casualties.
Brain-Machine Interface Threats
Emerging neurotechnology capable of reading and writing to the brain creates unprecedented vulnerabilities to cognitive manipulation and data poisoning.
Master Reading Comprehension
Practice with 365 curated articles and 2,400+ questions across 9 RC types.
Article Analysis
Breaking Down the Elements
Main Idea
The Weaponization of Perception
The article’s central thesis is that cognitive warfare represents a fundamental evolution in conflict, where manipulating human perception becomes as strategically important as controlling physical territory. By targeting the cognitive domain through disinformation, psychological operations, and emerging neurotechnology, adversaries can achieve geopolitical objectives that cause real harm without triggering traditional definitions of armed conflict. This requires urgent legal and conceptual adaptation to protect human autonomy in an era where minds are battlefields.
Purpose
To Advocate for Legal Reform
Nord and Rinaldi write to convince readers—and policymakers—that current international legal frameworks are dangerously inadequate for addressing cognitive warfare. The hypothetical flu panic scenario and real-world examples serve as evidence that psychological manipulation can cause genuine casualties while evading regulation. The authors advocate three specific reforms: redefining threats to include non-physical attacks, recognizing psychological harm as legitimate injury, and leveraging human rights frameworks to protect freedom of thought.
Structure
Problem → Evidence → Future Risks → Solutions
The article employs a four-part argumentative structure: defining cognitive warfare through hypothetical and historical examples → demonstrating its real-world consequences through COVID-19 and Ukraine cases → warning about emerging threats from AI microtargeting and brain-machine interfaces → proposing specific legal and conceptual reforms. This progression moves from establishing the phenomenon’s existence to proving its dangers to offering concrete policy recommendations, creating urgency while maintaining scholarly credibility.
Tone
Urgent, Scholarly & Cautionary
The tone balances academic authority with accessible alarm. Opening with a vivid hypothetical scenario creates immediacy, while references to Sun Tzu, the Tallinn Manual, and the U.N. Charter establish scholarly credibility. The repeated emphasis on “real harm,” “legal vacuum,” and “insidious threats” conveys urgency without sensationalism. The authors avoid both alarmist hyperbole and detached neutrality, instead adopting a concerned expert’s voice warning about genuine dangers while proposing pragmatic solutions.
Key Terms
Vocabulary from the Article
Click each card to reveal the definition
Build your vocabulary systematically
Each article in our course includes 8-12 vocabulary words with contextual usage.
Tough Words
Challenging Vocabulary
Tap each card to flip and see the definition
A form of conflict that targets human perception, cognition, and behavior to gain geopolitical advantage, operating through psychological manipulation rather than physical force.
“This is cognitive warfare, or cog war for short, where the cognitive domain is used on battlefields or in hostile attacks below the threshold of war.”
A strategic technique refined by Russia involving shaping an adversary’s perceptions to benefit the manipulator without the target understanding they’ve been influenced.
“A classical example of cog war is a concept called reflexive control—an art refined by Russia over many decades.”
Relating to politics and international relations as influenced by geographical factors; concerning strategic interactions between nations and power blocs.
“It is therefore a weapon in a geopolitical battle that plays out by interactions across human minds rather than across physical realms.”
The connection or interface between human neural systems and computer technology, allowing direct communication between brain activity and digital devices.
“The capability of microtargeting may evolve rapidly as methods for brain-machine coupling become more proficient at collecting data on cognition patterns.”
International legal principles that regulate the conduct of armed conflict to limit suffering, protecting civilians and regulating acceptable methods of warfare.
“This exploitation of medical trust would constitute perfidy under humanitarian law—but only if we start recognizing such manipulative tactics as part of warfare.”
The capacity to recover quickly from difficulties, adapt to adversity, or resist being affected by harmful influences or disruptions.
“Only by adapting our legal frameworks to this challenge can we foster societal resilience and equip future generations to confront the crises and conflicts of tomorrow.”
Reading Comprehension
Test Your Understanding
5 questions covering different RC question types
1According to the article, cognitive warfare is currently fully regulated by international laws of war.
2What is “reflexive control” as described in the article?
3Which sentence best demonstrates that cognitive warfare can cause physical harm despite operating without traditional weapons?
4Evaluate the following statements about emerging technologies and cognitive warfare:
AI-generated social media personas can deliver targeted content without creating actual pictures or videos.
Brain-machine coupling technology currently cannot be hacked or fed poisoned data.
DARPA’s N3 program illustrates devices capable of reading from and writing to multiple brain points simultaneously.
Select True or False for all three statements, then click “Check Answers”
5Based on the authors’ proposed solutions, what can be inferred about their view of existing legal frameworks?
FAQ
Frequently Asked Questions
While traditional propaganda involves broadcasting persuasive messages to general audiences, cognitive warfare employs sophisticated microtargeting enabled by digital footprints and AI. Modern cog war can deliver individualized content tailored to specific cognitive biases, operates continuously through social media ecosystems, and increasingly uses AI-generated personas that don’t require human-created media. Unlike historical propaganda that was relatively transparent in its source and intent, cognitive warfare often operates covertly, with targets unaware they’re being manipulated—the essence of reflexive control.
The opening scenario serves multiple rhetorical purposes: it demonstrates how disinformation can cause genuine physical casualties (hospital overcrowding leading to deaths) without traditional weapons; it illustrates the legal vacuum problem—such an attack wouldn’t be defined as an act of war despite causing deaths; and it makes abstract concepts concrete for readers. The scenario bridges information manipulation and bodily harm, establishing that cognitive warfare isn’t merely theoretical but poses tangible threats. This hypothetical mirrors real events like COVID-19 disinformation that actually caused deaths when people refused protective measures.
Brain-machine coupling represents a qualitative escalation in cognitive warfare vulnerability. While current disinformation operates through external stimuli (screens, audio), brain-machine interfaces could provide direct neural access, ‘eroding the line between the information domain and the human body in a way never done before.’ DARPA’s N3 program demonstrates emerging capability to read from and write to multiple brain points simultaneously, creating unprecedented manipulation possibilities. These devices could be hacked or fed poisoned data, transforming cognitive warfare from external persuasion to potential direct neural manipulation—a fundamentally different threat requiring urgent regulatory attention.
Readlite provides curated articles with comprehensive analysis including summaries, key points, vocabulary building, and practice questions across 9 different RC question types. Our Ultimate Reading Course offers 365 articles with 2,400+ questions to systematically improve your reading comprehension skills.
This article is categorized as Advanced level due to its sophisticated conceptual demands: understanding geopolitical strategy, grasping the distinction between physical and psychological warfare, recognizing legal frameworks like the U.N. Charter and humanitarian law, and evaluating complex ethical questions about human autonomy. It requires synthesizing multiple domains—technology, law, military strategy, neuroscience—while following nuanced arguments about legal gaps and policy proposals. The vocabulary includes specialized terms from international relations, cognitive science, and legal theory. Comprehending the article demands analytical thinking beyond surface-level information processing.
Perfidy refers to illegal deception in warfare that exploits an adversary’s adherence to laws protecting certain activities—like attacking while displaying a white flag or misusing medical symbols. The authors use a hypothetical vaccination program secretly collecting DNA for military intelligence to illustrate how cognitive warfare can constitute perfidy by exploiting medical trust. This matters because international humanitarian law prohibits perfidy, but only if such manipulative tactics are recognized as part of warfare. The example demonstrates that cognitive operations can violate existing legal principles, but enforcement requires first acknowledging these information tactics as legitimate forms of warfare rather than operating in a legal vacuum.
The Ultimate Reading Course covers 9 RC question types: Multiple Choice, True/False, Multi-Statement T/F, Text Highlight, Fill in the Blanks, Matching, Sequencing, Error Spotting, and Short Answer. This comprehensive coverage prepares you for any reading comprehension format you might encounter.
