The Pentagon’s Strategic Capabilities Office is launching an initiative to wage cognitive warfare — nonkinetic military operations short of major destructive conflict.
Sam Gray, chief technology officer in charge of autonomy and artificial intelligence at the office, said the goal is to “disrupt the cognition and the thinking ability of an adversary or person and influence” adversaries’ perceptions, senses and actions.
Mr. Gray discussed the activity at a recent conference hosted by the National Defense Industrial Association in Honolulu, which was first reported by National Defense Magazine.
The initiative will produce new cognitive warfare capabilities within three to five years to confront high-priority challenges, he said.
In the past, influence operations were “physically observable,” such as the use of inflatable tanks to fool German military leaders in World War II.
Physically observable effects are less important today because advanced AI tools can produce similar digital impacts with greater reach.
Mr. Gray said adversaries such as China and Iran are using cognitive warfare to alter the thinking of entire populations and the U.S. needs to catch up “because we’re behind from the technology perspective.”
A new project for the program has been created called Basic Information Awareness Operations, which will leverage commercial technology for cognitive domain operations.
Its focus will be on systems that can detect and identify enemy materials, and produce actions in the information domain, including text, video and audio.
“I need the ability to deploy” those tools and “measure my effectiveness,” Mr. Gray said. “How good am I doing with this narrative? Did it resonate like we thought it was going to? And if it doesn’t, then you need to go back and retrain your models.”
China is engaged in a major cognitive warfare efforts known as the “three warfares” — public opinion warfare, psychological warfare and legal warfare, China expert Andrew B. Jensen said during a recent presentation on the subject.
Chinese military writings describe cognitive war operations as those that “directly target human will, beliefs, thoughts and psychology, aiming to alter an opponent’s cognition, thereby influencing his decisions and action.”
The new cognitive battlefield is becoming an arena for major power conflict and “a key factor for victory,” according to the official China Military Online outlet.
According to the Chinese Academy of Social Sciences: “Cognitive domain operations exert combined effects across the physical, informational, and cognitive dimensions, influencing will, thoughts, behavior, and emotions through the operation of the brain, thereby achieving the goal of ‘subduing the enemy without fighting.’”
The Chinese Communist Party uses cognitive warfare domestically to control the population and abroad to divide and demoralize its enemies and promote its communist system.
Mr. Jensen quoted China’s Communist leader Mao Zedong on the subject as saying: “The Red Army fights not merely for the sake of fighting but in order to … establish revolutionary political power.”
Greater countermeasures are needed, including exposing CCP cognitive warfare lies and abuses, supporting credible Chinese voices of opposition and highlighting the failure of China to follow its treaty obligations, Mr. Jensen said.
