The ancient Chinese military strategist Sun Tzu once declared that subduing your enemy without fighting is the acme of skill. For China today, that goal is closer to being realized through new weaponry and capabilities that Beijing calls cognitive warfare.
China’s most recent experience with large-scale war took place over 70 years ago in Korea. Human waves of troops were sent into battle against better-armed U.S. and allied forces. The result was a slaughter — the People’s Liberation Army lost between 400,000 and 1 million soldiers.
Today, the PLA is no longer planning human wave military attacks. Instead, many of its researchers are working on advanced warfare capabilities that combine high-technology hardware with biotechnology research focused on the human brain.
The goal, driven by the ideology of Chinese-style Marxism-Leninism, is nothing less than world domination and a global populace under the control of China’s communist regime, according to the analysts and specialists who have studied Beijing’s leaders.
Cognitive warfare experts interviewed for this report say there is evidence China has embraced the development and eventual use of weapons designed to affect the mind — with the troops and commanders of adversarial militaries to entire civilian populations serving as potential targets.
Most details of the work on Chinese cognitive warfare remain closely guarded U.S. government secrets, but clues first surfaced officially in December 2021. That’s when the Commerce Department’s Bureau of Industry and Security announced sanctions against the PLA’s Chinese Academy of Military Medical Sciences and 11 related research institutes.
Commerce banned U.S. firms from doing business with the labs, which were working on biotechnology, including “purported brain-control weaponry,” on behalf of the Chinese military.
That unspecified effort was enough to trigger national security sanctions. But all details of the research remain under wraps.
In December, the Pentagon for the first time disclosed in its annual report on China that Beijing in 2016 launched something called the China Brain Project, a multi-year program designed to unlock human cognitive functions and neural pathways in support of civilian and military applications.
According to the Pentagon, the research has included brain-computer interface activities that enable humans and computers to interact and exchange information through implants in the brain or on the skull.
There have also been experiments with mind control of remote machines — technology that could give PLA commanders and troops optimized command-and-control networks, and the ability to maximize the use of advanced weapons systems and other military equipment for more rapid and precise attacks.
Other work includes what the report said is “emotion detection,” a technology useful for cognitive warfare in influencing enemy troop morale in war, as well as in establishing control over civilian populations.
PLA scientists are also working on military applications for brain research that will produce more mentally agile combat troops equipped with greater mobility and increased situational awareness.
“The PLA is exploring a range of ’neurocognitive warfare’ capabilities that exploit adversaries using neuroscience and psychology,” the report said without elaborating.
Other than the brief Commerce notice in 2021 and the Pentagon report in December, no other official details on Chinese cognitive warfare have been made public.
But recently published science articles and interviews with cognitive warfare experts indicate the Chinese military is moving forward with major strategic investments in what the PLA calls a new domain of warfare to complement its massive buildup of military hardware.
“The emergence of cognitive warfare — which manipulates cognition to destabilize sociocultural, economic, political and military systems — poses a unique threat to America and its allies,” said Josh Baughman, an analyst at the Air Force’s China Aerospace Studies Institute.
“This type of warfare differs from information warfare in that it aims to influence how, not what, people think, feel, and act, altering the cognitive space from individual to population levels,” he said in an interview.
Mr. Baughman recently revealed in a new book that cognitive warfare is now a pivotal component of the People’s Liberation Army strategy for achieving victory in war.
Writing in the U.S. military edited book “Human, Machine War: How the Mind-Tech Nexus Will Win Future Wars,” the defense analyst wrote that the PLA believes its ultimate victory will come from destroying an adversary’s will to fight.
The United States, he said, urgently needs to understand how the PLA’s focus on cognitive warfare has shifted the battleground of a potential conflict with China from physical territory to the minds of Americans.
Failure to understand this new concept of war, he said, could lead to China conquering America’s allies — or even the United States itself — without firing a shot.
For the PLA, the nexus of mind and technology is fundamental to winning the cognitive war, and the tools of the trade include social media, the metaverse, smartphone apps such as TikTok, wearable technology, virtual reality, artificial intelligence and especially generative AI.
Chinese-controlled apps like TikTok offer China the means to wage warfare on the battlefield of the mind, according to researchers.
Ian Oxnevad, senior fellow in national security at the National Association of Scholars, said TikTok is “one of [China’s] foremost cognitive weapons.”
The popular video-sharing app was banned in the U.S. but given a temporary reprieve by President Trump.
TikTok has been blamed for popularizing dangerous fads, criticized for promoting discredited diversity, equity and inclusion programs on college campuses and accused of fueling anti-Israel protests. All while collecting reams of personal data on Americans.
China’s strategy of cognitive warfare is “to make America angry and stupid with an app has proven remarkably successful,” Mr. Oxnevad said.
Roots in Soviet science
China was not the first to conduct research on cognitive warfare.
The Soviet Union and later Russia studied a cognitive warfighting concept called “reflexive control” for more than 40 years. Reflexive control seeks to convey to a partner or adversary specially prepared information that will lead to a target voluntarily making a predetermined decision — one preselected by the Russians.
Reflexive control includes disinformation, camouflage and other strategic tools used against either the minds of enemy leaders and troops or through computer-based decision-making processors, such as those now emerging through artificial intelligence.
The term reflexive control has become “intellectual information warfare” in today’s Russian military.
According to Russian military writings, the tactic works by distracting the enemy, overloading information systems, creating exhaustion by tricking adversaries into useless operations and using the power of suggestion to introduce disinformation that will affect an enemy legally, morally or ideologically.
Timothy L. Thomas, a China warfare expert with the Mitre Corp. predicts mind-centered conflict will become the major battle domain that will revolutionize warfare in the not too distant future.
“Human fighters will fade away and intelligent equipment will be brought onto the battlefield,” he said. “Cross-domain unconventional and asymmetrical fighting will be the new normal, and intelligence control will replace territorial control as the center of gravity in war.”
This new form of war that Beijing called “intelligentized warfare” will reshape the rules of engagement and lead to a major restructuring of combat forces so that machine-on-human or machine-on-machine war will become a new standard.
China prioritizes mind warfare
China’s work on brain warfare has been on the radar of U.S. intelligence since at least 2019. Three reports produced that year by the PLA highlight the emphasis being placed on brain warfare.
One report obtained by The Washington Times cited the military uses of advances in science and technology.
“War has started to shift from the pursuit of destroying bodies to paralyzing and controlling the opponent,” states the report headlined, “The Future of the Concept of Military Supremacy.”
“The focus is to attack the enemy’s will to resist, not physical destruction,” the report said.
The PLA now is extending warfare to human consciousness in ways that are “causing the brain to become the main target of offense and defense of new concept weapons,” the report added.
The merger of humans and machines will set off a new contest for controlling the brain, according to the PLA.
“The two combatant sides will use various kinds of brain control technologies and effective designs to focus on taking over the enemy’s way of thinking and his awareness, and even directly intervene in the thinking of the enemy leaders and staff, and with that produce war to control awareness and thinking,” the report said.
A second PLA report disclosed that brain-machine interface is part of Beijing’s plan for the development of intelligentized warfare. Interactive combat will include “direct control of machines using thoughts through mature brain-machine interface,” this report said.
A third PLA report stated that the China Electronic Technology Group was working on “brain confrontation” technology for warfare.
This process calls for measuring neuronal activity in the brain and translating neuro-signals into computer signals that can be used to control weapons with the brain.
PLA researchers also are working on “neuro-defense” technology that will leverage electromagnetic, biophysical and material technologies to enhance the brain’s defenses against control attacks.
PLA political warfare engaged in long-standing attacks
Kerry K. Gershaneck, a China expert, said China has been waging political warfare and cognitive warfare, a related form, against the United States for almost 100 years.
Chinese President Xi Jinping is preparing to annex Taiwan and has stepped up political warfare to extraordinary degrees, Mr. Gershaneck said.
The Chinese leader is willing to go to war but would prefer to win by subverting U.S. willingness and ability to fight back, he said.
“Accordingly, Xi’s goal for his vastly expanded political war is to achieve mind superiority by attacking us in the cognitive domain to weaken us physically and mentally, to destroy our will to fight, and to create fatal doubt in our leaders and in our decisions,” said Mr. Gershaneck, a professor at National Chengchi University in Taiwan.
Mr. Gershaneck, a retired Marine Corps officer with extensive intelligence experience, said the Trump administration is finally tackling Chinese economic warfare against the United States. But so far it is less clear whether the president is devoting needed resources to defeating ongoing Chinese political warfare.
Books like “Human, Machine, War” provide important policy leads for the president and his national security team. The book “lays a solid foundation for understanding the insidious nature of the existential threat we face from Communist China,” Mr. Gershaneck said.
“Ideally, it will help propel Trump 47 to do what America has failed to do for more than three decades: devise a counter-political warfare strategy for our Second Cold War, rapidly resource it, and execute it.”
Sound, thought, electronic weapons target the brain
Other tools in this new form of warfare include the use of sound weapons capable of incapacitating enemy forces by disrupting neurological functions without causing visible injury.
This PLA method was disclosed recently in a report by CCP BioThreats Initiative, a think tank made up of former intelligence and military experts.
“Infrasound and cognitive weapons represent a significant leap in the evolution of modern warfare, introducing a new set of capabilities designed to target the mind and body in ways that are difficult to detect and defend against,” the report said.
PLA sound weapons can induce confusion, emotional distress and a loss of consciousness, according to Chinese military researchers who wrote about them in a 2024 report. They also are designed to directly impair cognitive abilities vital in warfare.
“As the CCP and PLA and other military forces continue to incorporate these technologies into their arsenals, the U.S. and its allies must remain vigilant and proactive in developing countermeasures.”
Electronic brain warfare tools also include the broadcasting of radio waves designed to disrupt thinking and decision-making.
Other weapons use electromagnetic energy for nonlethal attacks that produce drowsiness or cognitive impairment in adversaries, the report said.
The brain weapons likely would be used in what the U.S. military calls gray zone operations around Taiwan, in the South China Sea and East China Sea and along the disputed Sino-Indian border.
“Any breakthrough in this research would provide unprecedented tools for the [Chinese Communist Party] to forcibly establish a new world order, which has been Xi Jinping’s lifelong goal,” the Biothreats Initiative report said.
One indication of the major shift toward cognitive warfare was the Chinese military’s dismantling of the Strategic Support Force last year. In its place the PLA set up a new Information Support Force that reports directly to the CCP Central Military Commission. Both forces were regarded as powerful units equal to services like the army and navy.
Edward Haugland, a retired military intelligence officer and specialist in cognitive warfare, said focusing on the PLA is important. But he believes a wider cognitive war is being waged on multiple fronts — with ongoing Chinese operations deep inside Western countries, including the United States.
Tactics in this underground war include covert Chinese “police stations” in numerous countries, collaboration with drug cartels and shipments of fentanyl, Confucius Institutes on U.S. and foreign college campuses, elite capture of officials and other leaders and up to 300,000 Chinese students who can be used for technology theft and intelligence and propaganda activities.
Mr. Haugland said he is concerned that an overemphasis by the U.S. military on PLA cognitive warfare could result in a misplaced focus on solutions that are military, kinetic and technical, and not informational and political.
Still, the cognitive warfare threat is real.
“This to me is our greatest mistake, as the primary battlefield — the cognitive domain — is being attacked concurrently on so many parallel fronts it is likely China will never need to use its military,” said Mr. Haugland, author of the 2023 book “The Cognitive War: Why We Are Losing and How We can Win.”
“Besides, I believe Xi Jinping cannot trust his military and a large percentage of it is used to control his people, so he must win the cognitive war without a shot. And he is doing so.”
American national security leaders, he said, remain unaware, unprepared and unarmed to wage U.S.-style cognitive warfare, he said.
As a result, “we will lose to the CCP and radical left both domestically and globally,” Mr. Haugland said.
Cmdr. Robert Bebber, a Navy intelligence officer, said in a recent report for the Hudson Institute, that war is evolving from precision strike and stealth warfare used in the Cold War era to operations and technologies that target an opponent’s decision-making.
“This shift has taken many forms, such as gray zone operations, hybrid warfare, [Russian] little green men [in Crimea], and [geopolitical] salami-slicing operations and tactics,” he said in a report published by the Hudson Institute.
Cmdr. Bebber believes cognitive warfare is highly disruptive, threatening democratic institutions and sovereignty and likely changing the basic character of war.
Advances in brain sciences, data and computational technologies, and artificial intelligence are fundamentally altering the global strategic environment, he said, by “expanding the attack surface that foreign adversaries can exploit using cognitive manipulation.”
“The emergence of cognitive warfare — which manipulates cognition to destabilize sociocultural, economic, political, and military systems — poses a unique threat to America and its allies,” Cmdr. Bebber said.
“This type of warfare differs from information warfare in that it aims to influence how, not what, people think, feel, and act, altering the cognitive space from individual to population levels.”
U.S. policymakers have been slow to recognize and react to the threat because it is new, and also “perhaps because the American public has remained under a persistent state of cognitive manipulation, which has debilitated the people,” he said.
The danger, according to Cmdr. Bebber, is that cognitive warfare by China or Russia will result in advanced military operations used by the United States or NATO becoming fractured, disjointed and ultimately ineffective as enemies disrupt or destroy linkages and network connections.
“Perhaps most insidiously, the military may find itself irrelevant to adversary operations as cognitive warfare capabilities emerge and mature to the point where adversaries can coerce societies through so-called information confrontation,” he said.
This could result in the U.S. military and its allies unable to respond as adversaries control entire domestic populations.
Despite this danger, U.S. and allied military forces and national security policymakers have not yet organized their institutions and infrastructure to detect, track and combat cognitive warfare campaigns that adversaries are waging against the American public,” he said.
Washington and Western allies need to develop their own cognitive warfare capabilities to support security needs, he said.
