I have never attacked a mind.
I have conducted human intelligence operations. I influenced people. I shaped situations.
But I never touched a brain!
And I suspect most practitioners working in intelligence, influence or information operations could confirm what I am saying.
This sounds ridiculously obvious, yet it has to be stated because you will hear this sentence repeatedly in the coming years:
The human mind is the attack surface. Your mind is the battlefield.
I understand why it survives. It is memorable. It gives an abstract field an object: the mind.
It sounds operational. But sounding operational and being operational are two very different things.
There is a lot of intellectual handjob in emerging fields: concepts stroking other concepts, sophisticated language producing the pleasurable sensation that something has been explained when very little has actually been made clearer.
So let's take this one seriously:
If the mind is the battlefield, where exactly is the battle taking place? What is being attacked? Where are the boundaries of the attack surface? What does exploitation look like? What can be hardened?
Most of the time, when we conduct influence operations, we are not acting directly upon a mind. We are acting upon everything around it: the information someone receives, the people they trust, what they can see/ cannot see, their physical security, the institutional and technological systems through which reality reaches them.
There is, however, one important exception to my argument.
Some interventions really can target the biological machinery of cognition.
Neuroscientist and neuroethicist James Giordano has spent years examining the dual- and direct-use potential of neuroscience and neurotechnology in warfare, intelligence and national security. In Redefining Neuroweapons: Emerging Capabilities in Neuroscience and Neurotechnology, Giordano and his co-authors examine technologies and agents capable of modifying or disrupting the central nervous system and neurocognitive function.
In that specific domain, the metaphor is materially literal.
There is a biological substrate to target. There is an intervention acting upon it. There are physiological mechanisms through which cognition, emotion, behavior or performance may be altered.
The weaponization of neuroscience and neurotechnology deserves extremely serious attention. It is why we need specialists like Giordano studying the actual mechanisms, capabilities and risks involved.
But that seriousness also makes me less comfortable with an entire field casually borrowing the same language to describe something fundamentally different.
Most influence operations do NOTHING of the sort.
They don't require access to your nervous system. They don't touch the biological machinery of cognition. And that exception makes the broader problem much easier to see:
If nobody touches the neural substrate, and the intervention instead changes the conditions from which a person perceives, interprets and decides, where exactly is the battlefield?
That is the question I want to take seriously.
I write here because I think too much of intelligence, influence and cognitive security is discussed in abstractions. My courses are where I teach the practical side of the work.
Explore practical training on HUMINT, intelligence, perception, influence and decision-making under ambiguity — or go deeper with the Grey Zone Protocol.
The brief is about what happens when we move the battlefield out of the skull:
- What operators actually manipulate and how.
- Why cognitive warfare keeps mistaking perfectly normal human features for vulnerabilities.
- What is actually worth defending, and the operational consequences of getting the object wrong.
What operators actually manipulate
We manipulate access, timing, information, relationships, trust, visibility, sequence of events, social context, what someone knows about what other people know, what reaches them, what does not, when it reaches them and through whom.
Let's take an example: I want you to make a particular decision.