Somewhere between 2020 and 2025, "cognitive warfare" became one of the most fashionable concepts in national security.
Governments have strategies.
Think tanks publish reports.
Universities launch research programs.
Everyone seems convinced "cognitive warfare" is one of the defining challenges of the XXIst century.
Why did the world suddenly NEED the concept of cognitive warfare?
Concepts don't suddenly become fashionable by accident. Especially not in national security.
A concept becomes dominant because institutions need it. Once adopted, it reorganizes budgets, research agendas, military doctrine, university programs and entire professional ecosystems.
To understand why the world needed that concept, I started investigating.
Unlike most of the literature on the topic, I did not begin in libraries. For years, I participated in what many people would now call "cognitive warfare".
To be honest, we never used that expression. In fact, we rarely named what we were doing at all. We were doing the job without debating its ethical or intellectual meaning.
The luxury of theory is to name things. The constraint of operations is to act before they are named. So by the time academics begin debating definitions, operators have been exploiting those mechanisms for years.
I started with operations and asked later what concept, if any, could explain what I had done and seen.
After reading hundreds of pages about it... I am not convinced the people writing about cognitive warfare understand what they are describing.
Before we start, I will warn you. This essay is a "mise en abyme". By the time you finish reading it, you will have experienced the very mechanism it describes.
For its duration, you are going to borrow my way of seeing reality. By the end, you will understand what kind of transaction that was and why whoever controls that transaction, at scale, controls more than any army does.
TL;DR
- "Cognitive warfare": the genealogy of a concept
- What happened in 2020 that made the concept dominant
- The word nobody cares to define: cognition
- What operations teach that papers don't
- Contrary to what theoricians believe, the battlefield is NOT the brain
- What cognitive warfare is actually a symptom of
Nobody invented cognitive warfare: the genealogy of a concept
Or at least, not in the way many people assume. The practices themselves are ancient.
25 centuries ago, Sun Tzu opened The Art of War with the axiom that all war rests on deception, and ranked subduing the enemy without fighting above any victory won in battle.
A few centuries later, Kautilya's Arthashastra described disinformation, agents of influence and the deliberate creation of divisions as ordinary instruments of statecraft.
The Hebrew Bible is filled with stories of rulers, spies, prophets and military leaders winning (or avoiding wars) by deception, intelligence, psychological pressure and the strategic shaping of perception.
Shaping perception, influencing decisions, weakening morale, creating uncertainty, exploiting fear: none of this is new.
What is new is the language around it.
I set out to identify the first appearance of the expression cognitive warfare.
One of the earliest documented military uses appears in a 1996 thesis by Arden Dahl, where the term is discussed within the context of command-and-control warfare. At the time, the term attracted little attention.
It would take another two decades before cognitive warfare entered mainstream strategic thinking.
But without naming it as such: the Soviets had already mathematized it in the 1960s.