Niklas Serning
The West struggles with cognitive warfare, and it urgently needs to get better. Its defenses are weak. Its tactics are limited and outdated. It still hasn’t grown out of the belief that the end of the Cold War meant that Western liberal democracy had won, that the End of History has arrived, and that everyone else simply needs to catch up with it.
This article argues that these struggles stem from the unique constraints that the West faces in the domain of information warfare. Western countries operate from Enlightenment ideals of individual liberties and human rights. These values make Western societies places that many others aspire to move to and take part in. The freedom of information and thought that follows from them created the conditions for rapid scientific and technological progress that the rest of the world is now benefiting from. Such values are, therefore, worth fighting for. But they can also make the West vulnerable. An open society is open to hostile actors and messaging, and the commitment to freedom of expression prevents the West from shutting those actors down. Humanitarian commitments prevent the West from sowing the same division and harm that their adversaries sow in their populations. It is playing under Queensberry Rules while its adversaries get to fight dirty.
Ethics and Cognitive Warfare
The problem, then, is to work out how the West can fight back effectively while remaining something worth fighting for. This is a current topic of concern for the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO), whose most recent cognitive warfare concept identifies the tension between operating within an ethical framework while gaining advantage over adversaries who operate without those ethical constraints. A small number of ethical frameworks (RAND, Skerker, Henschke) have been proposed in order to address this tension, largely arguing for adherence to classic Western Kantian imperative norms of autonomy and dignity.
This article argues that a more fundamental philosophical rethink is warranted. Western Enlightenment values include a commitment to the pursuit of truth. The way the secular West understands truth is through a metaphysically realist framework. Truth is out there; any statement about the world can be determined to be valid by finding corresponding facts to back it up. Accordingly, fact-checking comes first when faced with problem information: if the Russian claim that the CIA created AIDS can be debunked by waving the right facts at people, they will update their beliefs and peacefully move on.
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