John Wilcox, Ryan Walters |
A unit prepares to deploy as a deepfake video begins circulating online, amplified by bot accounts and picked up by mainstream outlets and influencers within hours. As staff officers coordinate a response, lawyers review courses of action, and platforms deliberate content moderation, the narrative mutates, spills across audiences, and triggers legal challenges, partner hesitation, and public pressure. By the time a response is finally authorized, the original claim has already evolved into something new, and the operational conditions it created have hardened. The force did not fail to act; it acted on a timeline measured in days against an adversary iterating in hours.
This contradiction is not a failure of intent or effort. It is a failure of mental models.
Over the past two decades, the Joint Force has increasingly recognized the centrality of the human and information environment in contemporary conflict. Doctrine and strategy emphasize influence, narratives, legitimacy, and perception as decisive factors in competition and war. Yet operational practice reveals a persistent contradiction: cognitive warfare is still planned using conceptual models designed for kinetic operations in the physical domain.
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