Cognitive Warfare (CW), particularly with Artificial Intelligence (AI) as a force multiplier, aims to alter how adversaries think by inducing neuroplastic changes and epistemic closure through sustained, tailored influence. While AI offers a real scale advantage over traditional PSYOPs in generating thousands of individually calibrated products, offensive CW applications face significant challenges.
Operational field-testing is absent, and extrapolating clinical neuroplasticity research to adversarial military contexts remains speculative. Critically, cognitive overload in an adversary commander may lead to unpredictable outcomes like freezing, delegating, or escalating, rather than controlled behavioral change. Institutional issues, including the inability to measure causal links between operations and outcomes, also threaten CW's long-term viability, echoing past budget cuts for information operations. In contrast, the defensive case for CW is urgent and actionable. Current military institutions are poorly organized to recognize and resist cognitive threats, as demonstrated by Chinese, Iranian, and Russian campaigns. Investment in cognitive resilience, prebunking, and bias recognition is essential.
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