United States Army Cognitive Warfare

According to Clausewitz's definition, the nature of war consists of three main elements. It is fought by men (the subject of war), it is driven by political interests (the cause of war), and it is a contest between the wills of the opposing sides (the outcome of war).

From this, the " focus " of the three types of conflicts can be deduced.

The focus of the "war of attrition" is the enemy troops on the battlefield, and the key to winning the war is how to rely on overwhelming numerical superiority to effectively annihilate the enemy's main force.

The focus of "maneuver warfare" is the key weak links of the enemy's war system or combat system, such as the command center, information system, logistic nodes and so on. The key to the battlefield is how to paralyze the entire system of the opponent by hitting the key points with decisive quality advantage and battlefield control advantage.

The focus of "cognitive warfare" is to take the human brain as the main combat space, aiming at striking, weakening and disintegrating the war will of individuals or groups of the enemy country, taking anxiety, suspicion, fear and other psychological weaknesses as the breakthroughs, and relying on intelligence warfare, psychological warfare, public opinion warfare, cyberwarfare and other soft-killing means to create a political atmosphere of insecurity, uncertainty and distrust within the enemy, and increase its internal struggle and decision-making misgivings, and ultimately leading to the disintegration of the war system and the realization of "victory without a fight".

In terms of targets and implementation methods, "cognitive warfare" can be broadly categorized into three styles.

1. Strategic induction

Taking the political decision-making level of the enemy country as the core target, using intelligence warfare as the main means, focusing on utilizing the opponent's mentality of blindly following the trend, and relying on the discourse superiority of the U.S. military's theoretical innovations and conceptual development, the U.S. military will implement a combination of real and virtual induction and deception of the enemy through high-profile sales of certain unrealistic operational concepts, and induce the opponent to engage in a reciprocal and symmetric arms race with the U.S., or to simply copy and imitate the U.S.-style military system.

In this way, it creates, utilizes and magnifies the vulnerability of its war system and combat system, disrupts the goal, direction and rhythm of its military development, causes the deformed development of its military-economic structure, and ultimately drags down its economy to provide support for the implementation of subsequent political subversive tactics, such as "color revolutions". During the Cold War, the "Star Wars" program implemented by the United States against the Soviet Union was a typical case.

2. Political subversion

Taking the population of the enemy country as the target of its implementation, using online social media as a platform, and relying on soft-kill tactics such as public opinion warfare, psychological warfare and cyberwarfare, and focusing on exploiting the psychological gaps in the relations between the military, the government and the people of the enemy country, it has weakened the enemy country's national consciousness and historical identity, and undermined its education system and way of life by disseminating false information, inculcating Western values, and poisoning the minds of its young people.

It also shakes the foundation of its ideology and values, intensifies its ethnic and religious conflicts and internal political problems, continues to alienate its military, political and civil relations, continuously depletes its resources and capabilities, and severs the spiritual ties that sustain its social stability, political beliefs and national unity, thus inducing political unrest and causing it to perish without a fight. The many "color revolutions" instigated by the United States are the main examples.

3. Dissuasion

Taking the enemy's military as the main focus, the emphasis is on finding, creating and exploiting the weaknesses of the enemy's war system or combat system to the maximum extent possible by relying on high-tech clusters such as artificial intelligence, 5G technology and unmanned combat systems to form a cognitive-operational advantage of foreknowledge, pre-occupation and pre-emptive action. And through the high-profile display of certain new technologies and new equipment that subvert the traditional rules of war, the disproportionate cost of war or operational risk imposed on the enemy, in order to effectively sabotage the adversary's operational attempts, "dissuade" it to give up the dominant right to strategic competition.

At the same time, relying on the network air, space and special operations and other factors are not subject to the limitations of time and space, can be flexibly switched in the global elite forces, the enemy a domain combat forces to implement unexpected cross-domain breakthroughs in order to increase the difficulty of its preventive efforts, increase its fear, weaken its determination to fight, so that it is caught in an unfavorable situation. The United States Army's concept of "multidomain warfare" is the main representative.