Joint Force Quarterly
Abstract
Τhe United States is facing unprecedented challenges in the cognitive domain. While democracies struggle to develop frameworks that promote collective understanding, adversaries are employing gray zone tactics—those that never rise to the level of war—as a form of cognitive warfare against the United States and other democratic societies. François du Cluzel, head of innovative projects at the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO)’s Allied Command Transformation Innovation Hub, describes the key distinctions of the emerging cognitive domain:
Cognitive warfare degrades the capacity to know, produce, or thwart knowledge. Cognitive sciences cover all the sciences that concern knowledge and its processes (psychology, linguistics, neurobiology, logic, and more).
Cognitive warfare is, therefore, the way of using knowledge for a conflicting purpose. In its broadest sense, cognitive
warfare is not limited to the military or institutional world. Since the early 1990s, this capability has tended to be applied to the political, economic, cultural, and societal fields.
Any user of modern information technologies is a potential target. It targets the whole of a nation’s human capital.
Recommended Citation
Michael J. Cheatham, Angelique M. Geyer, Priscella A. Nohle & Jonathan E. Vazquez, "Cognitive Warfare: The Fight for Gray Matter in the Digital Gray Zone," Joint Force Quarterly 114 (3rd Quarter 2024), 83-91, https://digitalcommons.ndu.edu/joint-force-quarterly/vol114/iss2/15.
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