The Alliance faces a range of challenges in emerging domains of disharmonize. These domains can ascend from the introduction of new and confusing technologies. The domains of infinite and cyber, for instance, came out of developments in rocket, satellite, computing, telecommunications, and internetworking technologies. The increasingly widespread use of social media, social networking, social messaging, and mobile device technologies is now enabling a new domain: cognitive warfare.

In cognitive warfare, the human mind becomes the battleground. The aim is to change not merely what people call up, merely how they think and human action. Waged successfully, it shapes and influences private and group beliefs and behaviours to favour an aggressor's tactical or strategic objectives. In its extreme form, it has the potential to fracture and fragment an entire society, so that it no longer has the collective will to resist an adversary's intentions. An opponent could conceivably subdue a lodge without resorting to outright strength or coercion.

The aims of cognitive warfare can exist limited, with brusque time horizons. Or they tin exist strategic, with campaigns launched over the class of decades. A single campaign could focus on the limited aim of preventing a military manoeuver from taking place as planned, or to forcefulness the alteration of a specific public policy. Several successive campaigns could be launched with the long-term objective of disrupting entire societies or alliances, past seeding doubts about governance, subverting democratic processes, triggering civil disturbances, or instigating separatist movements.

In the last century, the innovative integration of mobile infantry, armour, and air resulted in a new and initially irresistible kind of manoeuver warfare. Today, cognitive warfare integrates cyber, information, psychological, and social technology capabilities to achieve its ends. It takes advantage of the net and social media to target influential individuals, specific groups, and large numbers of citizens selectively and serially in a society.

It seeks to sow doubt, to introduce conflicting narratives, to polarise opinion, to radicalise groups, and to motivate them to acts that tin can disrupt or fragment an otherwise cohesive lodge. And the widespread apply of social media and smart device technologies in Alliance member countries may make them specially vulnerable to this kind of attack.

The Cerebral Domain is a new space of competition, beyond the country, maritime, air, cybernetic and spatial domains.
© NATO Innovation Hub

It is useful to annotation that false data or simulated news are not required to achieve the aims of cognitive warfare. An embarrassing government certificate, hacked from a public official's email account, anonymously leaked into a social media sharing site, or dribbled out selectively to opposition groups in a social network, is sufficient to cause dissension.

A social messaging campaign that inflames the passions of online influencers tin can cause controversies to get viral. Social media groups may exist motivated to organise demonstrations and to take to the street. Official denials or ambiguous public responses in these circumstances tin can add to defoliation and dubiousness or to entrench conflicting narratives amongst segments of the populace.

While false social media accounts and automatic messaging "bots" can augment this dynamic, they are non required. (A recent MIT study plant that the emotions of suprise and disgust alone make messages become viral – and regular users, not bots, chop-chop re-transport them.)

A paper re-create of your favorite newspaper does not know what news items you lot adopt to read. But your tablet reckoner does. The advertising you saw in the newspaper does not know that you lot went to the store to buy what was advertised; your smartphone does. The editorial you read does not know that yous enthusiastically shared it with some of your closest friends. Your social network system does.

Our social media applications runway what nosotros like and believe; our smartphones track where we get and who nosotros spend time with; our social networks rails who we associate with and whom we exclude. And our search and east-commerce platforms utilize these tracking data to plough our preferences and beliefs into activity – by offering stimuli to encourage us to buy things we might not otherwise take purchased.

Thus far, consumer societies have seen and accepted the benefits. The tablet estimator serves us news stories that it knows nosotros will like, because it wants to proceed us engaged. Advertisements are displayed that arrange to our tastes, based on our previous purchases. Coupons appear on our smartphone to encourage usa to terminate at the shop that, by some credible coincidence, is on our current route already. Social networks present opinions that we heartily concur with. The friends in our social network circles share these opinions too, as those who practice not are quietly "un-friended" or leave on their ain.

In short, we increasingly find ourselves in comfy bubbles, where distasteful or disturbing news items, opinions, offerings, and persons are quickly excluded – if they appear at all. The danger is that the society at large may fragment into many such bubbling, each blissfully divide from the others. And, as they drift apart, each is more than likely to exist disturbed or shocked whenever they come up into contact.

The regular bustle and commerce of the public square, the open debate in a public forum, the sense of a mutual res publica (public affairs) of a pluralistic gild – these moderating influences may go weakened and attenuated, and our sensibilities more easily disturbed. What once was a vibrant open social club becomes instead a collection of multiple closed micro-societies cohabiting the aforementioned territory, subject to fracture and disarray.

Our cerebral abilities may besides be weakened by social media and smart devices. Social media use can heighten the cognitive biases and innate determination errors described in the Nobel-prize winning behaviourist Daniel Kahneman's book Thinking, Fast and Slow.

News feeds and search engines that serve results which align with our preferences increase confirmation bias, whereby we interpret new information to confirm our preconceived behavior. Social messaging apps speedily update users with new information, inducing recency bias, whereby we overweight the importance of contempo events over those of the by. Social networking sites induce social proofing, wherein we mimic and affirm others' actions and beliefs to fit in with our social groups, which become repeat chambers of conformism and groupthink.

The rapid step of messaging and news releases, and the perceived demand to quickly react to them, encourages "thinking fast" (reflexively and emotionally) as opposed to "thinking slow" (rationally and judiciously). Even established and reputable news outlets at present mail emotional headlines to encourage viral diffusion of their news articles.

People spend less time reading their content, even every bit they increment the frequency in sharing them. Social messaging systems are optimised to distribute curt snippets that frequently omit important context and nuance. This tin facilitate the spread of both intentionally and unintentionally misinterpreted data or slanted narratives. The brevity of social media posts, in combination with striking visual images, may forestall readers from understanding others' motives and values.

Cognitive warfare integrates cyber, data, psychological, and social applied science capabilities to reach its ends.
© Root Info Solutions

The advantage in cognitive warfare goes to him who moves offset and chooses the time, place, and means of the offensive. Cognitive warfare can be waged using a variety of vectors and media. The openness of social media platforms allows adversaries easily to target individuals, selected groups, and the public via social messaging, social media influencing, selective release of documents, video sharing, etc. Cyber capabilities permit the use of spearfishing, hacking, and tracking of individuals and social networks.

A proper defence requires at the very least an sensation that a cognitive warfare campaign is underway. It requires the ability to observe and orient earlier determination-makers can determine to act. Technology solutions can provide the means to respond some key questions: Is there a campaign going on? Where did it originate? Who is waging it? What might be its aims? Our research indicates that there are patterns of such campaigns that repeat and can exist classified. They may even provide "signatures" unique to specific actors that tin aid to place them.

A particularly useful technology solution may exist a cognitive warfare monitoring and alert system. Such a system could assistance to identify cerebral warfare campaigns equally they arise, and to runway them as they progress. Information technology could include a dashboard that integrates data from a wide range of social media, circulate media, social messaging, and social networking sites. This would display geographic and social network maps that show the development of suspected campaigns over fourth dimension.

Past identifying the locations, both geographic and virtual, in which social media posts, messages, and news articles originate, the topics under discussion, sentiment and linguistic identifiers, pacing of releases, and other factors, a dashboard could reveal connections and repeating patterns. Links between social media accounts (for instance, shares, comments, interactions) and their timing could be observed. The utilise of machine learning and pattern recognition algorithms could help rapidly to identify and classify emerging campaigns without the need for human intervention.

Such a arrangement would permit real-fourth dimension monitoring and provide timely alerts to NATO and Alliance decision-makers, helping them to codify advisable responses to campaigns as they emerge and evolve.

Since the early on days of the Brotherhood, NATO has played an essential part in promoting and enhancing civil preparedness among its member states. Commodity iii of the NATO founding treaty establishes the principle of resilience, which requires all Alliance member states to "maintain and develop their individual and collective chapters to resist armed assail." This includes supporting the continuity of government, and the provision of essential services, including resilient civil communications systems.

Some central considerations for NATO at this time are how best to take the atomic number 82 in defining cognitive attacks, how to assistance Alliance members maintain awareness, and how to support more than robust ceremonious communications infrastructures and public education frameworks in social club to enhance the capacity to resist and to respond.

This is the quaternary article of a mini-series on innovation, which focuses on technologies Allies are looking to prefer and the opportunities they will bring to the defence and security of the NATO Alliance. Previous articles:

  • Edifice a resilient innovation pipeline for the Alliance

  • Artificial Intelligence at NATO: dynamic adoption, responsible use

  • Cognitive Biotechnology: opportunities and considerations for the NATO Alliance