Cognitive Warfare 2026: NATO’s Chief Scientist Report as Sentinel Call for Operational Readiness
https://inss.ndu.edu/Media/News/Article/4371195/cognitive-warfare-2026-natos-chief-scientist-report-as-sentinel-call-for-operat/The recently released NATO Chief Scientist’s 2025 Report on Cognitive Warfare provides a timely acknowledgment of a strategic reality that contemporary conflict is increasingly behavior-centric, and the decisive terrain is often not geographic but how individuals and groups perceive, interpret, decide, and act. I have had the privilege, honor and pleasure of working on NATO’s initial cognitive warfare studies beginning in 2018, which explicitly emphasized that cognitive warfare is not merely “PSYOPS with better tools.”
Indeed, NATO efforts in this space echo our group’s ongoing work that has argued for a more expansive, yet nonetheless realistic view of cognitive warfare as a mix of emerging technologies, influence methods, and adversary exploitation of societal fault lines that can be engaged to shape the conditions under which humans form beliefs, allocate attention, and generate intent. The nature of warfare may remain the same, but operationally I posit that cognitive engagements change three fundamentals of military missions, namely:
• The target set expands from discrete platforms or messages to human cognitive and social systems (trust networks, identity narratives, institutional legitimacy).
• The battlespace becomes continuous, operating non-kinetically below thresholds of armed conflict, blending strategic competition, hybrid pressure, and wartime maneuvering.
• The measure of effectiveness shifts from short-term message penetration to durable changes in cognitive patterns and behavioral dispositions (e.g., risk perception, threat appraisal, civic cohesion, and willingness to support military action).
Increasingly, neurotechnology and artificial intelligence (AI) are becoming dual-use instruments for cognitive engagement to leverage biological, psychological, and social levels of effect, as follows:
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