The nature of war has changed radically. This may seem like an overly categorical statement, but it is a reality defined by the nature of current conflicts, marked by the rapid development of the technological revolution.
Military Information Support Operations (MISO), aimed at influencing “enemy” audiences—their emotions, behaviors, and motivations—are part of this approach to waging conflict. The term, defined by the Pentagon, replaced “Psyop” (Psychological Operations) in 2010, a term used since World War II.
According to the document Warfighting 2040, Cognitive Warfare (CW) “is based on the use of disinformation and propaganda techniques aimed at psychologically exhausting the recipients of information.”
However, the possibilities of this form of warfare are expanding every day, with the advancement of information and disinformation techniques; but, above all, with the progress of NBIC (Nanotechnology, Biotechnology, Information Technology, and Cognitive Science).
It is no longer a matter of dominating the five main theaters of conventional or unconventional warfare (air, land, sea, space, and cyberspace); now the conflict also takes place in the human domain; therefore, victory will depend on the ability to impose a desired behavior on a selected audience.
The digital environment makes it possible to coordinate dispersed individuals and organize attack swarms with the mission of sowing uncertainty, despair, fear, anxiety, and chaos.
With the mastery of Artificial Intelligence (AI), analysts can build models capable of predicting hidden attributes, including political preferences, sexual orientation, etc.
The social media platforms and apps we use leave hundreds of thousands of digital footprints that are used by
Big Data companies use this data to build user profiles and organize interest groups.
It often happens that information warfare (IW), due to its close relationship with cognitive warfare (CW), is frequently confused with the latter; however, IW aims to control the flow of information, while cognitive warfare encompasses all the sciences that deal with knowledge and its processes, such as psychology, linguistics, neurobiology, logic, etc.
Every social media platform, every website, is designed to be addictive and trigger emotional outbursts.
According to the CIA, the viral nature of the internet has the potential to affect—and even change—a person’s character in a matter of seconds, as well as their long-term future, regardless of who they are or their life experience.
The subordination of the media to the tasks of manipulating information, shaping public opinion, and, by virtue of this, modeling patterns of behavior, has become an essential part of the U.S. empire’s strategy to achieve hegemony in a world that is becoming increasingly difficult for it to manage.
They work to incite hatred and fabricate negative perceptions; they exploit weaknesses and shortcomings, as well as identified automatisms, fears, and stereotypes. Mastering stereotypes allows the manipulator to take control of the audience through subjective triggers.
But CW goes much further; it serves to degrade the capacity to produce knowledge. It targets the entirety of human capital to erode the trust that sustains an entire society. Its objective is to hack the individual.
CW operations aim to instill in people a rigid way of thinking that provokes resistance to any argument, information, or even evidence of reality that contradicts their own perceptions and opinions.
On the other hand, they promote and stimulate aversive emotions, thoughts, and moods, which can escalate to high levels of intensity, making them very difficult to manage and sustain.
However, this is not something entirely new. The work of U.S. intelligence agencies to control the human mind began with projects like MK-Ultra.
Also known as Artichoke, this project was a nightmarish, chilling reality: experiments in the realm of the human unconscious, drug trials, brain implants, surgery, lobotomies… a veritable storehouse of horrors.
The task of carrying out MK-Ultra in 1953 fell to the Office of Scientific Intelligence (OSI), an entity founded in 1948, and came to involve more than 30 universities and scientific centers across the country.
Among the areas of research interest were inducing paranoia, causing amnesia, triggering illogical thoughts through the use of drugs, manipulating violence, studying the effects of ultrasound on human populations, as well as studies on cancer and leukemia.
In today’s world, the revolution in NBIC (Nanotechnology, Biotechnology, Information Technology, and Cognitive Science) is being used to control human beings, turning them into a weapon against themselves.
Traditional conditioning techniques have been reinforced and brought to near-perfection thanks to the possibilities offered by neuroweapons.
This is a struggle to take control of our senses, of our way of seeing the world, to turn us into puppets in the hands of a select elite that seeks to perpetuate its privileges without firing a single bullet.
Source: Cognitive Warfare. Unconventional Warfare
