Cognitive Warfare Without a Map: Why Current Targeting Logic Fails in a Fast-Moving Information Ecosystem
A Persistent Conceptual Mismatch
A unit prepares to deploy as a deepfake video begins circulating online, amplified by bot accounts and picked up by mainstream outlets and influencers within hours. As staff officers coordinate a response, lawyers review courses of action, and platforms deliberate content moderation, the narrative mutates, spills across audiences, and triggers legal challenges, partner hesitation, and public pressure. By the time a response is finally authorized, the original claim has already evolved into something new, and the operational conditions it created have hardened. The force did not fail to act; it acted on a timeline measured in days against an adversary iterating in hours.
This contradiction is not a failure of intent or effort. It is a failure of mental models.
Over the past two decades, the Joint Force has increasingly recognized the centrality of the human and information environment in contemporary conflict. Doctrine and strategy emphasize influence, narratives, legitimacy, and perception as decisive factors in competition and war. Yet operational practice reveals a persistent contradiction: cognitive warfare is still planned using conceptual models designed for kinetic operations in the physical domain.
Traditional targeting frameworks assume that relevant elements of the operational environment can be identified, fixed, and acted upon within a discrete decision cycle. Cognitive warfare violates these assumptions. Beliefs, identities, narratives, and social alignments do not remain stationary while staffs deliberate; they evolve continuously in response to internal dynamics and external stimuli. As a result, influence operations frequently address a cognitive reality that no longer exists.
The Information Environment Is Not a Traditional Battlespace
Kinetic environments can be fast and uncertain, but the physical domain imposes friction and observability that are typically slower than the rate of state-change compared to networked information dynamics. The physical battlespace is constrained by geography, physics, and observable movement. Even in high-tempo kinetic operations, targets often remain valid long enough for planning, coordination, and execution to produce intended effects.
The information environment behaves differently in three fundamental ways:
Speed. Information propagates at network speed, amplified by digital platforms, recommender algorithms, and social feedback loops. Empirical research demonstrates that false and emotionally resonant information spreads faster, farther, and more broadly than factual content, often outpacing institutional response mechanisms.
Interconnectedness. Influence diffuses across overlapping social, cultural, and digital networks, where second and third-order effects frequently matter more than initial actions. Networked conflict rewards adaptability and resonance over centralized control.
Adaptability. Individuals and groups continuously adjust beliefs and behaviors in response to perceived signals, including influence attempts themselves. Meaning is socially constructed and reinforced through interaction, not imposed mechanically. Decision-making under such conditions relies on recognition and adaptation rather than linear optimization.
These characteristics make the information environment fundamentally ill-suited to target-centric planning models. While the joint targeting cycle and air tasking order operate on 96-hour planning horizons, adversaries can weaponize information in 9.6 seconds.
Murmurations as a Model for Cognitive Behavior
A murmuration of starlings provides a useful analogy for understanding cognitive warfare. In a murmuration, no central authority directs the flock. Each bird responds only to the movements of its nearest neighbors, yet complex, coherent, and rapidly shifting collective patterns emerge.
In planning terms, a murmuration model shifts attention from discrete targets to interaction patterns: planners observe how narratives, identities, and behaviors move through networks, measure the speed, direction, and coherence of those movements, and intervene by altering the rules of interaction that shape collective behavior rather than attempting to control individual nodes.
Several features of murmuration behavior are directly relevant to the information environment:
- There is no decisive node. Removing a single bird does not disrupt the flock. Similarly, influencing a single individual, platform, or account rarely produces decisive cognitive effects.
- Behavior is emergent rather than commanded. Global patterns arise from local interactions rather than centralized control. Influence emerges from identity alignment, emotional resonance, and narrative coherence, not from top-down messaging alone.
- Responses to pressure are non-linear. A threat approaching from one direction can cause movement in an entirely different direction. In cognitive warfare, influence efforts often generate backlash, displacement, or unintended amplification.
Cognitive warfare, therefore, presents an ecosystem to be understood, rather than a target system to be dismantled.
Decision Latency and the Illusion of Precision
The most damaging consequence of applying kinetic targeting logic to cognitive warfare is decision latency. Decision latency is generated less by uncertainty than by structure, the separation of approval authority from the units that plan and execute information effects, forcing actions through sequential staffing, legal review, and coordination layers that consume time faster than the cognitive environment remains stable.
Traditional targeting relies on discrete intelligence snapshots, followed by deliberation, approval, and execution, under the assumption that the operational environment remains sufficiently stable. In the information environment, this assumption routinely fails. By the time an influence action is approved and executed, the cognitive state it was designed to address may have shifted significantly.
The result is action that is precise in execution but misaligned in effect. The root of this problem is the temporal execution mismatch.
Design Implication: A Warfighting System Approach
If the core failure in cognitive warfare is indeed temporal mismatch, then the solution is not simply another refinement of targeting methodology. It is a redesign of how the force senses, decides, and acts in the information environment. This is a system problem. Effective competition requires capabilities aligned with decision-makers who possess appropriate authorities, integrated sensors and effectors across echelons, and a continuous battle rhythm that turns observation into action at the speed of relevance.
A fair objection is that traditional targeting has always dealt with uncertainty; the difference here is not uncertainty, but the rate of change. Properly conceived, this approach does not simply automate influence. It compresses the time for sensemaking and adaptation within clearly defined legal and ethical constraints, thereby expediting execution.
By front-loading understanding, desired end-states, and pre-set risk tolerance, we can expedite the execution phase. To make this process function, information must therefore be treated as more than an enabling function, but as a warfighting system designed to operate within an ecosystem’s velocity, with requisite command and staff focus and support. In practical terms, this means defining measurable indicators of cognitive movement (velocity, coherence, saturation, and drift), pre-approving bounded response options tied to those indicators, and instrumenting continuous assessment rather than episodic completion
Cognitive Targeting Versus Ecosystem Velocity
Figure 1 below illustrates how the cognitive environment moves continuously and often faster than traditional decision processes can keep pace with.
Figure 1: Cognitive Targeting Versus Ecosystem Velocity
This Figure Illustrates the dynamics of the cognitive environment, and an optimal means of targeting and operationalization at speed and scale.
The intersecting lines at the top represent individual agents within the information environment. These agents may be individuals, groups, narratives, or social dynamics. Each line shows how those agents evolve over time. While no single agent controls the system, recognizable patterns emerge through local interaction, analogous to a murmuration of birds.
The vertical cross sections A and B represent discrete moments of observation and decision. A traditional targeting process typically observes the environment at one of these moments, develops a plan based on that snapshot, and executes later. By the time execution occurs, the agents have moved, and the underlying cognitive conditions have changed. The resulting action is therefore precise but no longer aligned with reality.
The lower portion of the figure depicts an alternative approach. A synthetic cognitive environment, overseen by human judgment, continuously models how agents and narratives are likely to evolve. This environment informs a machine-assisted decision loop designed to recognize emerging patterns and predefined conditions rather than rely on static snapshots. When those conditions are met, actions are executed immediately through distributed cognitive capabilities such as psychological operations, cyber activities, civil affairs, and other cognitive or information warfare tools.
The key insight is that effectiveness in the cognitive domain depends on both precision and timing. Precision without timeliness is functionally irrelevant.
From Targeting to Cognitive Ecology
Effective competition in the cognitive domain requires a shift from target-centric to ecosystem-based approaches. The objective is to understand the interaction rules shaping collective behavior, including identity alignment, emotional contagion, narrative coherence, social proof, and algorithmic amplification.
Operationally, this implies prioritizing continuous sensing, rapid interpretation, and iterative action enabled by delegated parameters and integrated assessment, rather than episodic, staff-driven targeting cycles. Psychological operations, cyber operations, civil affairs, electronic warfare, space capabilities, narrative intelligence, and traditional intelligence functions as distributed sensors and effectors within a cognitive ecosystem.
Ethical and Strategic Constraints
Accelerated cognitive operations require clear ethical boundaries. If information is treated as a warfighting system, then legitimacy is not a rhetorical concern, but a design requirement built into authorities, oversight, auditing, and separation protections.
Democracies cannot replicate coercive information control practices. Human oversight, legal compliance, and respect for civil liberties are strategic imperatives. These principles must be embedded in system design rather than imposed after the fact.
Potential Solutions
This is not the first time the United States has faced a gap between the character of conflict and the institutions designed to fight it. In the early 1980s, senior leaders concluded that capabilities for influence and psychological operations had atrophied even as competition short of war made perception increasingly consequential. The response was a senior-directed effort to rebuild doctrine, authorities, force structure, education, and interagency coordination, culminating in the initial 1985 and formalized 1990 Psychological Operations Master Plans.
The present moment is comparable, but the terrain is broader. Cognitive and information warfare now shape whether military power can be generated, deployed, and employed at all. Yet responsibility for this terrain remains fragmented across organizations and planning models not designed for a fast-moving, adaptive environment.
What is missing is not just awareness, but coherence.
A modernized “Cognitive Advantage Master Plan” could articulate how the United States should organize, govern, and employ information as a warfighting system in competition and conflict. As with its predecessors, its value would lie less in any single recommendation than in its ability to synchronize a commonly understood, coherent effort across institutions that currently act in parallel.
Absent such an effort, the United States risks continuing to apply slow, narrowly focused, and tactical tools to a problem of speed, strategic coherence, and adaptation.
Conclusion
The United States does not lack tools or expertise in the cognitive domain. It lacks an operational model aligned with the environment it seeks to influence and the ability to coherently articulate and execute across multiple platforms across the enterprise.
Cognitive warfare unfolds in a rapidly changing and adaptive ecosystem more akin to a murmuration than a battlefield. As long as kinetic targeting logic is retrofitted to this environment, influence efforts will remain late, displaced, or irrelevant.
Success will come from rethinking how we observe, decide, and act in an ecosystem where time, interaction, and adaptation matter more than targets.
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