Cognitive Warfare and the Indo-Pacific
Editor’s Note: this article is being republished with the permission of the Irregular Warfare Initiative as part of a republishing arrangement between IWI and SWJ. The original article was published on January 12, 2026 and is available here.
“Psychologically, the PRC is trying to cause mental disarray and confusion, in order to weaken fighting will and determination to defend ourselves.”
–Taiwan Ministry of National Defense
Editor’s Note: This article was submitted as part of the Irregular Warfare Initiative’s 2025 Writing Contest, in which authors were invited to explore how the United States and its partners can use irregular warfare to strengthen security cooperation, build trust, and enhance resilience among Indo-Pacific nations. This article stood out for its innovative framing of cognitive warfare as a tool of deterrence and alliance-building, and for its practical recommendations on how small Indo-Pacific nations can leverage information operations to uphold international norms. We have edited the piece after its selection.
The balance of the modern global information environment has become algorithmically biased, with social media platforms tailoring content to users’ preferences and reinforcing their pre-existing beliefs. By isolating users in personalized filter bubbles, these algorithms amplify confirmation bias and cultivate increasingly polarized online echo chambers, distorting users’ perceptions of reality and fueling societal division—conditions the People’s Republic of China (PRC) has learned to weaponize.
This is particularly true in small, strategically important countries in the Indo-Pacific, where the PRC orchestrates influence campaigns to propagate pro-Beijing narratives and discredit critics. For example, in the Philippines, a Chinese embassy–funded marketing firm called InfinitUs created fake social media accounts that praised China’s actions in the South China Sea, disparaged the U.S.–Philippine alliance, and amplified anti-American content under the guise of local voices. This kind of targeted political propaganda, sometimes called “spamoflauge,” illustrates how hostile actors exploit algorithmic amplification to reinforce existing rifts.
How, then, can the United States address the PRC’s systemic use of information warfare, given its unrestrained employment of misinformation against the United States and its allies in the Indo-Pacific? Part of the solution lies in adopting a partner-enabled Cognitive Warfare Framework: a construct designed to strengthen sovereign resilience while changing the PRC’s perception of risk in conducting influence campaigns or irregular warfare. At the center of this framework is a Cognitive Warfare Operations Cell (CWOC): a multinational staff that synchronizes social-media campaigns, influence measures of performance, and legal-diplomatic messaging across the information environment. The framework would also establish a Pacific Cognitive Commons, an open-architecture data lake where partners and the CWOC could share sensor feeds, disinformation forensics, and narrative templates in near real time. Finally, the framework would provide local information power brokers technology grants with an emphasis on transparency and strengthening partner capacity.
Protecting International Norms Through the Human Dimension
Global stability depends on shared international norms, which the PRC has attempted to undermine by leveraging gray-zone tactics that allow Beijing to operate below the threshold of open conflict. Keeping with communist ideology, the PRC assiduously works to control information and narratives at home and abroad, developing information campaigns that weave together public opinion warfare, legal manipulation, and psychological pressure to erode the foundations of international law, particularly the United Nations Convention on the Law of the Sea (UNCLOS). For instance, China’s assertion of the Nine-Dash Line in the South China Sea disregards established maritime boundaries and challenges UNCLOS provisions, while simultaneously pressuring neighboring states to acquiesce through coercive presence operations and persuasive narratives.
In effect, China’s strategy aims to redefine the status quo without triggering direct confrontation. This gradual erosion of norms matters because agreements like UNCLOS provide more than legal clarity; they underpin stability by setting predictable standards for state conduct, constraining unilateral aggression, and legitimizing collective responses. When these norms weaken, predictability gives way to coercion, and the international order drifts from one rooted in law to one governed by opportunism or an alternative set of rules and facts of Beijing’s choosing—which it also backs up through concerted information campaigns and lawfare.
Countering China’s human-centered, narrative-driven strategy requires a response anchored in the human dimension—one that empowers authenticity and local voices across social media platforms, civil society fact-checkers, civil literacy education, and independent regional journalists not influenced or financed by outside state sponsors. Doing so can create an organic, scalable information network that makes it easier for civil society or the public to identify illegal behavior and misinformation in real time.
Furthermore, China fears empowered, networked activism which is why Beijing devotes significant resources to monitoring and managing the online activities of its own population. When taken in context of the South China Sea example raised earlier, the more that U.S. allies publish unclassified drone footage, crowdsource maritime data, or use artificial intelligence (AI) to expose PRC narratives and falsities, the higher the reputational cost incurred by Beijing, and the harder it becomes to alter political conditions with impunity.
In cognitive warfare, repetition across multiple media vectors—as opposed to amassing volume on one platform—becomes the metric of success. That is because one source of information is easier to counter than a network of different voices across multiple platforms and domains. As a result, every social media post, newspaper opinion piece, or fiery YouTube video can serve as a micro-deterrent that sustains truthful narratives.
Building Alliances Around Shared Cognitive Effects
Cognitive warfare is the deliberate shaping of perceptions, narratives, and decision cycles and is a decisive precondition for a strategy of denial against the PRC. Cognitive warfare also entails the purposeful manipulation of information, technology, and social dynamics to influence how audiences perceive reality, decide, and act, effectively turning perception itself into the primary battlespace. An effective cognitive warfare campaign to deter China’s aggression would emphasize messaging that upholds international norms, signals costs to China’s aggression and PRC stability, demonstrates allied unity, and integrates low-cost information effects to skew Beijing’s cost–benefit calculus long before crisis.
A strategy of denial in the information environment depends on an alliance ecosystem that can see, understand, and signal faster than the People’s Liberation Army (PLA) can maneuver. Strategic denial is vital in the information dimension because once a narrative takes hold it is more difficult to counter or debunk an entrenched line of thinking. In economics this is known as a first mover advantage. Furthermore, RAND’s analysis of denial underscores the importance of credible, distributed American forces backed by partners that are willing to accept risk on behalf of each other. Modern technology lowers the barrier to collaboration by providing narrative toolkits, bot-detection software, and TikTok templates—open-source tools that can be shared with any cognitive warfare partner.
While the previous sections addressed integrated and combined information operations, the need for structure—a central body where practitioners and local actors can coordinate, seek guidance, and reinforce shared narratives—becomes essential. That’s where a Cognitive Warfare Operations Cell (CWOC)—a multi-national staff that synchronizes social-media campaigns, influences measures of performance, and crafts legal-diplomatic talking points—comes in. Creating such a cell could allow even the smallest coast guard in Oceania to punch above its weight if it is integrated with partner information platforms along a coherent information campaign. The CWOC would operate with the flexibility of modern intelligence-sharing agreements, while focusing specifically on coordinating a cohesive, multinational cognitive warfare campaign.
Technology as the Key Enabler
Technology is the new equalizer in modern warfare and is the primary conduit to conduct cognitive warfare at the speed and scale required of the modern information environment. Low-cost, effective technologies have proliferated in the last several years. Particularly with regard to access to free Large Language Models (LLMs) and cheap drones. As a result, humanity is experiencing a rapid expansion of accessible capabilities and, in effect, a democratization of cognitive warfare–related technologies.
The PRC fears the democratization of technology because cheap quadcopters, commercial SATCOM, and open-source AI capabilities make it possible for even the most remote village in the Indo-Pacific to collect evidence counter to PRC narratives, live-stream it to global audiences, and auto-translate subtitles within minutes. Additionally, the greater a U.S. partner’s technological tempo (firmware drops, fresh data, rapid prototype cycles), the more uncertain Beijing becomes concerning their ability to obscure (and therefore leverage) their own Irregular Warfare campaigns below the conflict threshold.
Illustrative Scenario: Palau
Palau, a strategic archipelago east of the Philippines, is one of three Pacific nations that formally recognize Taiwan. Located in the second island chain, Palau sits between a U.S. base in Guam and the Philippines, a key American partner against Chinese expansionism in the South China Sea. With a population of around 17,600, this U.S. ally draws significant attention from the PRC, whose influence in Palau poses risks to broader American power projection.
Absent an organic capability, and due to a lack of regional resistance frameworks like the cognitive warfare framework, the PRC employs targeted social media campaigns and strives for full control of Palauan information networks. Most notably, efforts to prop up a pro-Chinese newspaper, Tia Belau, represent the kind of systematic attempts to control local perceptions of PRC activities. Ultimately the owner of Tia Belau unsuccessfully attempted to launch a media venture promoting Palau in China in 2018. Although that initiative failed, Beijing continues to wield economic leverage over Palau and makes concerted efforts to interfere in Palau’s elections.
Under a cognitive warfare framework, Palau can counter PRC influence by identifying threats, such as social media manipulation, via the CWOC headquarters. Alternatively, the CWOC can also support grass roots counter-PRC influence campaigns.
For example, once a PRC influence operation or territorial incursion s identified, the CWOC can first empower local voices through training, small grants, and cost effective tools such as Generative AI to create and disseminate investigative content exposing PRC intentions. A second step would entail a coordinated narrative campaign across varied languages and media platforms by CWOC member states. Finally, the content would further amplify local efforts by distributing coordinated information campaigns across the Indo-Pacific and leveraging the content against adversarial messaging networks.
Establishing a Cognitive Warfare Framework in the Indo-Pacific
A partner-enabled cognitive warfare Framework that counters PRC influence campaigns would require the following initial steps:
- Fund a Pacific Cognitive Commons: maintain an unclassified, open-architecture data lake where local partners and CWOC upload sensor feeds, disinformation forensics, and narrative templates in near real time.
- Institutionalize the Cognitive Warfare Operations Cell (CWOC): establish the CWOC under the Quadrilateral Security Dialogue plus ASEAN invitees and rotate leadership quarterly to reinforce ownership. Require members to coordinate information campaigns and provide resourcing to the cognitive warfare Framework.
- Tie Technology Grants to Outcomes: establish a fund and then release micro-grants to partners and local journalists or social media influencers who publish verifiable evidence of norm violations, incentivizing transparency. CWOC members would conduct training on provided technology via online or in-person engagement.
Conclusion
A partner-enabled cognitive warfare framework would complicate the PRC’s risk calculus by introducing uncertainty in the information space well before conflict, and sow doubt in Chinese decision makers before considering even the smallest forms of aggression. Partner-enabled cognitive warfare shifts the strategic high ground from geography to mindset and brings strategic competition to where the PRC has been prioritizing for decades. Technology-enabled signaling by the United States and its allies would amplify alliance actions, reinforce the states’ sovereignty and international order, and convince Beijing that any attempted aggression would trigger a multi-spectral backlash it cannot afford. Perception is nine-tenths of deterrence, and if wielded effectively, the United States and its partners have the opportunity to wield the loudest megaphones.
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