The "New" Cognitive Dimension of Competition and War: Calibration Issues and NATO's Response

List of Key Chapter Titles

1. Does NATO Need a New Response to Brand-New Challenges?
2. Does Russia's Cognitive Warfare Approach Pose a Threat to NATO?
3. How Should NATO Respond to Challenges in the Cognitive Domain?
4. What Goals Can Be Achieved Through Competition in the Cognitive Domain?
5. Conclusion
6. Definition of Russian Success in Cognitive Confrontation (Table 1)
7. Definition of Western Success in Cognitive Warfare Competition (Table 2)

Document Introduction

Against the backdrop of a continuously deteriorating security environment, NATO is accelerating its adaptation to new security demands. However, it faces competition, conflict, and forms of warfare reshaped by the ambitions and innovations of its adversaries. The challenge posed by Russia to NATO is fundamentally different from that of the former Soviet Union. Understanding Russia's modern warfare model and its strategic dimensions has become a primary task for NATO. The Russia-Ukraine conflict has fully demonstrated the core elements, current limitations, and Russia's own learning and adaptive capabilities of its new operational methods.

Within NATO, there is no consensus on positioning the cognitive domain as a military operational domain. Although NATO's top-level operational concept lists cognitive superiority as a key priority for warfare development, experts also disagree on the core components of the cognitive domain, leading to a lag in the development of related concepts. This report revolves around a core question: Is the cognitive domain a new, unique, and critical area requiring NATO to adopt coherent and sustained new countermeasures? Or can it be addressed through existing and ad-hoc methods?

The report points out from a historical perspective that the cognitive dimension of war is not a new phenomenon. Theories such as Clausewitz's theory of war, the Soviet theory of reflexive control, and "active measures" from the Cold War era all attest to the long history of cognitive warfare tactics. However, three major factors now give it new characteristics: the increasing vulnerability of democratic societies to external manipulation, the active exploitation of these vulnerabilities by countries like Russia, and technological innovations providing new tools for cognitive warfare, especially the application of cyber tools, artificial intelligence, and biotechnology.

Russia's information confrontation strategy has clear objectives: to shape the information environment at local, regional, and global levels to suit its own interests during peace, crisis, and war. Its 2023 foreign policy concept further clarifies the strategic direction of promoting a multipolar world order and weakening US dominance. China also incorporates the cognitive domain into its "intelligentized" warfare model, shaping the information environment through propaganda penetration and technological empowerment, which NATO views as a "systemic challenge."

The report proposes six basic principles for NATO to address challenges in the cognitive domain. These include adopting a more competitive overall strategy, adapting at both operational and strategic levels, deconstructing challenges by conflict phase and geographical level, formulating a technology development strategy, focusing on long-term competition, and enhancing situational awareness and understanding capabilities. The report also notes that "superiority" and "victory" are not suitable competitive goals. NATO should focus on pragmatic objectives during peace, crisis, and war stages, maintaining alliance resolve and cohesion while deterring adversaries' escalation intentions.