Dr. Prigozhin, or “How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love Cognitive Warfare”

INTRODUCTION

“Cognitive Warfare” is a frequently disputed, yet increasingly popular term used in many foreign policy circles. Multiple definitions of it exist, with different implied views of its purpose and effectiveness. However, scholars and practitioners generally agree that it is a form of conflict between countries characterized by the use of propaganda and misinformation to influence public opinion and leadership perceptions in an enemy state. The prevailing objective of this strategy is to modify a foe’s behavior without resorting to military force or economic coercion, though it can be pursued in tandem with either of these. Put directly, it is a form of warfare (which Carl von Clausewitz classically defined as “an act of force to compel our enemy to do our will”) concentrated on the human mind (often called the “cognitive domain”).

The modern style of cognitive warfare was pioneered by the Russian Federation. Moscow created novel methods for states to compete below the threshold of armed conflict by invading the minds of each other’s populations, militaries and elites to promote narratives conducive to their political objectives. This results in an arms race, as states seek to detect new vulnerabilities in others’ information spaces and expand upon existing techniques for invading them with misinformation, as well as outright propaganda, with new means peculiar to the internet age. In this piece, Russia’s entrepreneurship in the sphere of cognitive warfare, beginning with their interference in the 2016 US presidential election, is explored. It then discusses the globalization of their techniques and argues that the proliferation of such methods suggests an uncertain future for the development of cognitive warfare and the future of state sovereignty and democracy.

RUSSIA’S COGNITIVE WARFARE CAMPAIGNS

During the 2016 US Presidential Election, the Democratic Party and its functionaries were subjected to a series of attacks by Russian hackers. This set of attacks represented a continuation of Russia’s “active measures” campaign of covert action against the United States. It saw the Kremlin leveraging modern technology to hone efforts at achieving narrative control that it had originally initiated during the Cold War for the information age. The goal of this campaign was to saturate American civil society with pro-Russian and destabilizing propaganda and subvert the autonomous functioning of US democracy.

As part of this, Russian influence operatives sought to amplify partisanship and put out information disqualifying for Hilary Clinton’s campaign. Russian outfits like Fancy Bear, a GRU-linked hacking unit, and the Internet Research Agency, a front corporation for bot-farming efforts owned by Yevgeny Prigozhin, the late Russian oligarch of Wagner Group infamy, sought to delegitimize the election and the Democratic Party. The objective of this effort was to create chaos and facilitate the rise of the Trump Campaign, whom the Kremlin perceived as a more conciliatory candidate than Clinton.

At the height of their efforts, they even tried to coordinate directly with Republican nominee Donald Trump’s campaign to exploit information leaks. In some corners of society, this sparked sporadic violence and promoted views conducive to pro-Russian foreign policy. That was achieved chiefly through the Russian government capitalizing on isolationism, conspiracy theories and anti-establishment sentiments already embedded in American politics.

This campaign was a prelude for subsequent efforts. The Russian Federation has also extensively worked to promote populist right-wing elements across Europe, intending to undermine the unity and expansion of the European Union while also creating administrations and premierships that they can collaborate with to disadvantage Ukraine.

Russian disinformation and propaganda tools have also served to prop up autocratic regimes in West Africa. Through doing so, they provide a way for Russian state-sponsored organizations like the Africa Corps (formerly Prigozhin’s Wagner Group) to expand their reach and secure economic interests and military power, with these actions legitimated as part of an anti-Western political project. In cognitive warfare, therefore, Russia has appeared as an entrepreneur in developing new methods and then globalizing them.

THE GLOBAL ADOPTION AND APPEAL OF COGNITIVE WARFARE

The use of cognitive warfare as a means of undermining an adversarial state has not remained isolated to the actions of the Russian Federation. The People’s Republic of China has promoted its own variation on Russia’s strategy. These initiatives are pursued under the People’s Liberation Army’s “Cognitive Domain Operations”, which are largely concentrated on undermining Western resolve in the case of an invasion of Taiwan. In the United States, too, there have been recent efforts to platform and promote the use of cognitive warfare against that state’s adversaries as a viable tool. Finally, in the Middle East, Iran and Israel have both engaged in efforts at subversive narrative control in digital spaces aimed at their foe’s populations, militaries and elites, creating a whole new domain for conflict in that region, as the realm of collective attention becomes more contested.

Cognitive warfare appeals to states today because it allows them to weaken the resolve of their foes by competing without conventional military or economic conflict, which is typically more costly and high-visibility. This gives it clear transnational appeal, which is rooted in its ability to produce the maximal effect of reshaping the foe’s views of the world without having to resort to direct coercion. Today, that appeal endures despite its potential for wide, destabilizing effects across the whole international system.

THE RISKS OF COGNITIVE WARFARE

Recent developments in cognitive warfare also create an arms race around identifying vulnerabilities in other states’ public squares and refining techniques to penetrate them and install narratives conducive to one’s aims. If a state is trying to implant views of the world conducive to its aims or cause chaos by manipulating the views of an adversary’s population, it often has to appeal to the existing prejudices or political tendencies of that population. For example, Russia’s use of an ultra-masculine nationalism has allowed it to appeal more easily to white nationalist movements in many Western countries, letting them generate pro-Russian and anti-Western sentiment premised on the view that such a violent, patriarchal view of the world is more organic than liberal internationalism. Moreover, as Russia pioneered with its promotion of “Pizzagate” and other conspiracy theories during the 2016 election cycle, more anti-establishment portions of the enemy state’s public might be more easily convinced to buy into viewpoints that cause chaos. That marks them out as an element to target during a cognitive warfare campaign.

In the end, this leaves the world significantly less secure. Countries start constantly fighting over the immaterial world of human perceptions, deploying difficult-to-detect methods, like Prigozhin’s bot farms, to undermine each other. In turn, a greater degree of suspicion characterizes the way policy-makers perceive their own populations, civil society organizations, etc. This creates a situation in which maintaining an authoritarian or quasi-authoritarian state capable of managing its population’s “narrative hygiene” might be appealing to states to secure themselves against cognitive warfare.

THE THREE FUTURES OF COGNITIVE WARFARE

This creates three possible global futures, two of which are interrelated in the way they amplify authoritarianism and create insecurity.

The first future is one in which competition in cognitive arenas continues unfettered and is perpetuated by states, leading to escalating instability. Figures like Prigozhin and intelligence outfits like Fancy Bear continue their work to control the cognitive domain for the benefit of their government’s political ambitions. That replicates the security dilemma highlighted above and, as time goes on, threatens to expand the globalization of malign techniques even further, with more countries establishing their own cognitive warfare units and initiating campaigns against their enemies.

The second future is one in which private capital starts to utilize methods for cognitive warfare, either in a way conducive to state ambitions or purely for their own purposes. In this future, corporations like Palantir continue to offer capabilities for engaging in digital surveillance while also providing ways for cognitive warfare to proliferate freely. Often, a multinational corporation in this sphere is not a totally reliable actor with total adherence to its sponsoring governments. When guided by idiosyncratic ideologies like “anarcho-capitalism” and “accelerationism”, or swayed by an adversary, they could even betray their governments’ trust and become, effectively, mercenary forces. Alternatively, they could even try to carve out exemptions from state authority and create areas, digitally and politically, where they can operate freely and exert their own authority, either through proprietary control of citizens’ data or by manipulating their home state’s information spheres.

Both these futures make arguments in favor of either pursuing dominance, like this recent one made by scholar Łukas Kamieński, or farming the cognitive warfare sphere out to private capital, in a way akin to recent arguments to this effect made by organizations like the American Enterprise Institute, potentially deeply dangerous. As the first two futures demonstrate, continuing down the road of unfettered cognitive warfare spells out greater insecurity for states and heightens the risk of authoritarianism becoming the norm. So, how do societies begin to mitigate risk for themselves in this space without permanently broadening geopolitical insecurity to the world of the human mind?

A third future does exist, in which states begin to pursue some form of diplomacy to de-risk the cognitive domain, potentially in tandem with efforts to create norms surrounding AI’s use in militarized conflict. Little to no work has been done to forge this future, so even beginning a global conversation on cognitive warfare would be an essential first step. By elaborating on previous efforts at strategic engagement over the use of AI systems in warfare and related projects, states may be able to construct a binding regime over the use of cognitive warfare.

Such a regime could also be backed up by introducing mechanisms like threshold-based penalties or diplomatic and economic isolation for contravening powers to ensure compliance with a prospective agreement’s terms. These threshold-based penalties could work in a similar vein to the Iran nuclear deal’s use of “snap-back sanctions”, which attempted to guarantee Tehran’s compliance with the terms of that deal by guaranteeing economic pain for verified breaches of its terms. This imposes costs on those that continue to engage in cognitive warfare, potentially skewing their strategic calculus against it and de-risking this area.

CONCLUSION

In a world where conflict between states is already at its greatest level since World War II, the realm of the human mind should not be permanently turned into a battlefield. At a time when democracy and human rights are backsliding at a rapid pace, governments should not feel a further need to intervene in their own civil societies to prevent their adversaries from seizing control over them. Diplomacy offers the chance to suppress the new world of cognitive warfare, and this opportunity to liberate human thought should not be dismissed. Let Yevgeny Prigozhin’s world of misinformation operations be buried with him.

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