Winning hearts and minds? Try ‘winning the brain’

The bodies of dead insurgents lay there in the hot Philippine sun. These weren’t battlefield casualties from the Hukbalahap rebellion, but something far more sinister.

An examination of the bodies revealed bite marks.

These fighters weren’t killed by counterinsurgents, but by local Aswang – vampiric creatures that hunted the fighters.

Fighters became too scared to leave their villages, and by 1954, the Hukbalahap communist insurgency was over. The rebellion failed.

The Huk Rebellion is one of history’s most curious cases of psychological warfare. The CIA’s counterinsurgency methodology relied on local myth and narrative to sow fear: from the Aswang, to the evil eyes and the use of curses and witchcraft – locals simply did not want to fight any longer.

In an information age, how can psychological warfare be enhanced to change not only alter perceptions of a person's reality, but to intimately effect the brain's innate decision-making processes and biases?

Recent research by the French military and higher education institutions has sought to examine the new era of cognitive warfare, and how it stands separately from traditional concepts governing psychological and information warfare.

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Writing in War on the Rocks, French air force and space force officer David Pappalardo analysed what makes cognitive warfare unique.

“Cognitive warfare is a multidisciplinary approach combining social sciences and new technologies to directly alter the mechanisms of understanding and decision-making in order to destabilize or paralyze an adversary,” he suggested.

“In other words, it aims to hack the heuristics of the human brain in an attempt to “win the war before the war,” echoing the strategic vision of French Chief of the Defense Staff Gen. Thierry Burkhard.”

According to Pappalardo, this style of warfare is a function of cyber operations and narrative warfare, which is designed to manipulate an adversary’s civilians or military personnel even during peacetime that can cause “influence, paralysis or confusion”. Simply – he noted that cognitive warfare is the art of the “exploitation of competing brain functions.”

“These three observations — that war has always implied a dialectic of wills and intelligences, that strategy is “a science of the other,” and that information is a weapon that offers a strategic advantage — inform the cognitive warfare approach to strategic thinking,” he contends.

The primary difference between cognitive warfare and traditional perceptions of information and psychological warfare is the introduction of social and cognitive neurosciences to change brain function. 

“Acting on information is only acting on the data that feeds cognition, whereas cognitive warfare seeks to act on the process of cognition itself. The objective is to act not only on what individuals think, but also on the way they think, thus conditioning the way they act,” he noted.

The military officer cites the paper Cognitive Warfare: The Future of Cognitive Dominance which was submitted to the NATO-ACT Innovation Hub Symposium on cognitive warfare with support of the French Armed Forces. This paper lays out a definitive foundation of this unique battlefield.

“Cognitive Warfare is the most advanced form of human mental manipulation, to date, permitting influence over individual or collective behavior, with the goal of obtaining a tactical or strategic advantage. In this domain of action, the human brain becomes the battlefield,” the paper’s foreword by Major General Philippe Montocchio reads.

“The pursued objective is to influence not only what the targets think, but also the way they think and, ultimately, the way they act. Cognitive Warfare is necessarily associated with other modes and domains of action for reaching targeted brains, such as Cyber Warfare and Information Warfare.”

According to Pr Bernard Claverie’s chapter in the NATO submission, the result is stark.

“The impairment of cognitive processes has two harmful consequences: i) Contextual maladaptation, resulting in errors, missed gestures or temporary inhibition; and ii) Lasting disorder, which affects the personality and transforms its victim by locking him or her into a form of behavioral strangeness or inability to understand the world,” he wrote.

How is this achieved? The paper notes that one key avenue for cognitive warfare is the use of the information world to socially engineer alternate realities. Such alternate realities build socially constructed groups of supporters around fake information, fomenting chaos and division. Such "group-think" can thus hack the cognitive biases of individuals who prioritise adherence to group orthodoxy rather than observable realities. 

Not only does this direct "collective social action" in a society, but fundamentally attacks "attention saturation, learning disorders, cognitive bias, working memory and long-term memories."

Your say

Does the information age just guide how people think, or can it ultimately be employed to change fundamental brain functions?

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