Younes Alizadeh \u2013 Artificial intelligence expert<\/p>\n
The future war will not only be over land and sky, and the main battlefield may be the human mind and the algorithms that shape his information, narratives, and choices. Recent developments in information warfare indicate that the boundary between psychological operations, strategic communications, cyber warfare, and artificial intelligence technology is becoming blurred. If in the past the main objective of cognitive operations was to disseminate a narrative or false news, now the more important issue is influencing the environment in which humans receive, validate, and interpret information.<\/p>\n
Artificial intelligence has provided the possibility of producing, personalizing, distributing, and reproducing content at a speed and scale with which traditional information defense mechanisms can hardly keep pace. The Atlantic Council’s recent study on the “multilateral cognitive warfare defense network” also shows that in the assessment of American policymakers, cognition has become an arena independent of security competition, and AI tools have made influence operations faster and more extensive.<\/p>\n
From psychological warfare to engineering the perceptual environment<\/strong><\/p>\n The difference between cognitive warfare and traditional psychological warfare lies in its level of targeting. The goal is not necessarily to convince the audience of a specific proposition, but can be the erosion of trust, increasing confusion, intensifying polarization, and creating doubt toward information sources. In such circumstances, even if the audience does not accept a particular narrative, widespread distrust of media, institutions, and official information can itself become a strategic outcome.<\/p>\n The Atlantic Council, in a report on US-Japan-Taiwan cooperation, has proposed with this same understanding the creation of a joint cognitive defense network; a network relying on shared threat identification, early warning, information exchange, and coordination among government, the private sector, and civil society. This report uses the term “brain control” to describe a new level of cognitive competition and warns that individual and merely reactive responses lag behind the speed of AI-based operations. However, this report is a policy study from the perspective of US security and its allies and should not be considered a neutral assessment of all parties to the dispute.<\/p>\n The Valdai Discussion Club website also argues in an article that Cold War-era geopolitical models are insufficient to explain power in the age of artificial intelligence; because algorithmic influence operations, AI-enhanced cyberattacks, and automated information campaigns can affect markets, public opinion, and political decision-making without a soldier crossing a border.<\/p>\n The Israeli regime and transferring the battle into algorithms<\/strong><\/p>\n The importance of artificial intelligence in cognitive warfare becomes more apparent when generative platforms and chatbots themselves become part of the competition arena. A Wired Middle East investigative report tells of a specific example: the American company “Clock Tower X,” which provides services to the Israeli regime’s government, had a contract worth 46.5 million dollars in 2026, whose stated purpose in documents registered under “FARA” was “influencing the framing results” of GPT conversations. This company has also created a collection of websites to offer favorable narratives on political and security issues.<\/p>\n Wired’s experiment on six chatbots, including ChatGPT, Claude, Perplexity, Copilot, Gemini, and Grok, showed that some of these systems incorporated their content into their responses without the user mentioning the websites’ names. In one case, three systems reflected in their responses a figure that a website affiliated with this campaign was promoting. Of course, the report itself emphasizes that “influencing chatbots” is not the same as “influencing public opinion,” and evidence of the two must be assessed separately.<\/p>\n The importance of this experiment for Iran lies in the fact that cognitive operations are no longer necessarily limited to social networks or media and may be transferred through the path of search engines, content bases, and then a chatbot’s response to the user. As a result, the war has moved from the stage of “message production” to “engineering the path of the audience’s access to information.”<\/p>\n The cognitive-technological deterrence doctrine for Iran<\/strong><\/p>\n Against such an environment, Iran’s cognitive defense should not be limited merely to denying news or responding after the publication of a narrative. The logic of cognitive deterrence is that the country can identify the source of the operation, monitor the scope of its dissemination, recognize social vulnerabilities, and quickly provide the audience with narratives based on data and documentation.<\/p>\n The first component of such a doctrine is the creation of an indigenous cognitive defense network that analyzes media information, social network data, search trends, AI-generated content, and algorithmic behaviors in a shared structure. The goal of this network should not be controlling public opinion, but rather increasing society’s ability to recognize influence operations and distinguish news, analysis, propaganda, and fake information.<\/p>\n The second component is technological resilience. Complete dependence on foreign platforms and chatbots in crisis conditions can create a strategic vulnerability. Developing indigenous language models, independent search engines, domestic cloud infrastructure, archiving and fact-checking systems, and Persian language processing capabilities increases the possibility of independent analysis of the information environment. Artificial intelligence here is not merely a content production tool, and analyzing massive data and discovering coordinated patterns is also part of cognitive defense.<\/p>\n The third component is the regional network. Cognitive warfare does not stop at national borders, and narratives cross multiple languages and multiple platforms. Cooperation among Iran and aligned countries in exchanging information alerts, fact-checking, media literacy, and developing AI tools can increase the cost of influence operations, without turning into a one-sided military system for narrative production.<\/p>\n Ultimately, cognitive deterrence becomes sustainable when it is based on trust, transparency, and the credibility of information. Successful cognitive operations often feed on information vacuums; therefore, the speed of informing, providing verifiable data, accepting error, and transparent explanation of ambiguities are also part of national power. From this perspective, cognitive-technological deterrence is not the digital version of traditional propaganda warfare, but an effort to make society, information infrastructure, and AI systems resistant to manipulation. In an environment where hard war is intertwined with cyber, spatial, and cognitive warfare, maintaining fact-checking, public trust, and decision-making independence also becomes part of the deterrence equation.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" SCFR Online – Opinion: The expansion of artificial intelligence and influence operations has drawn the field of conflict from physical space to the perceptual and algorithmic environment and has turned cognitive deterrence into a strategic necessity.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":422639,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_et_pb_use_builder":"","_et_pb_old_content":"","_et_gb_content_width":"","footnotes":""},"categories":[13268,283,12726],"tags":[23253,40054,49458,28508,49459,49456,49457,12741,24370,49460],"class_list":["post-422638","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-note","category-scienceculture","category-10-en-2","tag-artificial-intelligence","tag-cognitive-warfare","tag-cognitive-technological-deterrence","tag-cyberwar","tag-engineering-the-perceptual-environment","tag-influence-operations","tag-information-warfare-2","tag--en","tag-soft-war","tag-younes-alizadeh"],"yoast_head":"\n