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PreprintCited by 1European and Russian Geopolitical Military StrategiesMilitary Strategy and TechnologyMisinformation and Its Impacts

Cognitive warfare

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Pastor, Alvaro·2025
DOI 10.31234/osf.io/zgsej_v2
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Abstract

Military powers have consolidated in the last two decades a way to erase the boundaries between peacetime and crisis and wage a continuous war. Cognitive warfare (CW) has been proposed as the most advanced form to-date of manipulation of behaviour at mass scale to obtain strategic advantage. Instead of the corpse-ridden battlefields of kinetic warfare, the theatre of operations of CW is the human mind, and therein operations are realised on the fields of perception, emotion and memory. The goal is not termination but permanent control and exploitation. This opinion article reviews methods of CW focused on the human factors that may be manipulated not to merely control what populations think but how they think and thus how they act. It is argued that the weaponisation of sciences of brain and behaviour, combined with a distributed-computing technological milieu, can be utilised in CW to fine-tune societal and subject-level factors rendering not only all opposition infertile, but the very fact of being oppressed desirable.

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Authors
Pastor, A.
Affiliations
Universitat Oberta de Catalunya (ES)
Corresponding author
Pastor, Alvaro
ORCID
Pastor, Alvaro
Publisher
Center for Open Science
Published
2025-07-10
DOI
10.31234/osf.io/zgsej_v2
OpenAlex
W4412172384
Cited by
0
References
24
Type
posted content
Language
en
Open access
Licence
Topics
  • Social Sciences › Political Science and International Relations › European and Russian Geopolitical Military Strategies
  • Physical Sciences › Engineering › Control and Systems Engineering › Military Strategy and Technology
  • Social Sciences › Sociology and Political Science › Misinformation and Its Impacts
Keywords
cognitive warfare, perception, emotions, memory, brain research, distributed computing, information warfare, psychological control

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