CHAPTER 39: Cognitive Warfare and the Battle for Your Brain Space Is No Longer the Final Frontier—Reality Is* by Linda Goudsmit
https://goudsmit.pundicity.com/28106/cognitive-warfare-and-the-battle-for-your-brain
The North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO) is an international military alliance of 31 sovereign nations from Europe and North America. The treaty is a pact between member states that considers a military attack against one member a military attack against all members, and obligates all members to assist the attacked member. A shocking October 8, 2021, article by journalist Ben Norton, “Behind NATO’s ‘cognitive warfare’: ‘Battle for your brain’ waged by Western militaries,”[i] provides a chilling analysis of cognitive warfare. Excerpts from the article follow:
Western governments in the NATO military alliance are developing tactics of “cognitive warfare,” using the supposed threats of China and Russia to justify waging a “battle for your brain” in the “human domain,” to “make everyone a weapon.”
NATO is developing new forms of warfare to wage a “battle for the brain,” as the military alliance put it.
The US-led NATO military cartel has tested novel modes of hybrid warfare against its self-declared adversaries, including economic warfare, cyber warfare, information warfare, and psychological warfare.
Now, NATO is spinning out an entirely new kind of combat it has branded cognitive warfare. Described as the “weaponization of brain sciences,” the new method involves “hacking the individual” by exploiting “the vulnerabilities of the human brain” in order to implement more sophisticated “social engineering.”
Until recently, NATO had divided war into five different operational domains: air, land, sea, space, and cyber. But with its development of cognitive warfare strategies, the military alliance is discussing a new, sixth level: the “human domain.”
A 2020 NATO-sponsored study of this new form of warfare clearly explained, “While actions taken in the five domains are executed in order to have an effect on the human domain, cognitive warfare’s objective is to make everyone a weapon.”
“The brain will be the battlefield of the 21st century,” the report stressed. “Humans are the contested domain,” and “future conflicts will likely occur amongst the people digitally first and physically thereafter in proximity to hubs of political and economic power.” …
In a chilling disclosure, the report said explicitly that “the objective of Cognitive Warfare is to harm societies and not only the military.”
With entire civilian populations in NATO’s crosshairs, the report emphasized that Western militaries must work more closely with academia to weaponize social sciences and human sciences and help the alliance develop its cognitive warfare capacities.
The study described this phenomenon as “the militarization of brain science.” But it appears clear that NATO’s development of cognitive warfare will lead to a militarization of all aspects of human society and psychology, from the most intimate of social relationships to the mind itself….
Norton reports that the researcher who wrote the definitive 2020 NATO-sponsored study on cognitive warfare, François du Cluzel, is a former French military officer who helped create the NATO Innovation Hub (iHub) in 2013. Du Cluzel continues to manage iHub from its base in Norfolk, Virginia. Norton continues:
Although the iHub insists on its website, for legal reasons, that the “opinions expressed on this platform don’t constitute NATO or any other organization points of view,” the organization is sponsored by the Allied Command Transformation (ACT), described as “one of two Strategic Commands at the head of NATO’s military command structure.”
The Innovation Hub, therefore, acts as a kind of in-house NATO research center or think tank. Its research is not necessarily official NATO policy, but it is directly supported and overseen by NATO.
François du Cluzel participated in an October 5, 2021, panel discussion on cognitive warfare.
Du Cluzel summarized his research in the panel this October. He initiated his remarks noting that cognitive warfare “right now is one of the hottest topics for NATO,” and “has become a recurring term in military terminology in recent years.” …
“Cognitive warfare is a new concept that starts in the information sphere, that is a kind of hybrid warfare,” du Cluzel said.
“It starts with hyper-connectivity. Everyone has a cell phone,” he continued. “It starts with information because information is, if I may say, the fuel of cognitive warfare. But it goes way beyond solely information, which is a standalone operation—information warfare is a standalone operation.”
Cognitive warfare overlaps with Big Tech corporations and mass surveillance, because “it’s all about leveraging the big data,” du Cluzel explained. “We produce data everywhere we go. Every minute, every second we go, we go online. And this is extremely easy to leverage those data in order to better know you and use that knowledge to change the way you think.” …
Du Cluzel defined cognitive warfare as the “art of using technologies to alter the cognition of human targets.”
Those technologies, he noted, incorporate the fields of NBIC—nanotechnology, biotechnology, information technology, and cognitive science. All together, “it makes a kind of very dangerous cocktail that can further manipulate the brain,” he said.
Du Cluzel went on to explain that the exotic new method of attack “goes well beyond” information warfare or psychological operations (psyops).
“Cognitive warfare is not only a fight against what we think, but it’s rather a fight against the way we think, if we can change the way people think,” he said. “It’s much more powerful and it goes way beyond the information [warfare] and psyops.”
Du Cluzel continued: “It’s crucial to understand that it’s a game on our cognition, on the way our brain processes information and turns it into knowledge, rather than solely a game on information or on psychological aspects of our brains. It’s not only an action against what we think, but also an action against the way we think, the way we process information and turn it into knowledge.
“In other words, cognitive warfare is not just another word, another name for information warfare. It is a war on our individual processor, our brain.”
The NATO researcher stressed that “this is extremely important for us in the military,” because “it has the potential, by developing new weapons and ways of harming the brain, it has the potential to engage neuroscience and technology in many, many different approaches to influence human ecology…because you all know that it’s very easy to turn a civilian technology into a military one.”
As for who the targets of cognitive warfare could be, du Cluzel revealed that anyone and everyone is on the table….
And the private sector has a financial interest in advancing cognitive warfare research, he noted: “The massive worldwide investments made in neurosciences suggests that the cognitive domain will probably [be] one of the battlefields of the future.”
This “creates a new space of competition beyond what is called the five domains of operations—or land, sea, air, cyber, and space domains. Warfare in the cognitive arena mobilizes a wider range of battle spaces than solely the physical and information dimensions can do.”
In short, humans themselves are the new contested domain in this novel mode of hybrid warfare, alongside land, sea, air, cyber, and outer space.
NATO’s cognitive warfare study warns of “embedded fifth column”
And anyone could be a target of these cognitive warfare operations: “Any user of modern information technologies is a potential target. It targets the whole of a nation’s human capital,” the report ominously added.
“As well as the potential execution of a cognitive war to complement a military conflict, it can also be conducted alone, without any link to an engagement of the armed forces,” the study went on. “Moreover, cognitive warfare is potentially endless since there can be no peace treaty or surrender for this type of conflict.” …
The NATO-sponsored study noted that “some NATO Nations have already acknowledged that neuroscientific techniques and technologies have high potential for operational use in a variety of security, defense and intelligence enterprises.”
It spoke of breakthroughs in “neuroscientific methods and technologies” (neuroS/T), and said “uses of research findings and products to directly facilitate the performance of combatants, the integration of human machine interfaces to optimise combat capabilities of semi-autonomous vehicles (e.g., drones), and development of biological and chemical weapons (i.e., neuroweapons).”
The Pentagon is among the primary institutions advancing this novel research, as the report highlighted: “Although a number of nations have pursued, and are currently pursuing neuroscientific research and development for military purposes, perhaps the most proactive efforts in this regard have been conducted by the United States Department of Defense; with most notable and rapidly maturing research and development conducted by the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) and Intelligence Advanced Research Projects Activity (IARPA).” …
This weaponization of neuroS/T can and will be fatal, the NATO-sponsored study was clear to point out. The research can “be utilised to mitigate aggression and foster cognitions and emotions of affiliation or passivity; induce morbidity, disability or suffering; and ‘neutralise’ potential opponents or incur mortality”—in other words, to maim and kill people.
The report quoted US Major General Robert H. Scales, who summarized NATO’s new combat philosophy: “Victory will be defined more in terms of capturing the psycho-cultural rather than the geographical high ground.” …
The study spoke of “the crucible of data sciences and human sciences,” and stressed that “the combination of Social Sciences and System Engineering will be key in helping military analysts to improve the production of intelligence.”
“If kinetic power cannot defeat the enemy,” it said, “psychology and related behavioural and social sciences stand to fill the void.” …
All academic disciplines will be implicated in cognitive warfare, not just the hard sciences. “Within the military, expertise on anthropology, ethnography, history, psychology among other areas will be more than ever required to cooperate with the military,” the NATO-sponsored study stated.
The report nears its conclusion with an eerie quote: “Today’s progresses in nanotechnology, biotechnology, information technology and cognitive science (NBIC), boosted by the seemingly unstoppable march of a triumphant troika made of Artificial Intelligence, Big Data and civilisational ‘digital addiction’ have created a much more ominous prospect: an embedded fifth column, where everyone, unbeknownst to him or her, is behaving according to the plans of one of our competitors.”
“The modern concept of war is not about weapons but about influence,” it posited. “Victory in the long run will remain solely dependent on the ability to influence, affect, change or impact the cognitive domain.”
The NATO-sponsored study then closed with a final paragraph that makes it clear beyond doubt that the Western military alliance’s ultimate goal is not only physical control of the planet, but also control over people’s minds:
“Cognitive warfare may well be the missing element that allows the transition from military victory on the battlefield to lasting political success. The human domain might well be the decisive domain, wherein multi-domain operations achieve the commander’s effect. The five first domains can give tactical and operational victories; only the human domain can achieve the final and full victory.”
The NATO report emphasizes military-industrial cooperation, and openly asserts the necessity of Western militaries working more closely with academia to weaponize social sciences and human sciences and help the alliance develop its cognitive warfare capacities. As du Cluzel said, “cognitive warfare is not just another word, another name for information warfare. It is a war on our individual processor, our brain.”
The capacities of cognitive warfare are particularly dangerous, because its ambition alters the entire concept of warfare and supports globalism’s overarching reset of the world and everyone who lives in it. BigBrain and BICAN neurotechnology will facilitate the imposition of technocracy and transhumanism on the world’s population. How they will accomplish this is the subject of the next chapter.
[i] Behind NATO’s ‘cognitive warfare’: ‘Battle for your brain’ waged by Western militaries; https://thegrayzone.com/2021/10/08/nato-cognitive-warfare-brain/
*Space Is No Longer the Final Frontier––Reality Is is available in paperback, hardback, and ebook formats on barnesandnoble.com, amazon.com, and directly from Ingram in paperback.
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