By Ashraf Abul Saud
Cognitive warfare aims to influence peoples’ perceptions and strategic decisions by using knowledge as a tool of dominance.
Its main strategy relies on the integration of cyber operations, advertising campaigns and disinformation to pave the target communities in the face of AI tools.
These tools perform immediate analysis of big data to identify behavioural trends and vulnerabilities in those communities.
The same analysis provides accurate recommendations for ways to exploit this information to produce the required strategic effects.
AI can play an important role in cyber operations by predicting and detecting security threats in a significant way, enabling its users to carry out precision attacks or effectively repel them.
To achieve strategic superiority in some battles and conflicts, machine learning technologies and neural networks can also significantly predict the complex behavioural patterns of opponents and their future steps before they happen.
This allows the other side of the conflict to achieve far-fetched victories, the war on Iraq, the Russian-Ukrainian war and current developments in the Middle East being cases in point.
The scope extends beyond military domains into propaganda and media attacks by creating a safe space to target specific audience categories.
This is done through the analysis of personal data available on the internet.
Actors create customised messages that are designed to strongly influence the target public opinion.
This aims to create deep divisions in this public opinion by creating misleading content, using deep falsification techniques to enhance the credibility of the media campaigns used, based on texts, images and audio.
From a functional point of view, cognitive warfare empowers public opinion by an external entity on the road to influencing public policy and destabilising public institutions in the target countries.
This is all done to penetrate decision-making processes and reduce trust within those communities remotely, with the end goal of sowing the seeds of chaos.
This chaos creates fertile spaces for the launch of knowledge wars in the same communities, making this type of warfare one of the most important forms of mental manipulation.
This manipulation happens by decimating rational thinking and putting emotional thinking in its stead to serve the opponent’s strategic goal.
This has turned social media into a safe environment for AI tools which use it to achieve distant goals at a little cost.
The cyberspace battles taking place now among Arab peoples, against the background of the US-Israel war on Iran, are only one chapter of this cognitive warfare.
Sorry to say, these battles create misleading perceptions that deflect attention from the real schemes concocted to tear the region apart to serve what is known as the “Greater Israel” vision.
Dr Ashraf Abul Saud is a writer and an international relations scholar.
