Cog War's Glaring And Growing Legal Blind Spot

2025-07-19 01:10:12

(MENAFN- Asia Times) Imagine waking up to the news that a deadly new strain of flu has emerged in your city. Health officials are downplaying it, but social media is flooded with contradictory claims from“medical experts” debating its origin and severity.

Hospitals are filled with patients showing flu-like symptoms, preventing other patients from accessing care and ultimately leading to deaths. It gradually emerges that a foreign adversary orchestrated this panic by planting false information – such as the strain having a very high death rate. Yet despite the casualties, no rules define this as an act of war.

This is cognitive warfare , or cog war for short, where the cognitive domain is used on battlefields or in hostile attacks below the threshold of war.

A classical example of cog war is a concept called“reflexive control” – an art refined by Russia over many decades. It involves shaping an adversary's perceptions to your own benefit without them understanding that they have been manipulated.

In the context of the Ukraine conflict, this has included narratives about historical claims to Ukrainian land and portraying the west as morally corrupt.

Cog war serves to gain advantage over an adversary by targeting attitudes and behaviour at the individual, group or population level. It is designed to modify perceptions of reality, making “human cognition shaping” into a critical realm of warfare.

It is therefore a weapon in a geopolitical battle that plays out by interactions across human minds rather than across physical realms.

Because cog war can be waged without the physical damage regulated by the current laws of war, it exists in a legal vacuum. But that doesn't mean it cannot ultimately incite violence based on false information or cause injury and death by secondary effects.

Battle of minds, bodily damage

The notion that war is essentially a mental contest, where cognitive manipulation is central, harks back to the strategist Sun Tzu (fifth century BC), author of The Art of War. Today, the online domain is the main arena for such operations.

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