The nature of warfare has changed radically. This may seem too categorical a statement, but it is a reality defined by the nature of today's conflicts, marked by the vertiginous development of the technological revolution.
Military Information Support Operations (MISO), aimed at influencing "enemy" audiences, their emotions, behaviors and motivations, are part of this way of operating conflicts. The term, defined by the Pentagon, replaced in 2010 Psyop (Psychological Operation), used since World War II.
According to the document Warfighting 2040, Cognitive Warfare (CW) "is based on the use of disinformation and propaganda techniques aimed at psychologically exhausting the recipients of information."
However, the possibilities of this way of waging war are expanding every day, with the advance of information and disinformation techniques; but, above all, with the progress of NBIC (Nanotechnology, Biotechnology, Information Technology and Cognitive Science).
It is no longer a matter of dominating the five main scenarios of conventional or unconventional warfare (air, land, sea, space and cybernetic environment); now the confrontation also takes place in the human domain, so that victory will depend on the ability to impose a desired behavior on a chosen audience.
The digital environment makes it possible to coordinate dispersed people and organize attack swarms with the mission of sowing uncertainty, despair, fear, anxiety and chaos.
With the mastery of Artificial Intelligence (AI), analysts can build models capable of predicting hidden attributes, including political preferences, sexual orientation, etc.
The social networks and applications we use leave hundreds of thousands of footprints that are used by Big Data companies to build user profiles and organize interest groups.
It often happens that information warfare (IW), because of its close relationship with CW, is often confused with the latter; but IW aims to control the flow of information, while cognitive encompasses all the sciences that deal with knowledge and its processes, Psychology, Linguistics, Neurobiology, Logic, etc.
Every social media platform, every website is designed to be addictive and trigger emotional outbursts.
According to the CIA, the viral nature of the internet has the potential to affect and even change a person's character in a matter of seconds, and also their long-term future, regardless of who they are or their life experience.
The subordination of the media in the tasks of manipulating information, building states of opinion and, by virtue of this, shaping modes of action, has become an essential part of the U.S. empire's strategy to achieve hegemony in a world that is becoming increasingly difficult for it to manage.
They work to summon hatred and fabricate negative perceptions; they work on weaknesses and deficiencies, on automatisms, fears and identified stereotypes. Mastering stereotypes allows the manipulator to take control of the audience, based on subjective springs.
But CW goes much further, it fulfills the task of degrading the capacity to produce knowledge. It targets the totality of human capital to erode the trust that sustains an entire society. It aims to hack the individual.
CW operations aim to generate in people a rigid thinking style that provokes resistance to any argument, information, and even reality testing that contradicts their own perceptions and opinions.
On the other hand, they promote and stimulate aversive emotions, thoughts and moods, which can escalate to high intensity levels that are very difficult to manage and sustain.
However, this is not entirely new. The U.S. special services' work to control the human mind began with projects such as MK-Ultra.
Also known as Artichoke, this project was a Dantean, chilling reality: experiments in the field of the human unconscious, testing of drugs, drugs, brain implants, surgery, lobotomy... a whole storehouse of horrors.
The task of carrying out MK-Ultra, in 1953, fell to the Office of Scientific Intelligence (OSI), an entity founded in 1948, and came to involve more than 30 universities and scientific centers in the country.
Among the fields of interest in the research were developing paranoia, producing amnesia, provoking, through the use of drugs, illogical thoughts, manipulating violence, studying the effect of ultrasounds on human conglomerates, as well as studies on cancer and leukemia.
In the present times, the NBIC (Nanotechnology, Biotechnology, Information Technology and Cognitive Science) revolution is being used to control human beings, turning them into a weapon against themselves.
Traditional conditioning techniques have been reinforced and brought to a state of near perfection, thanks to the possibilities offered by neuroweapons.
It is a contest to appropriate our senses, our way of seeing the world, to turn us into puppets in the hands of a select elite that seeks to eternalize its privileges without spending a bullet.
Source
This article appeared on Granma December 26, 2024. Granma (en.granma.cu) is the official site of the sovereign nation of Cuba, and an excellent, though intermittent, source of news for the Caribbean, Central and South America as well. ~ Ed.
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To substantiate the article above, the following is an official document from the United States' National Defense University Joint Force Quarterly No. 114. ~ Ed.
