Chief AI Officer: The Roles To Serve
April 2, 2025
In the 21st century, war is no longer confined to physical domains or conventional battlefields. It has migrated into the psyche, the sensorium, the social fabric — into the very architecture of how people perceive, believe, decide, and act. This is the essence of cognitive warfare: a form of conflict that targets the mind itself as terrain. It operates not through coercion or destruction, but through the subtle manipulation of meaning, the erosion of trust, the saturation of information, and the redirection of emotional and moral energy. In this war, the weapon is the signal, the battlefield is perception, and victory is measured not in ground gained but in agency lost.
What makes cognitive warfare distinct from classical propaganda, psychological operations, or cyber influence campaigns is its total-spectrum nature. It spans from the neurobiological to the sociotechnical — from how an AI system classifies a signal under electronic attack, to how a civilian interprets a newsfeed under emotional stress. This warfare is not about lies versus truth, but about distorting the very frameworks through which truth is discerned. Its goal is not to destroy opponents but to disable their capacity to act coherently, turning societies into fragmented fields of epistemic fatigue and moral ambiguity.
Two landmark works — Adam Henschke’s ethical and philosophical exploration of cognitive warfare, and Haigh & Andrusenko’s technical framework for AI-enabled cognitive electronic warfare — reveal the scope and depth of this emerging paradigm. Where Henschke focuses on political legitimacy, human dignity, and democratic fragility, Haigh and Andrusenko dissect the signal-level vulnerabilities of autonomous systems under attack. Together, these perspectives allow us to see the full stack of cognitive warfare: from conceptual contagion in ideology to machine-time deception in real-world military platforms.
This article distills their insights into twelve foundational principles — cognitive, ethical, operational, and systemic. These are not abstract concepts. They are engines of manipulation and nodes of defense, already shaping elections, institutions, battlefield systems, and human behavior at scale. To understand these principles is to begin defending against them — and to reclaim the possibility of sovereignty in a world where thought itself is under siege.
Cognition isn’t passive. It’s a system — a living, processing architecture that:
filters stimuli,
applies pattern recognition,
assigns meaning,
activates memory,
and decides action.
But it can be probed, shaped, and induced to process inputs differently. In other words, the attacker doesn’t need to destroy your thinking — they just need to redesign its contours.
This is the basis of all cognitive warfare. You are the device. And the attacker isn’t hacking your data — they’re hacking your interface.
Cognitive warfare is not a metaphor — it’s a literal form of soft domination, where the individual's sense-making system is turned against itself.
“The subject of cognitive war is the subject as such.”
– Henschke
A political actor doesn’t need to censor you if they can fragment your epistemic trust in reality — turning you into a passive observer, overwhelmed, confused, and deferential to stronger narratives.
The result? Free people behaving like captured systems.
In the AI-EW domain, cognition is a process pipeline with modular functions:
Signal reception
Feature extraction
Classification
Decision output
Every layer can be deceived or flooded:
false features? → misclassification
signal spoofing? → decision loop corruption
delayed reward feedback? → degraded learning
Their insight: The same way we manipulate AI agents via input perturbation, human cognition is perturbable at signal, semantic, and emotional levels.
To weaponize cognition is to:
Reshape stimulus-reward pathways
Exploit attention bottlenecks
Hijack salience (what “feels” important)
Saturate or confuse pattern recognition
Redirect emotional valence
Control decision latency
This is not merely influence. This is full-stack cognitive redirection.
If cognition is a weapon surface, then defense means:
Fortifying attentional boundaries
Installing “mental rate limiters” (slowing stimulus-to-response speed)
Running periodic belief audits (checking for unexplained conceptual drift)
Practicing frame-switching fluency (testing alternate interpretive schemas)
“Your mind must become its own system integrator.”
Cognitive warfare does not need to invent lies or suppress truth. It simply has to reshape the meaning-making process that turns information into belief, belief into behavior, and behavior into social consequence.
“Facts don’t matter unless they enter a narrative structure.”
– Henschke
Data is inert until it is interpreted. And interpretation is governed by:
emotional tone
social alignment
prior schema
frame of reception
Whoever controls these, controls reality — without touching the facts.
Henschke outlines how authoritarian and illiberal actors exploit democratic openness by polluting the interpretive field — flooding it with competing truths, plausible lies, emotional confusion.
In this condition, citizens no longer know how to know. And this is far worse than ignorance. It is epistemic paralysis dressed in engagement.
Haigh’s systems don’t “see” the world — they interpret signal environments and construct a decision map. That map is shaped by:
context models,
prior classifications,
goal-directed bias.
Their systems are vulnerable to “false context injection”: if you manipulate signal timing, interference patterns, or emitter profiles, the AI builds wrong but coherent interpretations.
Same with humans: you don’t need to falsify the world — just alter the context in which it is experienced.
Weaponizing meaning means:
Framing information in affect-rich narratives
Embedding data in identity-aligned stories
Releasing signals in sequenced, emotionally-primed cascades
Reassigning terms (“truth,” “freedom,” “security”) to new referents
Constructing simulated coherence to bypass rational scrutiny
“The cognitive kill-chain doesn’t end with belief. It ends with action built on borrowed meaning.”
To defend against meaning-based attack:
Practice narrative disentanglement: “What’s the actual data, and what’s the story I’m importing onto it?”
Maintain a frame-catalogue: test each new claim through multiple worldviews.
Use meaning neutralization drills: extract raw events without attached emotion or narrative.
Develop resilience to coherence: beware of worldviews that feel “too right too quickly.”
“Meaning should be self-generated, not externally injected.”
Cognitive warfare doesn’t need to win on the facts. It only needs to fracture the cognitive trust-networks through which truth flows. If trust is broken — in sources, in institutions, in each other — truth becomes functionally irrelevant.
You can shout facts in the void, but if no one believes you — or worse, if they suspect you’re part of “the system” — the signal never lands.
“The enemy of cognitive warfare is not falsity. It’s dissonant credibility.”
– Synthesis of Henschke & Haigh
Democracies depend on distributed, trusted systems: public institutions, scientific bodies, journalists, judiciary. When these are infiltrated or discredited — not necessarily through lies, but through systemic skepticism, mockery, or overload — the public becomes epistemically orphaned.
“The strategy is not to destroy truth. It is to degrade its messengers.”
– Henschke
This opens the door to conspiracy, tribalized reality, or total disengagement.
In electronic warfare, trust is implemented as signal fidelity — signal validation, protocol authentication, source verification. If these layers are compromised — if spoofing or injection attacks succeed — then decisions become corrupted at the sensor level.
The AI system doesn’t need to be told a lie. It just needs to believe the wrong emitter is authentic.
Same with humans. Perceived trustworthiness overrides verification rigor.
Cognitive attackers aim to:
Undermine epistemic trust in key nodes (media, science, elections)
Erode peer-to-peer belief channels (you no longer trust your neighbor’s intentions)
Create false flags of trust — mimicking credibility (deepfakes, fake accounts, ideological camouflage)
Promote universal skepticism until cynicism becomes default epistemology
“Once trust collapses, every truth is just another opinion — and power gets to choose which one wins.”
Build verifiability into every message: make it traceable, sourced, checkable
Create credibility redundancy: don’t depend on one source or platform
Invest in trust repair rituals: transparency, audits, error correction
Teach meta-trust skills: how to evaluate not just content, but the structure of belief transmission
“The future of democratic resilience lies not in truth broadcasting, but in trust reconstruction.”
Persuasion tries to convince you.
Cognitive warfare tries to ensure you never act independently to begin with.
The real target is your capacity for intentional thought, reflective decision-making, and decisive action. If those can be interrupted, slowed, fragmented, or replaced with reactive scripts — the attacker doesn’t need to win. You lose yourself.
“The sovereign subject is replaced by the suggestible node.” – Synthesis
He draws from political philosophy: autonomy is the ability to act on reasoned understanding, informed by self-evaluation and ethical deliberation.
Cognitive war corrodes this by:
Flooding mental bandwidth with disorienting narratives
Installing interpretive defaults before reflection can occur
Replacing deliberation with tribal alignment or moral reflexes
Result: people act — but not from themselves. They operate as extensions of external narrative logic.
Their concern is autonomous EW systems: AIs that can operate without human oversight, adapting to adversarial behavior and evolving their strategy.
But autonomy is technically fragile:
Biased training data leads to maladaptive decisions
Jammed sensors degrade context awareness
Spoofed input results in behavior that serves enemy goals
Haigh’s lesson: autonomous agents must be equipped with self-checking epistemic loops — the same lesson applies to human minds.
To disable autonomy, attackers:
Saturate cognition with overwhelm
Prime responses with ideological shortcuts
Induce delay, fatigue, or decision paralysis
Undermine confidence in own judgment
Make action feel dangerous, shameful, or socially punishable
“Cognitive war disables the actor before the act.”
Practice metacognitive self-awareness: notice when you’re being led, not thinking
Build decision protocols: not what to think, but how to decide what matters
Reduce reactivity windows: slow down input → evaluation → response
Restore confidence in uncertainty: you can act even without perfect clarity
“Autonomy is not certainty. It is courageous agency under incomplete information.”
Cognitive warfare does not operate by commanding behavior directly.
It operates by shaping what appears real, urgent, moral, and inevitable. This is the battle for perceptual primacy.
If you can influence:
What is seen,
How it’s interpreted, and
What is ignored,
you control the chain of causality before choices are made.
This is pre-decisional dominance — control the lens, and you don’t need to control the person.
“He who owns the frame need not fire the shot.” – Synthesis
Perception isn’t just visual. It’s social, affective, symbolic. People see what their narratives, identities, media diets, and emotional priors allow them to see.
When democratic citizens experience different realities — not just beliefs, but observed facts — coordination becomes impossible.
The attacker doesn't plant lies.
They fracture the perceptual field so no consensus is possible.
In electronic warfare, systems don’t act on truth.
They act on perceived signal environments.
If you:
Jam a signal,
Mimic a radar reflection, or
Alter spectral fingerprints,
the system believes in a false environment and adjusts behavior accordingly.
“Manipulate input, and you bypass internal defense.” – Haigh
Same with humans.
Your environment is curated and weaponized — through search, feed design, visual media, and memetic architecture.
To gain perceptual power, an attacker will:
Frame events through emotionally-primed language
Control first contact with an idea (first-frame bias)
Shift focus through attention hijacking (e.g., visual cues, emotional triggers)
Insert false salience: making irrelevant things feel urgent
Redesign aesthetic grammar to feel more credible than the true
“Truth is slow. Perception is instantaneous — that’s where power lies.”
Train multi-frame viewing: learn to see the same data through opposing lenses
Delay reflexive interpretation: interrogate “what am I seeing?” before deciding
Build your own perception stack: don’t depend on platforms to curate what enters your awareness
Use cognitive radar: notice when you’re reacting to form, not content
“The sovereign mind sees the signal — and the system that shows it.”
Cognitive warfare is not confined to individuals.
It is self-similar across scale — meaning the same strategies can be applied to:
An individual’s belief system
A group’s shared story
A machine’s decision architecture
An institution’s legitimacy protocol
A culture’s semantic field
Each of these is a cognitive node that can be:
Overloaded
Redirected
Fragmented
Infiltrated
Or turned inward
“Cognitive attacks replicate like patterns in a fractal — different scale, same geometry.” – Synthesis
He shows how individual psychological tools — like narrative framing or identity-based priming — are mirrored at the collective level.
Just as a person can be flooded with contradictory info,
A public can be jammed with conflicting crises.
Just as a person can become ideologically captured,
A state can be reality-captured by long-term narrative control.
Their engineering is concerned with multi-agent coordination in EW:
How does one node react?
How do many coordinate under uncertainty?
What happens when signal-sharing is disrupted?
This maps precisely to human networks: if social coordination systems are jammed — by rumor, distrust, bad data — society becomes a malfunctioning machine.
“Cognitive disruption scales seamlessly from transistor to parliament.” – Synthesis
A fractal cognitive attack will:
Exploit a small-scale psychological trigger and scale it socially
Introduce a rumor and let it self-propagate institutionally
Hack a machine’s perception and use it to mislead its network peers
Introduce memetic pollution that scales from tweets to treaties
“Every unguarded mind is a potential infection point for the entire system.”
Apply cross-scale awareness: understand how micro-level confusion impacts macro outcomes
Use pattern-matching disciplines: recognize familiar manipulation structures across domains
Strengthen epistemic relay chains: ensure information passed between nodes retains fidelity
Design resilience at every scale: personal, team, institutional, civilizational
“The defense of the self is the defense of the state — because the war is fractal.”
In classical warfare, you analyze the situation, formulate a plan, then execute. In cognitive warfare, the situation mutates constantly, and static strategies become liabilities.
Whether you are:
a human mind
a political institution
or an AI-driven EW platform,
you must be capable of sensing environmental change, updating internal models, and acting accordingly — while under fire.
This is cognitive maneuver warfare.
It rewards in-mission learning over preconfigured ideology.
“The winner is not the one who knows most, but the one who re-learns fastest.” – Synthesis
Narratives in liberal democracies were once slow-moving, institutionally anchored. Now, due to social media, memetic virality, and algorithmic nudging, belief environments shift mid-sentence.
To survive cognitively, political actors must:
Rethink identity alignments,
Reframe messages dynamically,
And most importantly, detect when old assumptions no longer apply.
Otherwise, they will deploy rational strategies into irrational terrain.
They define cognitive EW systems as ones that can:
Sense the environment,
Interpret change,
Update objectives,
Plan adaptively,
Execute under uncertainty —
all while being targeted themselves.
They use:
Reinforcement learning
Bayesian inference
Real-time re-optimization
The enemy's move is part of your learning loop.
To survive cognitive warfare, systems (human or machine) must:
Detect shifts in adversarial behavior (new narrative, new framing, new strategy)
Abandon failing priors (stop doubling down on outdated truths)
Re-calibrate heuristics under stress
Perform on-the-fly belief surgery without mental collapse
“Rigidity in cognitive warfare is a kill switch. Only adaptive coherence survives.”
Train for epistemic fluidity: the ability to hold evolving interpretations without fragmentation
Embed learning frameworks inside all strategic operations: “What do we know now that we didn’t 5 minutes ago?”
Use reflection-in-action: decisions must carry embedded micro-audits
Design adaptive doctrine: playbooks that evolve as they are used
“Your doctrine must be capable of self-mutation under fire — or it will become your cage.”
Most people think the war is over “truth” or “facts.”
But the true battlespace lies beneath that — in the invisible infrastructure that governs how knowledge is produced, validated, distributed, and sustained.
This includes:
Search engines
Recommendation algorithms
Academic protocols
Institutional trust systems
Cognitive heuristics
Cultural norms of “what counts as evidence”
If you corrupt the protocols of knowing, truth becomes irrelevant.
“Control the epistemic pipeline, and you don’t need to control the message.” – Synthesis
He focuses on how disinformation and psychological operations exploit:
Crisis fatigue,
Institutional inconsistency,
Collapsing journalistic norms, and
Algorithmic distortion
The attacker does not need to change the content.
They just pollute the processes that generate credibility.
This is epistemic infrastructure warfare: attacking the plumbing of reality.
In AI systems, the most dangerous attacks happen not on the final decision, but at the data ingestion and model-building layers:
Poisoned datasets
Skewed sampling
Bias injection
Sensor spoofing
Intentional data starvation
The AI system thinks it’s learning — but it’s learning a designed distortion.
“If you shape the training environment, you control the future behavior.” – Haigh
Attacks on epistemic infrastructure include:
Algorithmic curation that pre-selects reality
Disruption of verification chains (e.g., fake sources that cite each other)
Legitimacy laundering (using credible-looking shells for malicious content)
Amplification asymmetries (true info buried under high-volume noise)
“If the system that tells you what’s real is broken, you will hallucinate clarity.”
Expose and document your epistemic stack: where you get knowledge, how you verify, who you trust
Use meta-audits: test not just the claim, but the architecture of how it arrived
Defend public epistemic infrastructure: fund science, journalism, open-source intelligence
Teach epistemic hygiene: “Don’t just believe — trace the belief’s supply chain.”
“What search is to Google, epistemic integrity is to civilization. If you lose it, nothing else matters.”
Before any cognitive warfare operation alters your beliefs, it first has to change your emotional state. Why?
Because:
Emotional arousal bypasses critical reasoning.
It activates pattern reflexes, not thought.
It triggers social alignment, not analysis.
Whether it’s outrage, fear, disgust, hope, or pride — these open the gate through which the manipulation walks.
“Emotion is the vulnerability layer in every cognitive operating system.” – Synthesis
He emphasizes how democratic publics are susceptible to emotional narratives, especially in times of:
uncertainty,
economic pressure,
security threat,
cultural disorientation.
This is not a moral failing — it is a neurocognitive design feature. But it becomes dangerous when weaponized for ideological reprogramming.
Emotions become not responses to meaning — but preconditions to control.
Though their systems don't have human emotion, they show something equivalent: weighted decision biases based on reward signals.
When an AI system is trained to prioritize certain patterns (e.g. high-confidence outputs), it becomes vulnerable to reward-hacking — delivering a “high signal” that feels right but is adversarially injected.
Human equivalent?
Emotionally satisfying stories that feel right, so we never question them.
Cognitive warfare exploits:
Moral outrage to anchor identity
Fear to shut down deliberation
Righteousness to pre-justify action
Disgust to reduce empathy
Hope to generate submission to solutions
Each of these opens a backdoor in cognition.
Once opened, ideas get in without passing security checks.
“The payload enters wrapped in feeling.”
Train emotional self-sensing: Learn to say, “I’m being emotionally primed right now.”
Use delay buffers: When emotion spikes, suspend interpretation.
Build cognitive after-action review loops: "What was I feeling when I accepted that idea?"
Teach empathic override: engage opposing narratives emotionally before analytically.
“You can’t out-think emotion — but you can out-pattern it.”
The human mind is not wired for truth.
It is wired for coherence — a sense that things fit together, that patterns are complete, that chaos has been resolved.
This felt sense of narrative alignment is so strong that we will:
ignore contradiction,
distort facts,
or reject anomalies
to preserve it.
Cognitive warfare leverages this by building narratives that simulate coherence — even if they are built on falsehoods.
“The mind doesn’t seek truth. It seeks closure.” – Synthesis
He describes how citizens are drawn to complete worldviews, especially under:
overload,
fatigue,
or ideological ambiguity.
Narratives that offer a totalizing explanation — “They are evil, we are righteous” — gain traction not because they are true, but because they offer resolution.
Once coherence sets in, any contradictory fact feels like an attack — and the belief hardens.
Their systems use pattern matching and classification as core functions.
The danger?
If the system sees a pattern that matches a known category (even falsely), it confidently acts — misled by its own coherence function.
In AI, this is a bug.
In humans, it’s a full-system exploit.
To manipulate via coherence:
Use familiar story arcs
Seed identity-consistent villains and heroes
Introduce simple causal chains for complex events
Offer closure faster than uncertainty can be explored
Create info-ecosystems where all signals reinforce each other
“Coherence creates psychological gravity — and the attacker rides it straight to your agency.”
Practice narrative inversion: flip the story and see if it still makes sense
Engage in structured anomaly detection: What doesn't fit? What am I ignoring?
Use mental deceleration protocols: train the mind to hold incomplete patterns without resolution
Design epistemic breathing room: a safe space to say “I don’t know yet”
“Intelligence isn’t the ability to conclude. It’s the ability to suspend conclusion until necessary.”
The purpose of cognitive warfare is not always to change your mind.
Often, it’s enough to make you incapable of making up your mind.
By:
flooding with contradictory inputs,
generating false equivalence between options,
amplifying ambiguity,
injecting moral confusion,
or framing all choices as dangerous,
the attacker doesn’t need to guide your action — they just need to stall it.
“Paralysis is not neutrality. It is engineered inoperability.” – Synthesis
Democracy requires deliberation → decision → action.
If decision-makers — from citizens to governments — become cognitively frozen, the system grinds to procedural impotence.
The attacker’s goal is to create a situation where:
Too many plausible explanations exist,
All courses of action carry risk,
There’s no time for full evaluation,
so the actor does nothing — or acts too late.
This is epistemic attrition.
In AI-based warfare, decision latency = vulnerability.
If a system cannot determine what to do in time, it is tactically neutralized, even if not technically destroyed.
Cognitive overload — or the injection of adversarial options — can disable agents not by crashing them, but by overloading their decision trees with unsolvable paths.
The same logic applies to human institutions under info-stress.
To induce decision paralysis:
Multiply mutually exclusive explanations
Make every option appear morally or strategically compromised
Shift frames repeatedly so no stable resolution forms
Embed micro-dilemmas inside larger decisions
Force reactive tempo: never enough time to reflect
“Overload doesn't kill cognition. It corrodes choice.”
Use bounded uncertainty protocols: define when action is still justified under incomplete knowledge
Teach prioritization heuristics: “What must be decided now?”
Embed decision stack triage: classify decisions by strategic urgency
Normalize incomplete action: build systems that improve post-decision, rather than wait for perfection
“Cognitive sovereignty is the ability to move under ambiguity.”
In kinetic war, you fight for terrain.
In cognitive war, you fight for legitimacy.
You can win the informational battle and still lose the war if:
your tactics violate your ethics,
your population no longer believes your values,
or you become what you claim to resist.
Cognitive warfare isn’t just about breaking minds — it’s about breaking the moral logic of defense, so that resistance becomes hypocrisy.
“If you adopt the tools of tyranny to fight tyranny, who have you become?” – Synthesis
He argues that liberal democracies are uniquely vulnerable to cognitive warfare because their core strength — freedom, openness, pluralism — are also attack surfaces.
The ethical challenge is acute:
How can you defend a system that forbids you from using the same tactics as your enemy?
How do you preserve human dignity while degrading hostile influence?
“In cognitive warfare, ethics is not the brake. It’s the steering wheel.” – Henschke
Their book does not explicitly cover ethics.
But the implications are clear: AI-based EW systems that learn in real time can become morally agnostic if not constrained.
A system that adapts only for efficacy may:
escalate without cause,
misclassify innocents,
or adopt tactics outside human intent.
Thus, ethics must be built into cognition itself, as a constraint within the optimization, not after it.
To weaponize ethics:
Provoke the defender into hypocrisy (e.g. censorship “for the right reasons”)
Create moral paradoxes that disable clear action
Exploit liberal constraints to allow illiberal expansion
Introduce legitimacy dilemmas: you win, but at unacceptable moral cost
“The most dangerous trap is the one that makes you break yourself.”
Articulate ethical red lines in advance, not during panic
Design value-resilient responses: defense strategies that do not erode democratic foundations
Use public-facing ethics protocols: show how and why decisions are made
Train moral agility: ability to navigate complex trade-offs without moral exhaustion
“In cognitive warfare, your values are both your shield and your target.”
April 2, 2025
April 1, 2025
March 31, 2025