Iranian cyber attacks on US water systems, the coordinated attack on Viasat satellite modems that disrupted communications across Ukraine and parts of Europe, and the growing use of AI-enabled influence operations show that the battlefield now extends beyond physical violence to encompass infrastructure, information, and our cognitive processes. These developments are increasingly interpreted through the language of cognitive warfare: that ‘the human mind is becoming the battlefield of tomorrow, [meaning] that every person is a potential target.’
A more precise definition of cognitive warfare depends on whom you ask. The European Union describes it as an effort to ‘reshape beliefs, weaken resolve, and make aggression appear inevitable or justified’. NATO, meanwhile, speaks of the brain as ‘both the target and the weapon in the fight for cognitive superiority’. China, likewise, describes attempts to ‘influence, intervene in, and manipulate the physiological, psychological, and value-based cognitive elements’ of targeted populations.
Considering cognition a strategic object invites questions about how these countries and organisations define threats, legitimise responses, allocate authority, and shape institutional priorities. Chiara Libiseller’s ‘Reconceptualising War: The Rise and Fall of Fashionable Concepts in Strategic Studies’ presents a compelling account of how concepts of war evolve. Drawing on three decades of debates in strategic studies, she identifies recurring patterns in what she terms the ‘fashion lifecycle’ of war concepts – the process through which concepts emerge, gain authority, reach their peak, and eventually lose prominence. Her framework offers a way to examine cognitive warfare while its trajectory is still unfolding.
The fashion lifecycle of war concepts
Libiseller examines three concepts that have shaped strategic studies since the end of the Cold War: the revolution in military affairs, counterinsurgency, and hybrid warfare. Each gained prominence in response to a distinct strategic challenge – technological transformation after the Cold War, the failures of intervention in Iraq and Afghanistan, and Russia’s annexation of Crimea respectively – but followed a similar trajectory.
First institutionalised in US defence policy, the revolution in military affairs, counterinsurgency, and hybrid warfare later diffused into academia, where their conceptual flexibility – what Libiseller terms ‘interpretative viability’ – enabled rapid adoption while gradually eroding analytical precision. Strategic studies frequently transformed these practitioner-driven concepts into seemingly neutral analytical frameworks, only to abandon them as the next strategic fashion emerged.
At the heart of this cycle lies the cognitive crisis: the perceived inability to make sense of an event with existing concepts creates demand for new guidance. Libiseller argues that ‘with increased fashionability, concepts are invoked without further explanation or definition based on the assumption that their wide use renders such efforts unnecessary […] Fashionability is, therefore, fundamentally about power.’
They serve practitioners by guiding policy, communicating to the public, and justifying budgets. A concept fades not because the phenomenon disappears, but because it loses explanatory power when it fails to deliver its promise in practice. The irony is that concepts are dropped before they are fully understood, leaving unanswered questions while the field moves on to the next fashion.
The strength of Libiseller’s framework lies in its ability to analyse emerging concepts before they become taken for granted. It is particularly valuable when applied to cognitive warfare because the concept remains in a formative stage: adopted by NATO and national defence establishments but not yet consolidated into doctrine or subjected to sustained critical scrutiny.
A familiar trajectory
Cognitive warfare began appearing in NATO-related research in 2018-2019. In 2020, NATO’s Innovation Hub published the influential report Cognitive Warfare, by François du Cluzel, which argued that ‘the human mind is becoming the next battlefield.’ The report defined cognitive warfare as an extension of information warfare that integrates psychology, neuroscience, AI, cyber capabilities, and social engineering into a comprehensive strategy.
In 2021, ‘NATO Review’ published Countering Cognitive Warfare: Awareness and Resilience, which brought the concept into mainstream strategic debate and presented it as an emerging domain alongside cyber and space. Between 2022 and 2024, NATO Defence College and Allied Command Transformation further developed the concept through doctrinal papers and began drafting a formal ‘NATO Cognitive Warfare Concept’.
Cognitive warfare subsequently entered academic discourse, where the concept has rapidly expanded to encompass a remarkably diverse set of security challenges. Russia’s campaigns to erode trust and deepen political polarisation; China’s ‘Three Warfares’ doctrine of psychological, media, and legal influence; Iran’s integration of AI-generated deepfakes into information operations; TikTok and other companies’ biometric data collection; and neurotechnology and proposals for ‘brain-control weaponry’ are increasingly discussed under the same conceptual umbrella.
This expansion has contributed to what has been described as a cognitive crisis, which, as Libiseller shows, can help propel the fashion cycle: ‘the perceived inability to make sense of an event with the existing conceptual apparatus creates the need for a new concept.’
Cognitive warfare as a concept is already beginning to receive critical scrutiny in strategic studies, though the extent of that may be limited because describing the human mind as a new battlefield expands the scope of military concern, legitimises new capabilities and organisational structures, and creates new roles for defence institutions, intelligence agencies, and private technology companies. The concept is influential in its capacity to organise policy, justify investment, and reshape institutional priorities.
A new cognitive crisis?
Much remains to be understood about the consequences of the rise – and possible decline – of cognitive warfare as a concept.
‘Reconceptualising War’ pays limited attention to the broader consequences that fashionable war concepts produce beyond the strategic studies field itself. Libiseller’s framework is highly effective in showing what work such concepts perform, who benefits from their adoption, and what political assumptions accompany their diffusion. The revolution in military affairs illustrates this dynamic: it justified continued defence spending after the Cold War, shaped acquisition priorities, and provided each military service with a narrative to protect its institutional interests. However, the wider implications of these conceptual fashions for society, democratic governance, and military effectiveness remain largely unexplored.
The book does, however, remind us why the assumptions embedded in fashionable concepts deserve scrutiny. A reader may wonder what interests the rise of cognitive warfare serves, and what forms of action the concept makes possible or easier to justify.
Some consequences are already visible. Cognitive warfare opens the door to increasingly personalised and automated forms of influence. In Taiwan, China-linked actors have used Facebook games and psychological tests to collect personal data, while AI allows for behavioural and biometric information to deliver ‘the right information to the right individual’ through algorithmic recommendation systems.
The concept is also beginning to acquire an institutional life of its own. The Ukrainian Defence Ministry has established a dedicated centre for cognitive warfare and is seeking to finance and expand operations intended, among other aims, to erode Russian support for the war and complicate future mobilisation. At the same time, synthetic media are expanding the means available for shaping perceptions of military events – in one recent incident, Iranian state-linked media circulated an AI-generated satellite image purporting to show extensive damage to the US Navy’s Fifth Fleet headquarters in Bahrain, presumably with demoralising intent.
Whether cognitive warfare proves to be a genuinely useful analytical tool or simply the next strategic fashion remains to be seen. Yet, as the book emphasises, we ‘cannot shy away from the complexity that characterises war’. Cognitive warfare is worth interrogating while its assumptions remain visible: while we can still trace what it renders legible as war, which actors and responses it privileges, and which alternatives it marginalises, before those assumptions harden into received wisdom and the field moves on to the next concept.
