Have our brains become the ultimate battlefield? The question in any case agitates the general staffs, because the threat has been identified and has a name: cognitive warfare. The control of thought seems to have become one of the major issues of the looming struggles. The war in our heads worries the French army as well as NATO.
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Intoxication is as old as war, but its broader concept: the notion of cognitive warfare, on the other hand, makes a resounding entry into strategic thinking. This war has become reality, assures Lieutenant-Colonel Éric of the army headquarters in Paris. Undetectable, it targets the entire society: “Cognitive warfare, it is the set of methods which make it possible to fragment a population, to develop emotions, such as anger, doubt, which allows this population to self-destruct from within using tools and methods which is applied either at the level of individuals or at the level of a population. »
The tools we have in our pockets are smartphones, the internet and social networks, which lend themselves wonderfully to the manipulation of opinion. Example with Covid and the arrival of vaccines, there are pros and cons, a loophole appears and can be exploited by competitors to pit citizens against each other.
Digital tools open up, indicates Bernard Claverie, founder of the French School of Cognitive, a limitless field of conflict: “It’s war in the enemy’s head. We could say that we have three levels: on the one hand the attack on the means of thinking, then the attack on the circumstances of thought and finally the attack on thought itself.
After war on land, sea, air, space and cyber, wars are now fought in people’s minds. Russia and the Wagner mercenary group have become masters of these digital offensives, large-scale information maneuvers. A diverted war, points out officer Corinne of the Joint Environmental Action Center and which, particularly in Africa, manages to turn public opinion against France: “This is where psychology comes in. We are going to use cognitive biases, we are going to use social psychology techniques, all kinds of things that have proven themselves in psychology laboratories in the past and techniques that we are going to use like that on a broad spectrum to see what will work. The example of trolls, for example, will consist of drowning people in a flow of information. To create confusion. »
Deep fake and risks of election manipulation
To find the solution, for two years, the Ministry of the Armed Forces has launched all-out research programs. Myriade program launched in 2021 to anticipate and identify cognitive threats or the Astrid Device with the support of the Defense Innovation Agency to support university research. We must move quickly, because the threat, underlines Professor Claverie, could be amplified by the arrival of artificial intelligence: “Why did the general staffs take care of it? I see there the convergence of two interests, on the one hand that of the fact that information wars are increasingly cognitive. But above all, it is the arrival of artificial intelligence. It is the open door to all influence tools which are low-noise influences. One of the characteristics of cognitive warfare is that by the time you realize it, it’s too late, you’ve already been hit. »
Deep fake, risks of manipulation of elections, destabilization of political leaders, but also military leaders. To cope, several levels of response are emerging, Lieutenant-Colonel Éric explains to the Ministry of the Armed Forces: “ There is the informational response which is effectively responding to arguments with other arguments to occupy the information space and there is the part which is to counter changes in behavior. It’s first of all having a critical mind. How to respond to information? How to debunk fake news, etc. Understand how cognitive warfare maneuvers are carried out by our competitors in order to effectively have a coherent response, within the Ministry of the Armed Forces, but also at the interministerial level. It is indeed a new battlefield which is now of crucial importance for France’s military strategy.
Last July, the NATO summit in Vilnius made this risk a priority. The Atlantic Alliance wants to standardize its Defense. Not offensive, but share alerts to keep the “cognitive superiority” as the military say.