From the U.S. Army's Mad Scientist blog, August 21:
“Be subtle! be subtle! and use your spies for every kind of business.” — Sun Tzu, The Art of War
[Editor’s Note: While China’s People’s Liberation Army (PLA) shares five military domains with the U.S. — Land, Air, Sea, Space, and Cyber — it also recognizes two additional domains: Electromagnetic Spectrum (EMS) and Cognitive. Today’s Mad Scientist Laboratory post by guest blogger Dr. John Ringquist explores how the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) and the PLA plan to employ the Cognitive Domain to achieve another of Sun Tzu‘s observations, “The supreme art of war is to subdue the enemy without fighting.”
By harnessing the convergence of the Internet, Big Data, Social Media, and Artificial Intelligence (AI), China is now able to conduct Cognitive Warfare at the granular level. We already know from PLA patent applications that China has designed methods and systems that use Generative AI to facilitate intelligence tasks like generating Open-Source Intelligence (OSINT) products, processing satellite imagery, supporting event extraction, and processing event data. We also know China is building dossiers on virtually every U.S. citizen and is harnessing AI to correlate sensitive information across databases they have stolen over the years from the U.S. Office of Personal Management (OPM), health insurers, and banks — this data includes fingerprints, foreign contacts, financial debts, and personal medical records. With this granular-level of understanding, the PLA can craft precise influence operations at machine speed — tailored to target key demographics and even specific individuals to shape U.S. domestic perceptions in favor of the CCP’s strategic objectives. “China’s cognitive warfare against the United States is happening now.” Read on to learn more about the CCP’s nefarious activities!]
Cognitive warfare sounds like the stuff of Hollywood movies or sci-fi futurism. Imagine your intimate thoughts, perceptions, and beliefs subjected to an ingeniously designed campaign of psychological and perceptual revision by a foreign adversary. Facts become lies and reality is created by machines crunching big data. Expect Cognitive Warfare to be an instrument wielded by intelligence agencies, cybercriminals, and military units in their mission to change your mind, beliefs, and reality to suit their purposes. It has already begun. China’s determination to control information moving into its virtual and physical borders is reinforced by constantly directed efforts to impact information abroad. The PLA is transforming its information warfare skills, and its forces have embraced the concept of virtual war. China’s cognitive warfare strategies are readily employed in grey zone tactics and techniques, simultaneously exercising influence through diplomatic, economic, and cultural spheres to create alternative realities to contest those of its Western adversaries.
China controls domestic access to information through the “Great Firewall” and its domestic agenda is a sweeping effort that aims to combat internal dissention, deflect international interference with China’s surveillance state construct, and blunt the West’s global democracy narrative.1 Chinese AI-guided Large Language Model (LLM) censorship programs identify and report social media targets, modify public opinion, and track potential political opponents — then refine counters to quell voices that contest Chinese efforts to control access to information.2
Efforts to combat unfavorable information derive strength from citizens willing to strike perceived traitors with counterinformation, bots, and threats against any that threaten government dominance.3 In February 2025, it was reported that a Chinese group used ChatGPT to collect social media posts with sensitive material for the Chinese government. The same report claimed a collaborative relationship was ongoing between public and private actors in China. 4
These same tools are turned outward on commentators that post content that challenges China. Social media of all types is subject to this kind of censorship.....
....MUCH MORE
Also at the MadSciBlog, September 25:
551. How Do You Get Millions of Drones—Fast?If interested see also:
July 21 - "AI-driven tactics and technologies to manipulate cognition and emotion..."
I am told that China is ahead of the U.S. in the weaponization of cognition. Some related links after the jump....
....Sometimes I think McLuhan could see the future:
