JMIR Publications

Military powers have consolidated in the last two decades a way to erase the boundaries between peacetime and crisis and wage a continuous war. Cognitive warfare (CW) has been proposed as the most advanced form to-date of manipulation of behaviour at mass scale to obtain strategic advantage. Instead of the corpse-ridden battlefields of kinetic warfare, the theatre of operations of CW is the human mind, and therein operations are realized on the fields of perception, emotion and memory. The goal is not termination but permanent control and exploitation. This opinion article reviews methods of CW focused on the human factors that may be manipulated not to merely control what populations think but how they think and thus how they act. It is argued that the weaponisation of sciences of brain and behaviour, combined with a distributed-computing technological millieu, can be utilised in CW to fine-tune societal and subject-level factors rendering not only all opposition infertile, but the very fact of being oppressed desirable.