Fighting for minds: cognitive warfare in the Israel-Hamas and Russo-Ukraine wars
‘You may not be interested in War, but War is interested in you’ were the words of Lieutenant General Vincent R. Stewart, the director of Defence Intelligence Agency (DIA) in his address at the DIA’s Department of Defence Intelligence Information System conference in 2017. Innocent and unsuspecti...
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| Format: | Thesis-Master by Coursework |
| Language: | English |
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Nanyang Technological University
2024
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| Online Access: | https://hdl.handle.net/10356/179106 |
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| Institution: | Nanyang Technological University |
| Language: | English |
| Summary: | ‘You may not be interested in War, but War is interested in you’ were the words of
Lieutenant General Vincent R. Stewart, the director of Defence Intelligence Agency
(DIA) in his address at the DIA’s Department of Defence Intelligence Information
System conference in 2017. Innocent and unsuspecting civilian minds have now become
part of the battlefield and target of modern wars today. The character of war, is no longer
purely kinetic as it has started to incorporate the weaponization of public opinion, and
emerging technologies in order to destroy the enemy from within. Influencing the
adversary’s population through technological means such as Deepfakes and Generative
Artificial Intelligence (AI) has only one goal that is age old to warfare: to coerce the
enemy to one’s favour. A comparative analysis of the two most recent wars – Russo-Ukraine and Israel-Hamas Wars– will be conducted in this dissertation to showcase how
emerging technologies have been affecting the cognition of the populations involved
the two wars. The Russo-Ukraine and Israel-Hamas wars could serve as a stepping stone
for the evolution of cognitive warfare. Would this possibly lead to more sinister forms
of weaponizing the cognition due to the advancement of emerging technologies in future
warfare? Only time will tell. Thus, there is a greater necessity to formulate defensive
counter-cognitive warfare strategies to remain operationally prepared in future warfare
as it has the potency to destabilise an entire nation by simply influencing the minds of a
population. Therefore, even though Cognitive Warfare alone will not win wars in the
future, Warfare has the potential to evolve into the highest form of warfare: defeating
the enemy without fighting. |
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