Fighting for minds: cognitive warfare in the Israel-Hamas and Russo-Ukraine wars

• Main Author: Devarajan, Vaishnavi
• Other Authors: -
• Format: Thesis-Master by Coursework
• Language: English
• Published: Nanyang Technological University 2024
• Subjects: Social Sciences; Russia-Ukraine; Israel-Hamas; Cognitive warfare; Artificial intelligence (AI)
• Online Access: https://hdl.handle.net/10356/179106
• Institution: Nanyang Technological University

‘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.