Cognitive Warfare: An Allied Blueprint and a Pentagon Opportunity
NATO’s Chief Scientist has done the hard work. The report on Cognitive Warfare is clear, sober, and useful. It treats cognitive warfare as a fight for cognitive superiority, waged through synchronized military and non-military action across the continuum of competition. It is rooted in science and tied to operations. It does not hide behind jargon. It does not pretend this is only a messaging problem. It makes the case that cognitive warfare targets how people perceive, make sense, decide, and act, and it warns that modern technology makes those attacks faster, cheaper, and harder to attribute.
That is what is needed.
Congress has now created an opening for the Department of War to act with speed and purpose. The 2026 NDAA directs the Secretary of War to define cognitive warfare for the Department, relate it to existing doctrine, identify which organizations have functional responsibility, and assess the value of narrative intelligence to cognitive warfare, information operations, and irregular warfare. The deadline is March 31, 2026. This is a demanding task, but it is also a gift. It forces clarity. It forces ownership. It forces a practical theory of the case.
The Pentagon does not need to start from scratch. The NATO report provides a strong foundation that can be adapted to U.S. needs, law, doctrine and strategy. It gives the Department language that is already coherent and already field-tested in an alliance environment. It also provides insights into structure, which is often lacking when new concepts arrive with more heat than light.
A Better Starting Point Than Another Glossary
The report’s value begins with its definition. NATO frames cognitive warfare as broader than Information Operations, Psychological Operations, Strategic Communications, and cyber warfare. It does not discard those tools. It puts them in their proper place. They are means, not the whole. Cognitive warfare is the contest over cognition itself, and the objective is advantage in decision-making and influence.
That helps Congress’s core concern. The committee notes that the Department often conflates information warfare, information operations, cyberwarfare, cognitive warfare, and influence operations. NATO’s framing offers a clean way out of that trap. It draws boundaries without building walls. It also supports a view of the cognitive domain as a core element of deterrence that must stand alongside land, sea, air, space, and cyber, because adversaries already treat it that way.
Then NATO adds operational traction. It ties cognitive warfare to the OODA loop and describes how adversaries exploit vulnerabilities in observation, orientation, decision, and action. This matters because it speaks to commanders in their own language. It also helps the Pentagon explain, in plain terms, what cognitive warfare is doing to forces in the field and to societies at home. This is how the Department can address cognitive warfare beyond public affairs, strategic communication, or fragmented information and cyber operations, and recognize this is a critical contest over sensemaking, perception and trust that requires a holistic and responsive approach.
A Practical Framework the Pentagon Can Use Now
The report also offers the Pentagon something rare: a usable organizing model.
It lays out three core functions for countering cognitive warfare. First, degrade adversary capability to influence and change behavior. Second, improve human and technological cognition above baseline. Third, build resilience to withstand and recover performance under cognitive attack. Those three functions are simple, complete, and easy to translate into roles and missions. They also map well to how the Department budgets and assigns responsibility, and they point directly to the broader goal of cognitive dominance and cognitive security for the force and for the Nation.
The “House Model” goes even deeper. It identifies seven knowledge areas needed to understand and counter cognitive warfare, grounded in legal and ethical frameworks. It links research to operations. It forces the integration of situational awareness and sensemaking, cognitive effects, adversary modus operandi, and technology enablers with neuroscience, behavioral science, and social and cultural science. That is the kind of disciplined structure the Pentagon can adopt to answer Congress credibly and to build lasting and effective capability.
This is where narrative intelligence fits naturally. Congress defines it as intelligence about the story or narrative an adversary is attempting to build. NATO gives that idea operational meaning. It centers sensemaking as a prerequisite to decision-making and as a primary target of adversary action. That is a stronger foundation for narrative intelligence than counting messages or tracking slogans. It focuses on how narratives shape interpretation, salience, trust, and action.
The Pentagon Can Meet the Moment
This is the positive case for the Pentagon. The Department has more talent here than it sometimes admits. The Joint Staff understands information effects. USSOCOM understands influence and irregular warfare. USCYBERCOM understands digital terrain and has deep knowledge of the actors who leverage it. The intelligence enterprise knows how to track adversary intent and behavior. The Services know how to train and sustain forces under stress. The research community inside DoD has deep expertise in human factors, autonomy, and decision support.
What has been missing is integration and clear responsibility.
The NDAA requirement gives the Department a forcing function. It can use the NATO report as the base layer, then tailor it to U.S. doctrine and authorities. It can identify a lead office for coherence and accountability, while acknowledging that cognitive warfare is inherently cross-cutting and demands a whole-of-department approach. It can define cognitive warfare in a way that aligns with existing constructs but does not collapse into them. It can explain where narrative intelligence belongs and why it matters to operations, not just to communication. It can also define how the Department of War should work with partners in the Intelligence Community, industry, and academia to secure the cognitive domain.
Most of all, it can treat this report to Congress as the first step in building a durable foundation. A foundation that supports defense against cognitive attack. A foundation that also supports the ethical and lawful execution of cognitive warfare in support of the National Security Strategy. NATO is explicit that legal and ethical frameworks are not an afterthought. They are the base of the model. That is not bureaucratic caution. That is strategic strength.
An Opportunity of Convergence
This is how the Pentagon should see it. Congress has issued the tasking. Our National Security Strategy endorses soft power and influence. NATO has drafted a blueprint. The Department now has a window to answer and to set a lasting direction.
If the Pentagon uses this moment well, it can give Congress a substantive report and give the force a clearer way to think and act about an area that is the battleground of the future – the cognitive domain. It can move past definitional drift. It can assign responsibility with reliability. It can show how narrative intelligence supports information operations and information warfare by protecting sensemaking and decision advantage. It’s time to put all the pieces of the puzzle together and take bold action.
That is the opportunity. It should not be missed.
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