Cognitive Warfare Fails the Cognitive Test

This article is a re-publish of a critique of Frank Hoffman’s Assessing “Cognitive Warfare” article that ran on Small Wars Journal on November 11, 2025.

The critique ran on Matt Armstrong’s substack, Arming for the War We’re In on November 17, 2025.

Introduction

Contemporary security discourse is frequently captured by a false narrative on new forms of warfare. The recent emergence of the term “cognitive warfare” is a symptom of this misconception, suggesting a novel evolution in warfare that does not exist. This form of non-military aggression was not unknown to us; on the contrary, at the onset of the Cold War, the United States profoundly understood the critical importance of public opinion to national security, both domestically and within nations abroad. American leadership recognized that the Soviet Union, and later China, waged political warfare that specifically targeted these populations to undermine the United States without firing a shot.

However, despite this early recognition, American strategic thought succumbed to a “Maginot mentality”—a term Henry Kissinger used in 1955 to describe a rigid belief in a strategy that precluded the consideration of alternatives. As Kissinger argued, this mentality fostered an “all-or-nothing” military policy that relied heavily on the threat of general war, leaving the United States paralyzed in the face of “gray area” aggressions that fell short of total conflict. This strategic paralysis was not limited to nuclear deterrence; it extended to conventional military operations as well. Political and economic barriers rightly limited the United States’ ability to deploy troops abroad, but the real failure lay in failing to recognize that the threats in these areas were political rather than military.

Because the United States forgot the utility of the other tools in its national security toolbox, instruments like foreign aid and information were relegated to lesser importance than military force, neglected, and misapplied. This was not just a policy problem; it was an educational one: national security studies also relegated the central nature of political warfare to the margins, inculcating generations of national security professionals to eye “unrestricted warfare,” “information warfare,” and now “cognitive warfare” as novelties—novelties that remain fundamentally unaddressed and ignored. The emergence of “cognitive warfare” today is merely a fresh attempt to paint a new coat on an old problem, rebranding the very vulnerability we chose to ignore.

Political Warfare and Clausewitz’s Admixture

A fundamental issue with the current discourse is that “cognitive warfare” lacks a coherent definition and, more importantly, shows no evolution in its definition. This stagnation reflects the “flailing” nature of the attempt to legitimize the term. Frank Hoffman, serving as a discussant of the concept, noted that in cognitive warfare, “the message is the munition.” He offered a starting definition of “Cognitive War” as “the application of targeted and tailored messages and nonviolent methods… to gain a positional advantage in the cognitive domain or gain desired political, military, and informational outcomes.”

This definition reveals the fundamental defect of the term. By emphasizing “targeted and tailored messages,” it places information at the center of the concept, giving only the barest nod to the broader spectrum of “nonviolent methods” that actually constitute political struggle. Furthermore, the inclusion of the word “or”—“to gain positional advantage in the cognitive domain or gain desired outcomes”—is significant and telling. It suggests a bifurcation where one could conceivably seek a cognitive advantage for its own sake, divorced from a political purpose. In reality, why would one want an advantage in what people perceive other than for a specific political purpose? This “or” betrays a confusion in the concept itself, implying that influence can be an end rather than a means.

The murkiness of “cognitive warfare” stands in opposition to the strategic clarity of political warfare, which is deeply rooted in Clausewitzian theory. Hoffman rightly identified Clausewitz’s relevance, even as he acknowledged that observers “encultured with violent visions” may find non-kinetic conflict difficult to grasp. This difficulty, however, is a product of our own “Maginot mentality,” not Clausewitz’s writing. His theories are not only compatible with political warfare; they are foundational to it. While many readers remain bedeviled by the application of Clausewitz beyond the battlefield, General Walter Bedell Smith, as the US Ambassador to the Soviet Union, noted that our rivals suffered no such confusion: “The communists have read Clausewitz and believe that war is merely politics transferred to another sphere.”

George Kennan well understood this reality. In his 1948 memo, “The inauguration of organized political warfare,” he wrote:

Political warfare is the logical application of Clausewitz’s doctrine in time of peace. In [the] broadest definition, political warfare is the employment of all the means at a nation’s command, short of war, to achieve its national objectives. Such operations are both overt and covert. They range from such overt actions as political alliances, economic measures (as [the Marshall Plan]), and “white” propaganda to such covert operations as clandestine support of “friendly” foreign elements, “black” psychological warfare and even encouragement of underground resistance in hostile states…

Kennan likely relied on the 1943 translation of On War by O.J. Matthijs Jolles. Jolles’s translation states that war is a continuation of political intercourse “with an admixture of other means.”

We know, of course, that war is only caused through the political intercourse of governments and nations; but in general, it is supposed that such intercourse is broken off by war, and that a totally different state of things ensues, subject to no laws but its own. We maintain, on the contrary, that war is nothing but a continuation of political intercourse with an admixture of other means. We say “with an admixture of other means,” in order thereby to maintain at the same time that this political intercourse does not cease through the war itself, is not changed into something quite different, but that, in its essence, it continues to exist, whatever may be the means which it uses, and that the main lines along which the events of the war proceed and to which they are bound are only the general features of policy which run on all through the war until peace takes place.

This differs from the modern Howard-Paret translation of “with the addition of other means.” The complexity is well defined by Jolles’s concept of “admixture,” which suggests a fusion of elements in which ingredients are inextricably blended rather than remaining autonomous parts. This distinction is profound. “Addition” implies a layer of violence placed on top of politics, like icing on a cake. “Admixture” implies a blending in which the political intercourse does not cease but continues, modified by the introduction of new ingredients.

Political warfare is simply the prosecution of this intercourse using an admixture of non-kinetic means. It is not a new form of war; it is the constant state of “war in peacetime” described by Robert Strausz-Hupé and Stefan Possony in 1954. Political warfare remained an admixture of methods rather than just the addition of new tools, but it became clearer in what it was and what it was not. They described this dynamic—and defined political warfare—as follows (italics are theirs):

Wars are fought to impose one’s political will on a foreign state. But military techniques are not the only ones to achieve this objective. Propaganda and political warfare can be defined as a continuation of war with the admixture of nonmilitary means of pressure. The purpose of this pressure is to make war unnecessary; or to create the most favorable conditions for the implementation of one’s own policies and military plans should war become inevitable.

Political warfare, briefly, is a systemic activity, mostly of a secret nature, to influence and direct the policies of other nations. The ultimate objective of political warfare would be reached if the government of nation A would make not only its own decisions but also the decisions for nation B and do so without resorting to coercion by force of military occupation.

In 1956, Representative Francis Walter, chair of the House Un-American Activities Committee, released a report titled Communist Conspiracy, which argued that Lenin viewed war as “simply politics in which the saber has been exchanged for the pen,” and that “the will of the enemy is the principal objective of war.” The central principle that Kennan derived from Clausewitz—that “war is not only a political act but the ultimate instrument of politics”—is found in Lenin’s 1915 “Notebook on Clausewitz.”

James Burnham, in his 1961 article “Sticks, Stones, & Atoms,” built on years of discussion to describe political warfare as follows:

True political warfare, as understood and practiced by our enemy, is not mere rivalry or competition or conflict of some vague kind. Political warfare is a form of war. It is strategic in nature. Its objective, like that of every other form of war, is to impose one’s own will on the opponent, to destroy the opponent’s will to resist. In simplest terms, it aims to conquer the opponent.

Burnham emphasized that whether the objective may be “grandiose—conquest of a nation, disintegration of an empire; or the minor takeover of a trade union, scaring a parliament into defeating a bill… the objective is always power.”

For what it is worth, to address some institutional resistance to “warfare”—namely the State Department’s—Murray Dyer, in his 1959 book The Weapon on the Wall, suggested the term “political communication” to focus on the “role of the instrument” and to circumvent institutional objections to “warfare.”

William Kintner and Joseph Kornfeder praised Dyer’s efforts in their 1962 book, The New Frontier of War: Political Warfare, Present and Future, but they argued that “communication” disconnected methods from intent, thereby hampering understanding of the actions’ nature and urgency. They would likely make a similar argument against “cognitive warfare.” They updated the definition of political warfare to describe “a form of conflict between states in which a protagonist nation tries to impose its will on opponents without directly using armed force.”

According to Kintner and Kornfeder, political warfare “combines the operations of diplomacy and propaganda, frequently backed by the threat of military force.” It aims to weaken or destroy the enemy through “diplomatic proposals, economic sorties, propaganda and misinformation, provocation, intimidation, sabotage, terrorism, and by driving a wedge between the main enemy and his allies.”

For the sake of the discussion, my definition of political warfare is the use of power with hostile intent against another, employed through discreet, subversive, or overt means short of open combat, operating across political, societal, economic, or psychological spheres to achieve political objectives.

Reinforcing the Maginot Mentality

Perhaps the most telling evidence that proponents of “cognitive warfare” have failed to grasp the nature of the threat is the pervasive militarization of the discussion. Hoffman’s survey, which included organizations like NATO’s Allied Command Transformation, centers almost exclusively on military means and tools. The conversation focuses on how to empower the military to respond to adversarial cognitive warfare, often invoking special operations personnel or revising “Information Operations” doctrine.

Hoffman noted that in cognitive warfare, “the target is the mind.” While this sounds profound, it is a dangerous oversimplification that Chinese strategists would likely dispute. To the adversary, the mind is not the target; the mind is merely a means to an end. The true target is the removal of resistance and the attainment of political objectives. By claiming the “mind” is the target, we misdirect defenders and aspiring strategists to focus on the psychological “flanks” while ignoring the political “front.” This reinforces the very “Maginot mentality” that created our vulnerability. We attempt to force a political problem into a military box, assuming that if we just shift the organizational chart or centralize authority under a military command, we can “win” the so-called “cognitive war.”

When military actors like NATO ACT or U.S. defense analysts lead the charge on “cognitive warfare,” they are essentially attempting to extend the “Maginot Line” into the mind, rather than recognizing that the adversary is maneuvering around it entirely. It ignores the reality that the most effective tools for this struggle—political warfare, economic influence, and even cultural engagement—are inherently non-military. By delegating—whether implicitly or explicitly—the “cognitive” fight to the military, the United States continues to absolve its political leadership of the responsibility to engage in the grey areas, ensuring that we remain prepared for the war we want to fight while losing the war that is actually being waged.

Defining A New Maginot Line

If we adhere to the proposed definitions of “cognitive warfare,” we impose improper and illogical limits on the nature of the threat, creating a new variety of Maginot defense. The definition of “cognitive warfare” as focusing on “messages and nonviolent methods” creates an artificial boundary that excludes the broader spectrum of power encompassed by “political warfare.” Political warfare, as defined by Kennan to Burnham (and me), utilizes “all the means at a nation’s command,” including economic measures, alliances, and covert support, to “impose one’s own will.” By narrowing the scope to the “cognitive domain,” we risk focusing intently on the “munition” (the message) while missing the larger strategic maneuver.

Furthermore, limiting this discussion to military actors and military audiences renders the response inherently and exclusively reactive. As Chinese and Russian doctrine illustrates, “cognitive warfare” is designed to be used before kinetic activities to undermine the adversary’s will and prevent them from taking effective military action. It is an end run around our Maginot Line. By the time the military is engaged or authorized to act against “cognitive warfare,” the adversary has already achieved a measure of victory by penetrating the decision-making loop and shaping the environment. The military is a reactive instrument in this domain; relying on it to lead the defense ensures we are always steps behind.

Finally, if “cognitive warfare” is primarily a tool of the military, one must ask: how is this different than “psychological warfare”? Hoffman argues that he prefers “cognitive” because “psychological warfare is a broad field,” whereas cognition “narrows the subject to key features.” This is a distinction without a difference, or worse, a distinction that reduces strategy to tactics. Is the difference merely that “psychological warfare” (or PSYOP/MISO, plus the related Civil Affairs and Foreign Area Officers) is viewed as a tactical act (or tools), whereas “cognitive warfare” is perceived as not merely tactical in audience or time? If so, this rebranding does nothing to solve the underlying problem: that we have failed to integrate these non-kinetic tools into a national strategy, leaving them to languish as tactical military support functions rather than central instruments of statecraft.

Conclusion

The debate over “cognitive warfare” serves as a stark illustration of a strategic and intellectual regression. By attempting to brand the “battle for the mind” as a novel concept, we reveal the depth of our own “Maginot mentality”—a mindset that has so narrowed our definition of war that we no longer recognize its political foundations. “Cognitive warfare” fails the cognitive test because it is a redundancy; it is “political warfare” stripped of its full operational spectrum—reducing a multi-domain struggle to a mere psychological operation.

We do not need new terminology to describe the adversary’s operations; we need to recover the understanding that war is an “admixture” of means. This was a reality understood not only by Clausewitz and Kennan but also by Lenin, who integrated these concepts into a revolutionary doctrine that viewed peace and war as a continuous spectrum of struggle. Our adversaries today have long realized the same, utilizing “cognitive” means to disintegrate our will to fight without crossing our kinetic red lines. The adversary has not discovered a new form of warfare; they have simply continued to wage the political warfare we abandoned. As Senator Thomas Dodd warned in 1961, “So long as we remain amateurs in the critical field of political warfare, the billions of dollars we annually spend on defense and foreign aid will provide us with a diminishing measure of protection.” Until we look back to the tools, institutions, and definitions we discarded, we will continue to be outmaneuvered in the “grey areas,” grasping at new labels while losing the old war.

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