DEEP DIVE EPISODE 95: YOUR MIND IS NOW KEY TERRAIN, COGNITIVE TERRAIN INTELLIGENCE

The Deep Dive in Episode 95 explores the concept of cognitive warfare, emphasizing the significance of controlling perceptions and beliefs as key terrain. The Joint Chiefs highlight three dimensions of the information environment: physical, informational, and cognitive. Examples like Operation Valhalla in Iraq illustrate how manipulating perceptions can overshadow physical victories. Reports discuss China's intelligentized warfare utilizing AI and swarm drones, while Russia focuses on psychological manipulation. The U.S. faces challenges in adapting to modern warfare due to bureaucratic hurdles and slow tech acquisition processes. Efforts like the Mimosini aim to map cognitive terrain for proactive defense. Episode 95, Your Mind is Now, featuring Exploring Cognitive Terrain Intelligence. Welcome back to the Deep Dive. You know, when we talk about warfare, the mental image is, well, it's pretty standard, right? Oh, yeah. Tanks, fighter jets, submarines, it's all very physical. Exactly. It's loud, it's kinetic, it's the stuff you can photograph. But today, we are completely flipping that script. We're looking at a stack of documents that suggest the most critical battlefield of the next decade isn't, you know, a place on a map at all. It's not the South China Sea. It's not Eastern Europe. It's the gray matter between your ears. And that sounds like a sci-fi intro, but based on the doctrine we're looking at, it is very, very real. We are talking about cognitive warfare. So the central question for this Deep Dive is, what happens when key terrain isn't a hill or a bridge, but your own perception of reality? And to get there, we've pulled together a really fascinating mix of sources today. We really have. First up, we've got the joint concept for operating in the information environment, the JCOIE. It's basically the Pentagon's new rule book. Then there's this massive and honestly pretty alarming report from the Atlantic Council called Eye to Eye in AI. It really breaks down the tech race with China. And for the tech heads listening, we have the white papers for a new tool from the National Defense Lab called MMO-CENINE. And this thing is, well, it's basically an attempt to map human thought patterns like their weather systems. Cognitive terrain intelligence. That's the term they use. Right. So the mission today is to connect these dots. We need to understand how the U.S. military is trying to pivot from purely physical dominance Blowing things up. to what they're calling informational power and why, according to some of these documents, we might be bringing a knife to a gunfight. Or maybe more accurately, bringing a fax machine to an AI fight. Oof. Okay, let's start with that landscape then. I want to dig into that JCOIE document first because it really redefines what the environment of war even is. It does. I think most people hear information environment and they just think IT support, servers, cables, that kind of thing. And that's part of it for sure. But the Joint Chiefs are much more specific. They break the information environment down into three really distinct dimensions. Okay, we'll go through them. First, you've got the physical dimension. That's exactly what you just said. The hardware, the infrastructure, the stuff you can touch. Easy enough. Then there's the informational dimension. This is the data itself. The ones and zeros, the content of the message flowing across the network. So the tweet itself, not the phone you're reading it on. Precisely. But then, and this is the absolute game changer, they add the cognitive dimension. Which is the minds of the people receiving all that information. Correct. The doctrine explicitly states that perceptions, attitudes, and beliefs are now treated as key terrain. I want to pause on that because key terrain is such a loaded military term. It's a choke point. It's a hill that gives you a view of the entire valley. And the logic here is that if you control the perception, you control the outcome. You can win the physical battle, take the hill, destroy the enemy. But if you lose the cognitive battle. If you lose the narrative. You've lost the war. It's that simple. There's a story in the JCOIE document that illustrates this so perfectly. It's honestly frustrating to read. It's called Operation Valhalla. This was back in 2006 in Iraq. Ah, yes. The textbook example of what they call tactical victory, strategic defeat. So set the scene. You have a U.S. Special Forces team, elite operators. They track down a death squad that had been terrorizing locals. And physically, the raid is flawless. A complete success. They kill about 16 or 17 enemy combatants, destroy weapons cache, and they even rescue a hostage. By every 20th century metric, that's a home run. Mission accomplished. But then the clock starts ticking. The U.S. soldiers pack up and head back to base. It takes them less than an hour. But in that 60-minute gap, the enemy fighters who got away, they come back. And they don't come back with guns. They come back with cameras. They immediately start rearranging the bodies of their fallen fighters. They pose them to look like they were kneeling in prayer when they were shot. That is chilling. They stage a massacre. They take photos, write up a press release in English and Arabic claiming U.S. forces slaughtered innocent worshipers. And here's the kicker. They upload it. Instantly. To the Internet. To news agencies. So while the U.S. commanders are high-firing a successful hostage rescue, the world is already seeing photos of a massacre. The story is already circling the globe. Exactly. And how long did it take the U.S. to respond with the truth? I'm afraid to ask. Three days. Three days. It took three days to navigate the bureaucracy, get the body cam footage approved, and get the real story out. In the Internet age, three days is an eternity. It's a different geological era. By then, the truth didn't matter. The perception had hardened. The enemy completely nullified a flawless physical victory without firing another shot. That story just drives home why this is all happening. You can have the best commanders in the world, but if you get outpaced by a guy with a smart phone and a lie, you lose. That's the definition of asymmetric warfare in the cognitive dimension. And this JCOIE document is the Joint Chiefs basically shouting, we cannot let that happen again. But that was 2006. The iPhone wasn't even out yet. Now. We're dealing with China and Russia. The Atlantic Council report makes the stakes seem exponentially higher. Right. Operation Valhalla was an insurgent tactic. What the Atlantic Council report describes with China is an industrial-scale strategy. They call it intelligentized warfare. Intelligentized. It sounds like a corporate buzzword, but I'm guessing it's more than that. It's about integrating AI into every single level of combat. There's a detail in the report about the alpha dogfight trials that I found. Well, pretty humbling. Oh, I remember seeing headlines about this. This was the DARPA event with the F-16s, right? Yes. They pitted a human F-16 pilot, a top-tier weapons instructor against an AI agent from a company called Heron Systems, put them in a simulator for a classic dogfight. I assume it was close. Human intuition versus a machine. It wasn't close at all. The AI won. Five to zero. Five to zero. The human didn't get a single kill. Not one. The report notes the AI was executing maneuvers a human pilot physically couldn't or just wouldn't because of G-force limits or cognitive hesitation. It just acted faster than the human brain could process. And the Atlantic Council is saying China is all over this. They're watching very closely. The report says China is already using AI opponents to train their pilots, but it's the scale that's scary. They detail a record-setting launch of 118 swarming drones. And when you say swarm, we're not talking about 118 guys with 118 remote controls. No, and that's the key distinction. It's swarm intelligence. The drones are talking to each other. If one spots a target. No, there's no instantly. Instantly. If one is shot down, the formation just heals itself and reroutes. You can't just jam the pilot's signal because there is no pilot. The swarm is the pilot. That's intelligentized warfare. It pushes conflict beyond human reaction time. Meanwhile, the report paints Russia a bit differently. They're maybe not as far along with the drone swarms, but they're masters of that cognitive chaos. Absolutely. Russia focuses on psychological manipulation, breaking the chain of command, spreading disinformation to create internal conflict. They want the enemy too busy fighting itself to fight a war. So you've got China building the AI spade, Russia mastering the psych ops, and then there's the U.S. The Atlantic Council report was, I mean, brutal is the only word for its assessment of the DOD. It did not pull any punches. They quoted Nicholas Shalin, who is the Air Force's first ever chief software officer. The guy who resigned in protest, right? He did, and his resignation letter was basically a fire alarm. He claimed China has effectively already won the AI race. He said the U.S. has no chance in the next 20 years. No chance? I mean, surely that's hyperbole. Well, the report backs him up on the structural problems. It lists siloed bureaucracy, antiquated acquisition processes, and a risk-averse culture. Translate that for us. It means while China is coding algorithms and testing swarms, the Pentagon is filling out compliance forms. The process to buy new tech takes years. In the software world, code is obsolete in months. So by the time we buy a new AI tool, it's already a museum piece. It's the three-day delay from Operation Bahala all over again, just on a massive scale. We're fighting a software war with a hardware mindset. Which brings us to the solution, or at least the attempt at one. This is where we get into the really sci-fi stuff, and Mimosini. Right. So if the mind is the battlefield, the National Defense Lab realized we have a huge visibility problem. We have maps for everything else, right? We know the elevation of every hill, the depth of every harbor. We can read a license plate from space. But we have no map for cognitive terrain. If a hostile narrative is spreading through a population, we can't see it until the riot actually happens. We're totally reactive. So a Mimosini is the attempt to build that map, that cognitive terrain intelligence platform. How does it even work? Well, it's not reading minds. It's reading the exhaust fumes of our minds. It ingests massive amounts of open source, publicly available data, social media, news, blogs, forums. It's listening to the Internet. Public data, yes. But it's not just doing keyword searches. It's using AI to map influence pathways, who the key influencers are, how a narrative travels. And this is the critical part. It identifies cognitive stress points. Cognitive stress points. Yeah. Break that down for me. Think of it like a weather map for social stability. If a population is dealing with high inflation or political polarization, they are stressed. They're more vulnerable to certain narratives. A happy, stable population might ignore disinformation. But a stressed population amplifies it. So a Mimosini tries to forecast where those breaking points are. It might say, there's an 80% chance of a disinformation campaign succeeding in this region because of these specific stressors. It's a radar system for ideas. Exactly. It's designed to see the narrative hurricane forming offshore before it makes landfall. Okay. I have to be the skeptic here. When I hear military AI analyzing the population stress points, that sounds an awful lot like a tool for mass manipulation. And that's a very natural reaction. The National Defense Lab was clearly expecting it. The FAQs in the release notes are incredibly aggressive about what a Mimosini is not. They draw a hard line. A very hard line. They state, it is a purely defensive tool. It analyzes and forecasts. It does not generate content. It does not push propaganda. It doesn't conduct psychological operations. So it tells you the weather. It doesn't build the storm. That's the claim. The argument is that right now, leaders are making these high stakes decisions completely blind. And Mimosini is just meant to turn the lights on. But the implication is that if we don't have this, we're ceding the entire terrain to adversaries who are definitely poking at those stress points. Exactly. It's about closing that visibility gap. So let's bring this all together. We have the threat. We have the map. The JCOI doctrine talks about integration. This isn't just info ops in a basement and combat ops in a tank. Right. This is the synthesis. The goal is combined arms, but for the cognitive dimension. The document actually uses the MOIB, the mother of all bombs, as a great example. I remember when that dropped in Afghanistan. The news coverage was insane. Well, the JCOI analyzes that not just as an airstrike, but as an informational event. Physically, yes. It collapsed the tunnel complex. But they have smaller bombs that can do that. They didn't need one that big. Exactly. The size was the point. The mushroom cloud, the shockwave, the immediate release of the video. The target wasn't just the fighters in the tunnel. The target was the world view. Of the Taliban, of ISIS, of North Korea, of Iran. It was a message delivered via high explosives. There is a new sheriff in town. It hit all three dimensions at once. Physical, informational, and cognitive. And that's the standard they want for every operation now. That's the goal. But the analysts in these reports note that this is a huge cultural shift. The U.S. military is built on attrition warfare. We are very good at grinding the enemy down physically. We know how to count destroyed tanks. We know how to count mines chained. Exactly. We are moving toward a contest of wills, which is much, much harder to measure. So, pulling all this together for you, the listener, we've gone from insurgents faking massacres to AI-winning dogfights to algorithms mapping our societal anxiety. What is the big takeaway here? I think the real shift is from being descriptive to being predictive. For the last decade, we've used big data to look in the rearview mirror. Oh, look, a riot happened yesterday. Here's why. Right, it's forensic analysis. But tools like Inevisign and concepts like intelligentized warfare, that's about machine learning and prediction. It's about predicting the riot before a single stone gets thrown. We're entering an era where wars might be won or lost based on who has the better algorithm for predicting human behavior. It's like Minority Report, but for entire societies. It really is, and it raises a final question I think we all need to sit with for a minute. Go on. If national security now relies on mapping our cognitive stress points, if your private beliefs and anxieties are now considered key terrain by our adversaries and our own military… Then at what point does freedom of thought become a national security vulnerability? Exactly. If the enemy is trying to capture your mind, does the state then have a duty to secure it? And what does securing your mind even look like? That is a heavy thought to end on. We started with the idea of a battlefield inside your head, and it turns out the battle is already raging. The frontline is everywhere. And on that note, we're going to leave you to process all of that. Thank you for listening to this deep dive into the cognitive battlefield. It's a lot, but these are the conversations we have to be having. Absolutely. Stay curious. And stay critical. We'll see you next time. This has been another episode of Deep Dive, brought to you by National Defense Lab. For more information about this topic and others, please visit our Deep Dive podcast page on NationalDefenseLab.com. Thank you for listening. 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