Cognitive warfare is the deliberate effort by states and their proxies to change how people think and make decisions. It draws on disinformation, real content given a misleading spin, emotional triggers and, increasingly, artificial intelligence. The aim is to weaken trust and widen divisions, usually without any open fighting. NATO describes it as “the fight for cognitive superiority”, and its Chief Scientist has made it a research priority across the alliance. A March 2026 academic paper puts it more plainly, as “a sustained and adaptive contest over human decision-making”.

In Britain, the official vocabulary is different. Ministers and security officials speak of foreign interference and disinformation, whilst the Ministry of Defence uses the term “information advantage”. The latest step is the National Centre for Information Defence, which the Prime Minister, Andy Burnham, announced at the UN on 22 September 2026. Its task, in his words, is to “detect, attribute and disrupt these kinds of hostile state information attacks”, with Burnham citing bots, fake websites and forged branding as examples. The centre's emphasis therefore appears to fall on who is behind these operations and how they work, rather than on whether any single claim is true.

Cognitive warfare, by contrast, takes a wider view of the terrain, looking at the effect of information on how people think and respond (including when the material is true).

How is cognitive warfare different from psychological warfare?

Psychological warfare, or psyops, is the older idea. It uses propaganda to change what a target audience believes and does. Cognitive warfare goes further, targeting the ability to judge information at all. Elisabeth Dick of the Netherlands Defence Academy draws the line clearly: psychological operations “aim to reinforce or redirect existing attitudes”, whereas cognitive warfare is “more disruptive in nature, aiming to impair or disable critical thinking altogether”. In practice the two overlap, and both belong to the wider field of information warfare.

Cognitive warfare and foreign interference

Europe and NATO often describe the same problem in different terms. The European Union calls it FIMI, short for foreign information manipulation and interference, and defines it as coordinated, manipulative behaviour by foreign states or their proxies that threatens democratic processes. The focus is on that behaviour, such as the fake accounts and laundered sources behind a campaign. NATO's term, cognitive warfare, focuses on what the activity does to how people reason. Russia relies heavily on this approach. The Institute for the Study of War, in a primer published by Small Wars Journal, says cognitive warfare “is distinguished by its focus on achieving its aims by influencing the opponent's perceptions of the world and decision-making rather than by the direct use of force”. Analysts often apply both labels to the same Russian and Chinese campaigns. In Britain, “foreign interference” remains the usual phrase.

Can true information be used as a weapon?

Fake stories are only one part of cognitive warfare. Real events and genuine footage can be framed and timed to provoke anger and deepen division. When riots broke out in France in June 2023, Kremlin-linked accounts circulated real footage of the unrest. Writing in a 2026 NATO conference publication, Tanna Krewson, described by NATO as the architect of its Cognitive Warfare Concept, observed that “its emotional framing and algorithmic amplification manufactured division”.

Campaigns like this are hard to counter, because a fact-check has nothing to correct in a real video.

How serious is the threat to Britain?

The government's own assessment is stark. In his address to the UN General Assembly, the Prime Minister warned of “an industrial-scale assault by hostile actors on the information environment”. According to the speech, Russian agencies have forged the branding of 28 British organisations, including universities and the BBC, and tried to interfere with the 2019 general election. The same speech put Kremlin spending on information manipulation at around £1.3 billion a year.

The methods are evolving quickly. For its July 2026 report GEO for Geopolitics, the think tank Demos asked five leading AI chatbots about claims published only by the “Foundation to Battle Injustice”, a Russian propaganda group sanctioned by the EU and the US. In 16.6% of 3,000 answers, the chatbots repeated the claims as fact, endorsed them or treated the group as a credible source. With 54% of UK adults now using tools such as ChatGPT, Copilot or Gemini, according to Ofcom, what chatbots repeat has become a direct route into British homes.

The law has been slow to catch up. Writing for Berkeley's Greater Good magazine, David Gisselsson Nord and Alberto Rinaldi point out that the laws of war were built around physical damage, leaving attacks on the mind in a legal grey area. As they put it, “psychological harm is real harm.”

Though countering foreign interference has long been a security priority for democracies, the growing movement towards public-facing agencies built for information defence reflects its rise up the national agenda.

Frequently asked questions

What is an example of cognitive warfare?

The destruction of the Kakhovka Dam in Ukraine in June 2023 is a clear case. Before the dam was breached, Russia's military publicly warned that Ukraine was planning to strike it. In the week afterwards, Russian diplomatic and media accounts posted about the dam on Twitter more than 1,300 times, earning nearly 200,000 retweets, a higher volume than Russia produced on Bucha or Nord Stream. The aim was to cast doubt amongst the public about who was responsible for the attack. Some outlets treated the two sides' claims as equally credible, which Ukraine's foreign minister said “put facts and propaganda on equal footing”. Writing for RUSI, Nick Loxton argues that this confusion “created the space within the cognitive domain to enable the effects within the physical domain to take hold”.

What is NATO's definition of cognitive warfare?

NATO's Chief Scientist report defines it as “exploiting facets of cognition to disrupt, undermine, influence, or modify human decision-making”. NATO Allied Command Transformation still treats it as an exploratory concept, though an analysis by the US National Defense University called the report a “sentinel call for operational readiness”.

Is Britain a target of cognitive warfare?

Yes. In his speech to the UN, the Prime Minister described what Britain faces as “information warfare”, and Russia is not the only country involved. According to the UK Extremism and Democratic Resilience Centre's report Britain Under Strain, Iran-linked accounts posed as Scottish and Irish users and spent months building trust on X, Instagram and Bluesky with posts attacking the Union and the Labour Party. Once they had an audience, they switched to praising Iran's late supreme leader and sharing AI-generated images of destroyed military bases. A separate network of pro-independence Scottish accounts went silent during Iran's internet blackout in January 2026, a strong sign of where they were being run from. The method is to borrow a local identity and stoke real grievances, then spend the trust they have built on another country's message.

How can you protect yourself from cognitive warfare?

Treat posts designed to make you angry with suspicion, and check who is spreading them before you share. Be wary, too, of anything that seems to be everywhere. A 2026 study led by Jan-Willem van Prooijen found that people who see conspiracy content tend to overestimate how many others believe it, and that this false sense of “everyone thinks so” makes them more likely to believe it themselves. When participants were shown how few people actually held the belief, their own belief dropped. Sweden's Psychological Defence Agency publishes practical guidance.