The essence of cognitive confrontation is knowledge confrontation and intellectual competition. Adversaries need to have full cognition, deep understanding and rapid response to the cyber environment, threats, targets, and opponents, and the analysis, judgment, decision-making, will and other cognitive level.  We will cover concepts in Cognitive Warfare, Grey Zone Tactics, Disinformation, Influence Operations, Information Operations, Color Revolutions, Neuro-Linguistic Program, Private Intelligence Firms, and more.

https://www.treadstone71.com/index.php/item/cognitivewarfare-sep

Ability, will directly affect cyber confrontations, the organization of the campaign, the decision of the strategy, and the trend and success or failure of the engagement. The concept of winning and losing in cognitive warfare has expanded from “hard damage to compete for battlefield space and focus on destroying the enemy’s living forces” to “soft penetration affecting morale and people’s hearts, and cognitive games interfering with the adversary’s command and decision-making”. Cognitive confrontation in human warfare will be upgraded from intellectual competition and knowledge confrontation between people to AI. But first, we as humans need to learn all we can about cognitive warfare.

We include review of cognitive warfare approaches, a potential framework, historical examples, rational processes, bias in perception and cognition, decision making and time pressures, domains of conflict and combatants, factors influencing decisions, speed and overload, manipulating situational awareness, inducing behavioral change using deception, distraction, distrust, chaos, and confusion.

Students learn to assess adversaries for susceptibility to cognitive weapons and what to observe for potential impacts. Students will learn methods of deception to deceive adversaries, distraction tactics, content creation for distrust, as well as methods of deployment. These methods are included in student created cognitive campaigns that are continuous from multiple vectors. Students will learn cognition of targets while understanding worlds of social media, information, intelligence, and other online vectors. We also cover the issues associated with measuring campaign effectiveness and influence analysis

Validated and registered students receive preparation information 1 week prior to class start.