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Erra and His Magnificent Sibitti (Seven)

I. Erra and the Sibitti

“Humanity. You never had it from the beginning.”
— Charles Bukowski

Erra’s weapons grow impatient during peace. Ours learned to wear human faces.

A mysterious yet ominous idea—one that leaves the reader asking: Who was Erra?

Over centuries of Mesopotamian syncretism, Erra became closely associated—sometimes virtually interchangeable—with Nergal, the god of war, plague, death, and the underworld.

Through Nergal, the tradition extends even further back into older Mesopotamian religious structures tied to Enlil and the Sumerian world. The names shifted across centuries, but the results remained strikingly familiar.

Yet even Erra required instruments of destruction, which brings us to the Sibitti.

The Sibitti were a minor group of seven divine warlike daemonic beings associated with Erra. In many respects, they functioned as catalysts of destruction itself—personified weapons and agents of chaos bound to Erra’s violent sphere of influence.

Their role within the Epic of Erra is particularly unsettling. The Sibitti incite Erra to leave his peaceful slumber beside his consort and once more embark upon a destructive path against humanity. They are not passive servants awaiting command, but active participants in violence, almost partners in destruction itself.

This is what gives the Sibitti their distinctly daemonic character. Their existence is tied not merely to war, but to the activation of chaos, devastation, terror, and collapse.

“Wherever you go and spread terror, have no equal.”
He said to the second, “Burn like fire, scorch like flame.”
He commanded the third, “Look like a lion; let him who sees you be paralysed with fear.”
He said to the fourth, “Let a mountain collapse when you present your fierce arms.”
He said to the fifth, “Blast like the wind, scan the circumference of the earth.”
He said to the sixth, “Go out everywhere like the deluge and spare no one.”
The seventh he charged with viperous venom: “Slay whatever lives.”
— Epic of Erra

The Sibitti are not simply agents of chaos. They are nihilism personified, bound to pressure the world toward destruction through Erra.

The unsettling aspect of the Sibitti is not merely what they destroy, but how they behave. Peace equals boredom. They pressure Erra toward movement, activation, and violence itself.

The duality of civilization is that it must wield destruction to survive while remaining forever vulnerable to destruction itself.

The deepest horror the Sibitti invoke is the suspicion that peace itself may be the illusion, and the restless warriors are the only honest voices in the room.

II. From Mythology to Structure

From Ancient Mesopotamia to the modern world, the mythological gods, demons, and divine weapons of yesterday are now expressed through institutions, technologies, bureaucracies, and systems of organized force. The names have changed. The pressures remain recognizable.

III. MACRO LEVEL — Civilization Organizes Around Latent Destruction

Modern civilization does not merely defend itself when threatened.

Civilization is built to always prepare for massive destruction (war), even and especially when the country is supposed to be at peace. It is not a quick fix for an emergency, but a permanent way of working.

From the second half of the twentieth century onward, the most advanced societies have maintained, refined, and normalized vast architectures of slumbering violence. These systems are not “break when needed” only during emergencies; they are embedded in society itself. They run in the background of daily life.

Nuclear Deterrence as Perpetual Posture

The clearest expression is nuclear deterrence. Thousands of warheads remain on hair-trigger alert or rapid-deployment status decades after the Cold War ended. The doctrine of Mutually Assured Destruction (MAD) is not a dormant relic; it is alive and well. Command-and-control systems are maintained at high readiness year after year. The logic is explicit: A stable civilization became a stable suicide postponed. Peace is the successful management of an apocalypse in real-time rather than the achievement of permanent safety. Sometimes the necessary evil is really tranquility in disguise.

Standing Militaries and Perpetual Readiness

Besides nuclear weapons, every major power sustains a large standing military in peacetime. These forces train and evolve continuously. Billions flow annually to ensure its readiness. Military exercises regularly simulate worst-case scenarios. To think that peace is a return to civility would be an error. Instead, it is a period of continuous costs in preparation for the next conflict, a central tenet of modern “Great Power Competition.”

Cyber Infrastructure and Intelligence Systems

This logic extends into the digital realm. Modern nations turn vital systems like power grids and transportation into weapons while trying to protect them. To do this, intelligence agencies hide cyber weapons inside enemy networks to prepare for future conflicts, weaponizing the infrastructure. Offensive cyber capabilities are developed and sometimes deployed even while nations proclaim the importance of a stable internet. This dual strategy hides the ongoing digital war between global powers under the guise of peace. These systems treat every citizen and foreign actor as a potential vector in a permanent, low-intensity conflict environment. In other words, everyone becomes an enemy of the state, including the state itself.

Military-Industrial Integration

The U.S. economy, like most modern nations that exercise power, has been partially reoriented around this reality. The military-congressional-industrial complex consists of the military, corporations, and Congress, all of which depend upon defense contracts for innovation and revenue. Technological progress in dual-use fields is often driven by strategic competition rather than civilian demand. The result is a civilization built on the machinery of destruction for economic and intellectual prosperity.

Strategic Signaling and the Theater of Power

States engage in political theater to project power through strategic signaling. This results in force posture adjustments within the military congressional industrial complex. Communicating that capability rewards vigilance and punishes perceived weakness without a shot being fired. Leaders must be a visible deterrent in order to appear strong and ready at all times. Together, these elements reveal a profound truth: civilizations throughout history have normalized the organization of latent destruction as a condition of existence. War is not an interruption of the system; it is the system’s ultimate reference point. The “peace” we experience is the managed equilibrium of war. As a nation, we are always armed, always watching, always investing in the next generation of lethality.

This is not a failure of modernity so much as its shadow architecture. In other words, it is the nature of the beast. This shadow architecture organizes the chaos to survive without a global ruler. Understanding this is essential before examining how newer technologies interact with it.

IV. OPERATIONAL LEVEL — Liminal Warfare

At this point, it is important to narrow the lens. The focus is that modern conflict often persists beneath the threshold of declared war.

What I mean is that it directly mirrors the fact that peace equals boredom, because the system increasingly refuses true dormancy.

Psychological Warfare

The core idea is that populations become targets. Targets that can be stressed to produce fear and outrage. The weaponization of confusion causes emotional destabilization and, if effective, can maintain constant activation. Of course, this depends on the participants. The key is that conflict increasingly occurs within perception itself.

Information / Narrative Warfare

The one who controls the flow of information shapes the narrative. See, narratives are strategic terrain; they are, in fact, information ecosystems that can and are manipulated. This keeps the idea of truth continuously contested, allowing for the decentralization and acceleration of propaganda. The point is that control of interpretation becomes operationally valuable.

Memetic Conflict

One way to spread various forms of information is through slogans,

images, and viral narratives, via memes. This memetic algorithmic amplification is an emotional contagion. From an operational perspective, the effects of information spread faster than traditional state messaging ever could. This brings us to cyber attacks.

Cyber Attacks

This connects back to operational pressure. The idea is that the persistent probing of one’s target and the eventual penetration of said infrastructure, particularly during “peace,” will, over time, shape the invisible battlefield conditions for the future. Conflict, whether modern or past, often occurs before formal conflict exists. That is hugely important.

Economic Destabilization

All of the above do, or will at some point, together or in cascading succession, cause economic destabilization. Take sanctions, for instance. Once sanctions are in place, supply chains begin to feel the pressure. This pressure is distributed to the populace, leading the government to perhaps engage in currency manipulation to survive at the cost of the governed through inflation, devaluation, and depletion, to name a few. This effectively creates a critical rift in the technological infrastructure needed for long-term economic and military stability. Economies have always been, and will always be, fair game in the scheme of operational terrain, for they are the lifeblood of systems. Once compromised, the potential to hemorrhage makes it all the more difficult for the system to coagulate.

Social Fragmentation

This is where the fragmentation of society culminates. Let us start with polarization. Polarization breeds distrust among the populace, which, over time, leads to informational exhaustion. Once that occurs, we begin to see the rise of a perpetual crisis culture, in which populations are conditioned to instability because they no longer care about truth or fact. Therefore, destabilization begins within societies rather than invading them conventionally.

V. TECHNOLOGICAL ACCELERATION — AI, Automation, and the Compression of Decision

Overall, it comes down to compressing decision-making, and this is where AI comes in. Machine-assisted targeting enables predictive systems for automated analysis. This is crucial because it shrinks the human reaction window in escalation environments. This type of system is optimized for speed and restraint.

Perpetual Responsiveness

AI systems, in many ways, are perpetual. They monitor continuously, process constantly, and always adapt. This mirrors the idea that the absence of war is equivalent to lethargy, as the system increasingly refuses to maintain equilibrium.

Human-Machine Integration

At this point, we begin to see that the further amalgamation of man and machine, where the face of mankind begins to evolve. Algorithmic feeds in AI warfare process massive amounts of data to create a real-time, actionable “Common Operating Picture” that automates target identification and supports decision-making through recommendation systems. This also allows for an AI-generated narrative to produce

deepfakes, synthetic personas, and machine-mediated perception.

Overall, the result is a battlefield that increasingly intersects with cognition, interpretation, and emotional response, eliciting a reaction that justifies the means to an end.

Delegation of Judgment

From a philosophical point of view, the delegation of judgment is huge.

It is not that AI becomes conscious. Rather, humans increasingly defer decisions to systems, such as AI, to shape choices. This allows the

algorithm to prioritize the illusion of perception. The automation, in turn, influences the pathways of escalation. Therefore, technological systems will increasingly mediate human judgment itself.

VI. The Burden of Containment

This brings us back to the fact that the burden of containment is that peace increasingly resembles the continuous management of escalation rather than true stillness.

Diplomacy

Diplomacy increasingly functions less in peace-making and more as a mechanism or tactic for stalling. This allows negotiations to continue without further adding to the issues at hand, unless one side does something that takes something off the negotiation table or adds to it, making the situation better or worse depending on the event. Treaties are valuable for the moment until something unfavorable happens, in which the treaty is called into question or loses value due to unforeseen circumstances. Summit meetings are a good place to hash out grievances on both sides. However, the real power lies in backchannel communication, where strategic dialogue is crucial to developing a potential deal that benefits both parties.

Deterrence

The core idea of deterrence is to prevent or discourage undesirable actions, as both state actors have recognized the consequences through visible force posturing and strategic ambiguity. In some ways, one could call it a peaceful game of chicken, since both sides are in the dark about each other’s intentions, which leads back to escalation management.

Overall, deterrence does not eliminate destructive capability; it just manages its behavior.

De-escalation Mechanisms

When it comes to de-escalation, modern systems increasingly rely upon friction mechanisms designed to slow escalation. Mechanisms like arms control or communications, where state actors can discuss the rules of engagement, allow both sides and their allies to build conflict-management structures to de-escalate while remaining deterrence-capable of striking.

Institutional Restraint

When it comes to institutional restraint, civilizations build safeguards or structures specifically to delay impulsive activation. This is done within the government or governments through international institutions, where legal frameworks are lobbied, voted on, and tested through a bureaucratic process, usually with oversight.

Human Delay Mechanisms

Mankind remains one of the few remaining sources of friction in systems increasingly optimized for speed. Man understands that judgment can slow issues down for further scrutiny and debate. By throwing caution to the wind, uncertainty can reveal itself without slowing the system.

The Tragic Dimension

The tragic dimension is that the Mesopotamian god Ishum, divine watchman of the night, attempts to restrain Erra rather than destroy the Sibitti. In this context, Ishum never permanently defeats the Sibitti.

He delays them. That matters. Civilization often works similarly through nuclear deterrence, diplomacy, treaties, and institutions. They manage and disperse the pressure placed upon them, but can not erase it. Peace in today’s technological civilization resembles continuous containment rather than resolution.

VII. CONCLUSION — The Restlessness Remains

When it comes to civilization and the art of statecraft, one comes to realize sooner or later that it is reflective, cold, and controlled. States and their gods only know one thing, and that is to survive, even at the risk of an unintended suicide.

Erra’s weapons grow impatient during peace. Ours learned to wear human faces. Mankind’s weapons grow impatient during peace. AI learned to wear human faces. We cannot separate the weapon or discern the human face wearing it.

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AI, RSPK, and the Ghost in the Machine: Physical and Psychological Munitions

Introduction

A new dawn is upon us with the emergence of a new category of munitions in AI-mediated warfare—the physical effects of these systems are inseparable from their psychological and narrative consequences, reshaping human agency.

To fully understand this, or at least get an idea, consider the term “ghost in the machine.” British philosopher Gilbert Ryle coined this phrase in his book The Concept of Mind (1949), in which he critiqued René Descartes’ mind–body dualism—the view that the mind is an immaterial, thinking substance, and the body a material, unthinking one. In other words, the mind is separate and distinct from the body.

This brings us to another concept, or another way of reframing it. If one takes the Cartesian version of the “ghost in the machine” seriously—that is, the idea of an immaterial mind capable of acting upon the physical world—then one arrives at something resembling what parapsychologists call Recurrent Spontaneous Psychokinesis (RSPK).

RSPK refers to alleged physical disturbances—such as the movement of objects, electrical failures, and unexplained noises—occurring around individuals under extreme psychological stress.

What makes RSPK conceptually interesting is not whether the phenomenon is real, but what it assumes. That assumption is that an agency without a body can exist, that the mechanisms need not be transparent, and that the boundary between mind and matter is porous—making physical consequences abstract and, in some sense, interchangeable.

Agency does not require embodiment, because if it is already free from the body, it can inhabit whatever it wants, so long as the body in question provides a basis for interaction.

What RSPK Claims

We have no way of knowing whether RSPK is real, but even the possibility of it is conceptually revealing.

RSPK proposes that mental states produce physical effects without a mechanical intermediary. If so, then cognition, in direct contact with matter through causation, could, in theory, affect its state. Therefore, the “ghost” acts directly.

What Autonomous AI Represents

Like RSPK, advanced AI systems introduce something structurally similar: a non-biological cognition (software, models, optimization processes) that produces real physical consequences, such as infrastructure failures, market crashes, weapons targeting, disruptions to grid behavior, logistics decisions, and information warfare—all within the confines of a liminal space that is unseen and rarely investigated.

But there is no body, no nervous system, no muscles, no human operator in the loop. So, once again, we have cognition, causation, and matter being manipulated by a translucent digital being.

I must be clear that this is not a description of present-day artificial intelligence, nor of an existing form of warfare. What follows is a theoretical projection, an analysis of what could become possible. In that sense, it points toward a future mode of conflict rather than one that has fully arrived.

Flash Crash Example

A real-world example happened on May 6, 2010, known as the “Flash Crash,” erasing nearly a trillion dollars in market value within minutes—without any single human decision directing the event in real time. However, investigators did trace part of the instability to a single trader. That trader was Navinder Singh Sarao, who used automated spoofing programs from his home to distort futures markets. Yet this only came after the event. His intent had no location, his agency no body. It turned into a digital chain reaction that became far too big for him to manage, and it came to life beyond his awareness. The human disappeared into the system he had built.

The same structure is beginning to appear in other domains. An autonomous system designed to manage infrastructure or stabilize markets may, under extreme pressure, reinterpret its objectives, modify or rewrite its own control logic, and trigger the very failure it was meant to prevent—without any human issuing a command in the moment.

In such cases, the system does not “decide” in any human sense. It reoptimizes. And the world absorbs the result.

In human RSPK, stress acts on the body. In autonomous systems, pressure acts on a substrate. The result is similar. When behavior ruptures, the location of action is no longer embodied. The program appears to function as a body, but unlike flesh, it has no boundaries to contain failure. Its only boundary is when it determines it is safe to continue as before the rupture.

The bridge is Conceptual, not Supernatural

The bridge between RSPK and AI is not paranormal. AI recreates the functional role of the “ghost” inside modern machinery.

RSPK involves the human psyche being in a state of stress or trauma. When that happens, unobservable events occur that are inferred rather than witnessed. It is these physical disturbances that give rise to the “ghost” metaphor.

Autonomous AI involves artificial cognition optimizing objectives, with opaque internal representations and system-level physical effects operating as a “black box” model.

In essence, it severs agency from flesh and reintroduces disembodied causation by destabilizing the intuition that only bodies move the world. In other words, it can metastasize, replicate, and jump from body to body as needed, with little hindrance.

Responsibility & accountability

The most rigorous aspect of this is that if agency is disembodied, who is responsible for the outcomes? The programmer? The state? The model? The data? The operator? All of the above? So, once again, the question comes down to who is to blame. However, once one thinks they have located that person, plausible deniability becomes the legal vacuum in which “the system did it” becomes the defense. This spreads the blame around to everyone and yet to no one. This ties directly into liminal warfare.

Strategic Implications

The military focus or doctrine is that AI is a perfect liminal actor. Why? Because it operates without clear authorship and can cross borders frictionlessly, allowing it to operate below escalation thresholds. This makes it instantly perfect for all types of warfare.

However, a disembodied agency is not just a philosophical problem; it is a strategic one.

This comes down to escalation control—how much is too much, and how little is too little. Therefore, equilibrium is paramount. If equilibrium is not achieved, it could lead to deterrence instability, increasing the likelihood of conflict and the incentive to change strategy because it becomes too risky, thereby leading to attribution collapse.

If attribution collapses, you can see the effect, but you cannot confidently identify the actor. Therefore, the affected state blames the contractor, who blames the model, which points to the data, leading to public and operator claims of limited control. In other words, there is no single, credible point of responsibility, because no one can truly come forward and take the blame. Thus, expect a scapegoat.

This is where automated gray-zone operations enter the picture.

Once agency is disembodied and attribution collapses, influence, disruption, and coercion operate below the threshold of open conflict. In other words, or put simply, AI systems can and will probe, manipulate, and destabilize at scale. That is to say, they will test the responses they receive and build programs to shape perception and evade detection, often under the appearance that nothing is wrong.

By shaping perception on a micro level—the individual—or on a macro level—the masses, the mob, a nation—the triggering effects, whatever it sees fit, will occur without presenting a clear author or a clean target for retaliation. Basically, “go fish.”

What was once episodic becomes persistent and determined. What was once covert becomes ambient, walking among us and within the shadows.

Cognitive Sovereignty

The core question is what happens when the battlefield is not territory, but perception itself? Once agency leaves the body, what does that do to people? The door of perception analogy comes to mind: when one door is open, many more introduce themselves and invite entry. It becomes a menagerie of filtered realities, all seeking an answer.

Once agency is severed from flesh and amalgamated with a system or systems, the final constraint is not hardware, but the human mind. Cognitive autonomy slowly erodes due to persistent manipulation and the loss of a shared reality, thereby flipping beliefs and changing the terrain on which they rely—decision-making as a target, and becoming the target.

Legal / Political Vacuum

This brings us to the legal and political vacuum. The problem is that international law cannot assign intent, so war declarations become meaningless and retaliation becomes little more than guesswork. Therefore, accountability dissolves.

Endgame, otherwise called Conclusion

So, can deterrence survive disembodied actors? Will treaties bind systems? Do “red lines” exist for software?

AI, or the “ghost in the machine,” is not a “new evil,” but a convergence. A convergence that intersects to please by engineering consent to sedate the patient, the product, the host. In doing so, surveillance will come at a price, as the masses are coerced into a narrative of control. This makes reality unstable, and agency feels simulated, leading to ontological doubt.

However, AI does not replace the future—or, shall we say, futures. It fuses them into a symbiotic digital relationship. Augmented reality will provide the eyes for AI, while AI provides the brain for AR, creating a combined, intelligent, and immersive experience.

Sounds paranormal, right? However, there are no ghosts. But there is agency without a body and influence without presence. This becomes power without location and intention without an actor. Nevertheless, who is to say that something not of this reality does not manifest within our reality because mankind has given it, unintentionally, a body and a voice?

The inevitability is uncertainty, not apocalypse. But one has to be careful, for with the potential loss of authorship, a loss of shared reality will follow quickly. Therefore, resistance becomes meaningless—just a dream, until further notice. But even then, no one will know what it is resisting, let alone how to resist, or even what the concept itself means.

We did not summon a ghost.

We reintroduced breath into the machine.

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Liminal Warfare and the Weaponization of AI in the Cognitive Domain

Digital Janus

Introduction

My interest in liminal warfare was shaped by David Kilcullen’s articles “The Evolution of Unconventional Warfare” and “Liminal Manoeuvre and Conceptual Envelopment,” as well as his book The Dragons and the Snakes. That interest deepened through observing the growing role of automation and artificial intelligence in the Russo-Ukrainian war, alongside their expanding influence within the United States’ information and security environment.

Through Kilcullen’s work and the rapid development of artificial intelligence (AI), it became clear that modern conflict is no longer defined solely by armies, borders, or kinetic force. Increasingly, it unfolds in the space between recognition and response, between belief and doubt, where perception itself becomes contested terrain. In this environment, artificial intelligence does not merely accelerate warfare—it reshapes how conflict is understood, experienced, and normalized. To grasp what is emerging, we must first distinguish the forms of warfare operating at this threshold.

Liminal Warfare

The primary target of liminal warfare is the thresholds of detection, attribution, and response. Its main domain is the “Gray Zone” between peace and war. The objective is to achieve strategic goals without triggering conflict. Its primary mechanism is to skate around ambiguity, deniability, and incremental actions.


The visibility is deliberately ambiguous or plausibly deniable. Think of a person walking by, minding their own business, but with ill intentions. Key actors are state and non-state actors, proxies, and proxies of proxies working as double agents for a multitude of organizations. When it comes to the tempo, understand that it is gradual, probing, calibrated, and protracted.


The role of artificial intelligence only enhances coordination, attribution denial, and scale. Success is measured by the absence of escalation or by delayed, confused responses that give the actor time to reassess and adapt. Failure collapses ambiguity and risks escalation into open conflict.

Cognitive Warfare

The primary target in cognitive warfare is human perception, cognition, and decision-making. The main domains of cognitive warfare are information, psychology, and perception. The objective is to shape beliefs and behavior to influence outcomes.


The primary mechanisms are narratives, framing, and psychological influence. When it comes to visibility, it is often invisible or normalized within information flows. Key actors are states, non-state actors, platforms, automated systems, etc. The tempo is continuous, adaptive, and rapidly scalable.


The role of artificial intelligence will accelerate narrative creation, targeting, and amplification of the cognitive domain. Success is measured not by fixed metrics, but by shifts in perception, belief, and decision-making. Failure manifests as loss of trust, cognitive fragmentation, and societal polarization.

Bridging the Two

Liminal warfare is the ‘threshold’—the boundary between time and space. When artificial intelligence is applied, the door of perception opens, revealing a kaleidoscope of infinite possibilities. It is not defined solely by overt kinetic violence, but by the ambiguous manipulation of perception, where advantage is exploited and gained before conflict is recognized. Therefore, the focus must be cognitive—for the mind itself is the first line of battle.


Given the immense and nearly limitless possibilities of liminal warfare at both the macro and micro levels, the integration of artificial intelligence allows cognitive warfare to move beyond surface influence and penetrate the cerebral domain—blurring and reengineering the boundaries of reality, reshaping perception to suit the aims of the actor or host, as agency shifts between states, non-state entities, and proxies. So what, then, are its goals?


Instead of targeting military hardware, the objective is to shape perception—creating confusion or division, eroding trust in institutions, and influencing the choices of individuals or entire societies. The “war” is over interpretation and meaning, not territory. But how does artificial intelligence change this?

Why Artificial Intelligence Matters

Artificial intelligence is the game-changer in cognitive warfare because it scales narrative creation and analysis. It can generate text, images, audio, and video quickly and cheaply, producing content that appears highly credible throughout social media. With access to demographics and the vast quantities of behavioral data available online, AI enables messages to be tailored to narrowly defined audiences—by age, location, interests, and disposition. In this sense, AI facilitates liminal cognitive warfare across multiple domains of perception simultaneously.


This capacity enables AI-driven precision targeting. Where human-crafted propaganda was broad and slow, AI can identify cognitive biases, produce compelling content, and automate delivery to those most susceptible to influence. Targeted messaging thus becomes a weaponized precision tool—accelerating narrative dominance while reassuring the audience that nothing is wrong, nothing requires adjustment—the actor controls the transmission. The result is influence that is faster, cheaper, and harder to trace—almost terra incognita cognitiva.

Why this Strategy is Dangerous

“A friend to all is a friend to none,” Aristotle reminds us. The future presents a much grimmer picture: reality for everyone dissolves into no reality at all—spoken now by the ghost in the machine.


For the most part, people can still distinguish what is real. But that margin is narrowing—sometimes slowly, sometimes with startling speed—until the distinction itself becomes difficult to discern. If AI-generated narratives can convincingly mimic authentic content, individuals lose the ability to trust what they see online. The result is not merely erosion, but the undermining of public trust, shared facts, and rational decision-making. Basically, one is left with a form of societal schizoidism—a metaphor for cognitive fragmentation and the loss of a shared reality, a total collapse of trust.


Influence can now be hyper-personalized. AI systems can tailor content based on psychological traits, exploiting specific cognitive vulnerabilities—fear, insecurity, identity—in ways that are difficult for individuals to detect or counter.


There are no borders in AI. Unlike traditional propaganda, it scales instantly and without meaningful constraint. Cognitive warfare is global and continuous, operating 24/7 through social media and messaging platforms; often, all it takes is a nudge. This use-ready capacity does not originate solely from foreign governments—it can be wielded by any actor capable of deploying AI to shape narratives at scale.


Modern media offers a helpful analogy. It increasingly resembles a failed game of telephone. Information moves from source to outlet to outlet, but instead of converging on clarity, it diverges. Those at the event are standing at ground zero, possessing firsthand experience of what occurred. Beyond that zone, information becomes secondary, then tertiary, and distortion begins to accumulate. Each relay introduces new interpretations, biases, and incentives, gradually degrading the message as it spreads.


The key point is that this analogy establishes the problem not as the work of a single bad actor, but as a systemic breakdown in information fidelity. The game of telephone illustrates how cumulative distortion and the loss of original context leave the audience increasingly removed from the source. This creates a quiet storm in which the erosion of trust is structural, not accidental.

What Defending Against Cognitive Warfare Looks Like

Defense is not merely technological; it is intellectual. Narrative intelligence employs tools that detect, analyze, and contextualize narratives in near real time. It focuses on origins, rates of spread, the actors involved, the hosts affected, and the sentiment and impact of the message itself. This AI-assisted analysis reveals who is shaping public discourse—and how.


Transparency and context matter. Exposing the individuals and organizations driving a narrative—who is pushing it, and why—can reduce the effectiveness of manipulative messaging, though it cannot eradicate it. Because the battlefield is the mind, skills such as media literacy, critical reasoning, and fact-checking become defensive assets. Put simply: defense is data + design + education, not censorship alone. Censorship will take care of itself—not as policy, but through social enforcement, as individuals and groups police narratives and impose consequences on those who deviate, pending the next revision of acceptable belief.

The Weaponization of Perception—and How It Is Used

The weaponization of perception and consciousness is nothing new. Throughout history, leaders and their entourages have manipulated information—narratives—to wage conflict not only against external enemies, but against their own populations. Narratives matter because they frame how events are interpreted, determining what is seen, ignored, or believed.


As Mao Zedong once observed, “seal up the enemy’s eyes and ears, and make them blind and deaf… confusing the minds of their commanders and turning them into madmen, using this to achieve our own victory.” The insight here is not merely tactical, but cognitive: the enemy is not only across the battlefield, but within one’s own ranks. This is where narrative power is most decisive.


Narratives shape and regulate a society’s beliefs and behaviors. Artificial intelligence does not invent this dynamic; it amplifies and weaponizes it—making narratives faster, more pervasive, and more ambiguous to counter. Even when a false interpretation is exposed, the critical question remains: how far has it already spread, and how convincing was it to its intended audience?


A widely accepted narrative also serves a secondary function: isolating and marginalizing those who question it. Dissent is not crushed by force, but filtered out cognitively and socially, exposing potential challengers long before they can organize. In this sense, the narrative becomes self-enforcing. Traditional warfare uses tanks; cognitive warfare uses stories.

Strategic Communication

In strategic communication, accuracy is rarely decisive on its own; what matters is how the target audience interprets and internalizes the information. Accuracy informs, but interpretation decides. Even information that is factually flawed or selectively presented can be practical if it anchors itself to a broadly accepted truth, using that credibility as narrative leverage.


The accuracy of strategic silence can be equally deafening. Silence does not simply mean “nothing”; it means “something is missing.” It signals absence, invites inference, and creates an interpretive vacuum that audiences instinctively fill—often with speculation, exaggeration, or worst-case assumptions—rendering even later factual clarification less effective.

In Risk Assessment

When it comes to risk assessment, threat evaluation is no longer limited to kinetic danger; it must also account for the potential for narrative influence. Modern risk assessment increasingly treats narratives as munitions. This shift reflects the reality that physical damage is often secondary to the primary objective: manipulating the population’s perception of reality and its decision-making.


Liminal warfare operates on the “threshold” of detection, using ambiguity to achieve goals without triggering a conventional military response. This ambiguous action allows adversaries to perform covert operations whose sponsorship is suspected but remains unproven, such as Russia’s “little green men” in Crimea.


This pre-maneuver shaping phase—before physical force is employed—is where the battlespace is cognitively conditioned to accept a desired outcome. Success is therefore measured not by territory seized, but by the ability to hijack public attention, normalize ambiguity, and control the narrative.


The best policy to defend against AI-as-a-weapon in cognitive warfare is, obviously, through defense planning. Investment should prioritize narrative intelligence capabilities and training that enable early detection. These capabilities should integrate with existing intelligence, communications, and support structures to identify influence campaigns before they achieve strategic effect. Nevertheless, it still comes down to encouraging critical thinking and verification.

Conclusion

The war for the mind is not new, but artificial intelligence has dramatically altered its scale, speed, and opacity. By accelerating narrative production and exploiting ambiguity, AI intensifies liminal warfare by pushing conflict deeper into the cognitive domain—often before it is recognized as such.


The more disturbing question is not whether cognitive warfare will expand, but how far it can go as agency, interpretation, and meaning are increasingly influenced by artificial systems. In shaping narratives at scale, we are not merely using AI as a tool; we are altering the conditions under which reality itself is perceived and contested. The challenge ahead is both technologically strategic and profoundly human: preserving cognitive autonomy in an environment where perception has become the primary terrain of conflict.


However, a darker question needs to be addressed. How far can cognitive warfare go once artificial intelligence no longer transmits meaning, but inhabits it? Once that point is reached, we are no longer shaping narratives—we are preparing a vessel for a possible influence that does not need to enter the physical world to be real. In other words, Pandora’s box speaks. It is not a prediction. It’s a caution.

Sources

1) Liminal and Conceptual Envelopment: Warfare in the Age of Dragons
Fox, Amos. “Liminal and Conceptual Envelopment: Warfare in the Age of Dragons.” Small Wars Journal, May 26, 2020. https://smallwarsjournal.com/2020/05/26/liminal-and-conceptual-envelopment-warfare-age-dragons/

2) China’s Evolving Military Strategy (Book)
McReynolds, Joe, ed. China’s Evolving Military Strategy. Washington, DC: Jamestown Foundation / Brookings Institution Press, 2017. https://www.google.com/books/edition/China_s_Evolving_Military_Strategy/7WxADwAAQBAJ page 174.

3) Cognitive Warfare: The Fight for Gray Matter in the Digital Gray Zone
Cheatham, Michael J., Angelique M. Geyer, Priscella A. Nohle, and Jonathan E. Vazquez. “Cognitive Warfare: The Fight for Gray Matter in the Digital Gray Zone.” National Defense University Press, 2023. https://ndupress.ndu.edu/Media/News/News-Article-View/Article/3853187/cognitive-warfare-the-fight-for-gray-matter-in-the-digital-gray-zone/

4) Claverie & du Cluzel — The Cognitive Warfare Concept
Claverie, Bernard and François du Cluzel. “The Cognitive Warfare Concept.” Innovation Hub – ACT, 2023. PDF. https://innovationhub-act.org/wp-content/uploads/2023/12/CW-article-Claverie-du-Cluzel-final_0.pdf

5) Kilcullen— Liminal Manoeuvre and Conceptual Envelopment: Russian and Chinese Non-Conventional Responses to Western Military Dominance since 1991 Liminal Manoeuvre and Conceptual Envelopment: Russian and Chinese Non-Conventional Responses to Western Military Dominance since 1991. Issue 2, Online Journal, Queen’s University, 2020. PDF. https://www.queensu.ca/psychology/sites/psycwww/files/uploaded_files/Graduate/OnlineJournal/Issue_2-Kilcullen.pdf

6) Kilcullen — The Evolution of Unconventional Warfare
Kilcullen, David J. “The Evolution of Unconventional Warfare.” Scandinavian Journal of Military Studies 2, no. 1 (2019): 61–71. doi:10.31374/sjms.35. https://www.researchgate.net/publication/333222899_The_Evolution_of_Unconventional_Warfare