NATO & Cognitive Warfare

This first appeared as a thread of mine on X

NATO now openly speaks of “Cognitive Warfare”—not just controlling behavior, but how you think. This isn’t science fiction. It’s official doctrine. It signals a deep shift in Western military posture: the war for your headspace. This thread is inspired by the excellent discussion of this topic by @PeterRQuinones & @NormanDodd_knew on Pete’s podcast, and by subsequent research.

According to NATO’s Allied Command Transformation: “Cognitive warfare aims to affect attitudes and behavior by influencing, protecting, or disrupting individual and group cognition to gain advantage.” This is not just info ops. This is jurisdiction over perception.

The human mind, NATO says, is the “sixth operational domain,” alongside land, sea, air, cyber, and space. That means you—your priors, your judgments, your loyalties—are now considered terrain.

NATO frames this as defense: protecting democratic societies from disinformation. But the underlying premise is more aggressive: To secure the liberal order, adversarial thought must be preempted—often before it’s even consciously formed. But what of questioning the “liberal order”?

So, what counts as a “cognitive threat”? Read closely: it’s not just enemy propaganda. It’s any idea or framing that might lead a person to distrust elite narratives, question globalist norms, or resist the postwar consensus.

The real danger here isn’t Russian bots or Chinese TikTok. It’s the quiet redefinition of dissent as mental instability—a vulnerability to be “hardened” against. The regime becomes not just censor, but psychic custodian.

NATO’s framework folds ideology into security. Populism, nationalism, even traditional religion can now be viewed as epistemic threats, not political alternatives. Cognitive warfare doctrine is how liberalism immunizes itself from critique.

C.S. Lewis warned of this in The Abolition of Man: “If man chooses to treat himself as raw material, raw material he will be.” And Leo Strauss saw it too: A state that governs the soul does not need to persuade—it only needs to engineer.

When the military becomes the arbiter of correct cognition, we’ve crossed a line. This is no longer defense of the West. It is the colonization of inner life by liberal institutions terrified of losing control.

The battlefield has moved from territory to consciousness. What NATO calls “resilience,” the dissident rightly recognizes as conformity. Guard your soul. Own your own mind.

Question the stripping of theology and the outlawing of metaphysics from what substitutes for “culture”.