The Disinformation Age: Toward a Net Assessment of the

United Kingdom’s Cognitive Domain

Paul Ottewell

Expeditions with MCUP, 2022, (Article)

Published by Marine Corps University Press

For additional information about this article

https://muse.jhu.edu/article/846136

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This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License.
The Disinformation Age
Toward a Net Assessment of the United Kingdom’s Cognitive
Domain

Paul Ottewell1

https://doi.org/10.36304/ExpwMCUP.2022.03

Abstract: This article analyzes the territory in which the battle of strategic

narratives is fought—the cognitive domain—and the nature of the battle

itself—cognitive warfare. It exposes three asymmetries between the United

Kingdom, Russia and China. These are: (1) the maturity of cognitive warfare

doctrine; (2) the ease with which cognitive warfare can be waged vice

defended against; and (3) that illiberal states enjoy greater freedom of

maneuver in the cognitive domain than their liberal competitors. These

asymmetries combine toward a strategic diagnosis that China and Russia

are approaching overmatch of the United Kingdom in its cognitive domain,

with implications for the latter’s security. Scholars and practitioners facing

similar challenges elsewhere may benefit from examining the situation in

the United Kingdom.

Captain Paul Ottewell is a Royal Navy warfare officer. He holds a bachelor’s degree in
computer science from the University of Manchester and a master’s degree in defence
studies from King’s College London. His research area of interest is computational
disinformation. The views expressed in this article are solely those of the author. They do
not necessarily reflect the opinions of Marine Corps University, the U.S. Marine Corps, the
Department of the Navy, the U.S. government, or the government of the United Kingdom.

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Keywords: disinformation, net assessment, cognitive domain, cognitive

warfare, information maneuver, asymmetry

In liberal democracies, the vox populi (voice of the people) is a cherished

concept, a referent object vital to the proper functioning and accountability

of the state. During the past three decades, the cyber domain has

accumulated such bandwidth, autonomy, and penetration that it is

increasingly plausible that malign actors could now use it to manipulate

public opinion. Globally, people have become agents in an “attention

economy” enabled by a transnational information network that weaves the

internet, personal computing, mobile telephony, and social networking

websites into a highly intuitive and ubiquitous machinery of

communication.1 The wisdom of the crowd may be giving way to the

deception of the masses. This article examines the growing threat to the

sovereignty of public discourse and the associated implications for a

society’s recognition of security issues and the state emergency activity it

leads to.

Manipulation of public opinion is not new. There is evidence of

propaganda—defined here as “the forming of texts and opinions in support

of particular interests and through media and non-media mediated means

with the intention to produce public support and/or relevant action”—at

least as far back as Ptolemaic Egypt (305–30 BCE).2 3

What is new is the

hyperpersonalization and targeting of propaganda made possible by the

growth of social media.

The following factors underline the novelty of the situation in 2022:

1. Ubiquity. Social media pervades society.4

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 2. Hyperpersonalization. Through social networking websites, actors can

target members of the same household with different messaging,

thereby avoiding the scrutiny of the crowd to which mass broadcast

propaganda is subjected.5

3. Opportunity. Pursuing a propaganda campaign online is both cost-

effective and low risk since such activity is sufficiently ambiguous and

unattributable to avoid crossing the threshold likely to trigger a

security response from the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO).

4. Regulation. Light regulation of social networking websites in

comparison to traditional media and the liberal principal of freedom

of expression are security vulnerabilities open to exploitation.

5. Efficiency. Even inexpert actors can rapidly create mass effects in the

information environment today. The process is exponentially easier

and cheaper now than it was before the invention of the social

networking websites.

The hypothesis of this study is that the balance of power is currently

not in the United Kingdom’s favor in the human/cognitive dimension of the

information environment, termed here the cognitive domain. To test this

assertion, this article analyzes strategic asymmetries between the United

Kingdom and two of its great power competitors: Russia and China. Both

have demonstrated the will and capability to conduct public diplomacy

through social media to influence audiences abroad.6

From analysis of the strategic asymmetries, the diagnosis emerges

that China and Russia are both outmaneuvering the United Kingdom in the

cognitive domain to the detriment of the latter’s security. This overmatch is

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borne of the tension between the democratic principle of freedom of

expression and the threat vector for disinformation represented by social

media. The implications for liberal democracy and consequently national

security strategy are profound: the United Kingdom must confront how to

better protect its own cognitive domain.

This article adopts the model proposed by Barry Buzan, Ole Wæver,

and Jaap de Wilde in their seminal work on securitization, Security: A New

Framework for Analysis.7 Unless otherwise stated, the audience referred to in

this work is the population of the United Kingdom and their elected

representatives in Parliament.

Value of This Research

To date, cyberwarfare initiatives in the West have focused on scientific and

technical measures.8 However, scholarly research on the weaponization of

social media and its implications for security has been scarce by

comparison. There is a gap in the literature on the security of the United

Kingdom’s cognitive domain.

Engaging in or framing responses to cognitive warfare presents legal,

moral, and ethical dilemmas to liberal democratic governments. How should

the United Kingdom, committed as it is to upholding the rules-based

international order, protect its cognitive domain and deter malign activity

against it without stooping to the level of its competitors? Answering this

question lies in the domain of grand strategy. This article offers a first step

toward crafting such a stratagem.

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Anchor Definitions

Roger W. Cobb and Charles D. Elder’s work on agenda-building is critical to

understanding democratic decision-making as involving a series of

connected agendas through which issues escalate until they “command the

attention and concern of decision makers.”9 Cobb, Jennie-Keith Ross, and

Marc Howard Ross introduced the formal agenda as “the list of items which

decision-makers have formally accepted for serious consideration” and the

public agenda as “all issues which (1) are the subject of widespread attention

or at least awareness; (2) require action, in the view of a sizeable proportion

of the public; and (3) are the appropriate concern of some governmental

unit, in the perception of community members.”10 Their outside initiative

model describes the process that a grassroots issue, such as a perceived

injustice, must undergo to achieve a place on the public agenda and ascend

to the formal agenda. Scholars of the Copenhagen School11 will recognize

parallels with the securitization process.

The United Kingdom’s Ministry of Defence recognizes five operating

domains: land, maritime, air, space, and cyberspace. However, the

contested territory in the court of public opinion lies in a sixth, yet

unrecognized, warfighting domain: the cognitive domain. The concept of this

domain is sufficiently novel that neither academia nor the military has yet

settled on its definition. Here, it is defined as consisting of perception and

reasoning in which maneuver is achieved by exploiting the information

environment to influence interconnected beliefs, values, and cultures of

individuals, groups, and/or populations.12

Cognitive warfare is competition within the cognitive domain. Existing

definitions suffer from a negative bias that ignore the possibility that

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cognitive warfare can be waged defensively and constructively as well as

offensively and destructively.13 A neutral definition of cognitive warfare is as

follows: maneuvers in the cognitive domain to establish a predetermined

perception among a target audience to gain advantage over another party.14

This article makes frequent reference to the rules-based international

order. A collective but contested term for the liberal democratic world order

that emerged following World War II, some scholars argue that it grossly

simplifies the global situation.15 However, the term is used frequently in

diplomacy and therefore has purchase as a concept. It is used in this article

as shorthand for the status quo. The rules-based international order is the

sum of the “rules, norms, values, institutions, security agreements, treaties

and other mechanisms that foster collaboration and help resolve disputes

between states.”16

The degree to which a state is satisfied or dissatisfied with its place in

the rules-based international order and/or with the legitimacy of the order

itself is relevant to what follows. Classical realists argue that there are two

categories of states. Those whose balance of interests lies in the

maintenance of the global order are known as status quo states. Those who

are unsatiated by the current global order, who “share a common desire to

overturn the status quo order—the prestige, resources, and principles of the

system,” are termed revisionist states.17

Given the dominance of the media on the information environment,

any analysis thereof would be incomplete without examination of the

relevant literacies of the audience. This study is concerned principally with

digital literacy. Allan Martin’s definition invokes a broad taxonomy of the

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cognitive processes involved in engaging critically with computer-mediated

means of communication:

Digital Literacy is the awareness, attitude and ability of

individuals to appropriately use digital tools and facilities to

identify, access, manage, integrate, evaluate, analyse and

synthesize digital resources, construct new knowledge, create

media expressions, and communicate with others, in the

context of specific life situations, in order to enable

constructive social action; and to reflect upon this process.18

Research Methodology: Net Assessment

Net assessment is a framework for analyzing the balance of military power

in intractable or persistent states of competition.19 It is therefore well suited

to a study of this nature. The U.S. Department of Defense describes the

methodology as the “comparative analysis of military, technological,

political, economic, and other factors governing the relative military

capability of nations. Its purpose is to identify problems and opportunities

that deserve the attention of senior defense officials.”20

Net assessment does not produce strategy. As Lawrence Freedman

puts it, strategy is “the art of creating power.”21 Therefore, an analysis of the

relative power balance between parties now and into the future is an

essential precursor activity to the formulation of any grand strategy. As an

analytical approach, net assessment goes beyond more prosaic, normally

quantitative measures of military balance. Net assessment acknowledges

that measures of power are only relevant when taken relative to another

party. Furthermore, net assessment rises above quantitative measures such

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as counts of brigades, warheads, and aircraft to include how less tangible

factors such as strategic decision-making processes, geography, politics, and

alliances would weigh on each party’s ability to deploy a capability

decisively.22

This article adopts the following characteristics of net assessment:

• It explores instruments of national power beyond the military.

• It identifies long-term trends.

• It examines strategic asymmetries.

• It acknowledges critical differences between states.23

Limitations and Potential Problems

Trying to conduct case studies at the state level is fraught with potential for

bias since the process of simplifying a complex situation sufficiently to allow

comparative analysis requires a heuristic approach. In addition, the

available evidence set is so large that it defies definitive quantification,

categorization, or comparison. For example, when analyzing a state’s foreign

policy, it is likely that examples exist of actions that both support and

undermine the hypothesis under test, presenting a challenge to a time-poor

researcher in remaining objective and thereby a vector for unconscious bias.

Similarly, abstract concepts such as advantage and influence present

profound difficulties in terms of objective measurement.

Being an exploratory study, the conclusions of this article will lack the

greater reliability that would derive from a more comprehensive evidence

base.

Analyzing a single operating domain, as the author does here,

precludes consideration of the competition between domains and

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consequently risks missing key asymmetries. For that reason, all other

things being equal, a multidomain net assessment is likely to be inherently

more insightful.

Finally, a state’s intent to wage cognitive warfare extraterritorially is a

tenet of its foreign policy, not a tangible real-world artifact. It can change as

quickly as the regime or administration from which it extends. In the case of

a rapid transition, such as a coup or revolution, the corresponding case

study would be rendered obsolete.

Net Assessment of the United Kingdom’s Cognitive Domain24

We resist the invasion of armies; we cannot resist the invasion of

ideas.

~ Victor Hugo25

This net assessment proceeds in four stages, beginning with a basic

assessment that captures the salient features of the competition. This

section discusses the competitive situation as it is today, explores how the

balance of power has changed over time, and looks ahead to consider what

might happen if the United Kingdom does not change its current policy

base.26

A founding member of the United Nations (UN) with a permanent

seat on the UN Security Council, the United Kingdom is the quintessential

status quo state. The nation’s ruling party describes its vision of the United

Kingdom as “an outward-looking country that is a champion of . . . a rules-

based international system.”27 Speaking in January 2020, a parliamentary

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undersecretary of state described the rules-based international order as “a

system that this country helped to build and one that this Government are

determined to defend and strengthen.”28

In contrast, Russia’s strategic goal is to “reorient and disrupt the entire

Western-dominated international system” and reassert Russian influence in

global affairs.29 President Vladimir Putin’s agenda is intrinsically revisionist.

Similarly, President Xi Jinping of China appears set on casting aside Western

concepts such as the Westphalian nation-state and instead is “reimagining

the world as a single complex network of supply chains and trade arteries”

serving China’s interests.30 Xi’s vision includes the spread of the Chinese

model abroad, given his argument that it “offers a new option for other

countries and nations who want to speed up their development while

preserving their independence.”31 China’s intentions are considered

revisionist for this study.

The United Kingdom is in a state of persistent competition in the

cognitive domain. Contests in this domain differ from those in the more

traditional domains. Taking the initiative or even maintaining a credible

deterrent in the cognitive domain is incompatible with the rules-based

international order in its current form. The United Kingdom’s director

general of Joint Force Development describes the situation as such:

Currently we are being challenged in a “grey-zone” short of

armed conflict by agile state and non-state actors—notably

Russia—who understand our vulnerabilities and seek to exploit

them through multifarious asymmetric approaches and the

flouting of rules-based norms.32

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 This is not hyperbole. On 4 March 2018, former Russian spy Sergei V.

Skripal and his daughter Yulia were the victims of the first offensive use of

nerve agents in mainland Europe since World War II. The attack took place in

Salisbury, England. As evidence mounted of Moscow’s complicity amid

growing international condemnation, Russian diplomats flooded the public

narrative with 37 alternative explanations.33 On 6 May 2019, Facebook

deactivated 16 fake accounts that it had traced back to Russia. Analysis

would later show that these accounts were part of a sophisticated and

international disinformation campaign extending across 30 different social

networking websites, involving myriad fake user accounts and nine

languages. Named Operation “Secondary Infektion” by the Western

researchers analyzing it, the campaign’s aim appeared to be “divide,

discredit, and distract Western countries.”34

Separately, China has constructed a machinery of public diplomacy

that integrates state media, social networking websites, and both overt and

covert commentators to amplify its influence on discourse online. Analysis

by the Oxford Internet Institute, a department of Oxford University, found

evidence of a network of fake user accounts engaged in the amplification of

the social media posts of Chinese diplomats based in the United Kingdom.

Many of the associated user profiles masqueraded as belonging to Britons.

Together, the network was responsible for nearly half of online engagement

with the Chinese ambassador’s posts on Twitter.35 The top 1 percent of so-

called “super-spreader” accounts were found to be responsible for half of

the posts rebroadcasting (or retweeting) Chinese content.36

The COVID-19 epidemic has accelerated China’s use of social media to

protect the positive image that it seeks to present to the world. Two

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examples of this are how Chinese diplomats respond to British Broadcasting

Corporation (BBC) reporting on the possible source of COVID-19 and China’s

treatment of the Uyghur minority in Xinjiang by flooding social media with

alternative conspiracy theories.37

The United Kingdom, being heavily invested in the status quo, is in

active competition with two revisionist great power nations who possess the

capability and the intent to subvert the rules-based international order via

the cognitive domain.

Figure 1. Tweet by Chinese Consul General @ZhaLiyou suggesting evidence

exists that COVID-19 originated in Maine, United States

Courtesy of Marcel Schliebs on Twitter (@m_schliebs), 21 October 2021.

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 British citizens exist in a state of information overabundance.38

Through the ubiquity of smartphones and 95-percent internet connectivity,

the overwhelming majority of the United Kingdom’s electorate can be

“tracked, traced, profiled and communicated with” most of the time.39

Consequently, the electorate is targetable most of the time.

The burden of fact-checking the news in the United Kingdom is

shifting from publisher to consumer. Audience share for broadcast news

media is falling while younger adults are increasingly using social media as

their main source of news.40 This consumption shift is outpacing the

development of digital literacy skills among the general population.41 Ill-

equipped to apply critical thinking to the news they consume, the digitally

illiterate are the soft underbelly of the United Kingdom’s cognitive domain.

Trust in the mainstream news media is falling. Between 2015 and

2019, the proportion of Britons reporting that they trusted most of the news

most of the time fell from 50 to 40 percent.42 Trust in the Fourth Estate (the

press and news media) is a proxy measure of the health of a liberal

democracy. If the light that journalism shines on threats cannot reach the

electorate, decision-makers may be denied popular support for their

emergency actions. The power of investigative journalism to hold the

powerful to account is diminishing.

The United Kingdom has fully embraced social media. In 2020, 66

percent of the country’s population were users, uploading hundreds of

millions of photographs, videos, and audio files to social media networks

daily.43 Though “the camera cannot lie” has never been true, images and

especially videos remain powerfully persuasive nevertheless. Advances in

machine learning now make possible the production of moving image

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disinformation in near real time. The result is known as a deepfake. While

the average viewer remains just able to distinguish deepfakes from the real

thing, this visual disinformation proves sufficiently unsettling as to leave

some viewers uncertain of whether what they saw was genuine or not.44

Combined, the above factors indicate that the United Kingdom’s

cognitive domain is highly conducive to the viral propagation of

disinformation, with a trend toward further deterioration. A 2019

parliamentary report titled Disinformation and “Fake News” diagnosed the

United Kingdom as “clearly vulnerable to covert digital

influence campaigns.”45

Left unaddressed, the reasonable worst-case scenario is that a

sufficiently organized actor could be successful in influencing the United

Kingdom’s public and formal agendas and subverting, delaying, or

undermining an otherwise democratic decision with security consequences.

Consequently, a battle could be lost without a shot being fired. The more

likely outcome is that the cognitive domain will become a common—if not

the primary—battlefield on which a revanchist Russia and a rising China will

pursue their revisionist agendas. Contest there is cheap, deniable, and falls

short of the threshold of kinetic warfare likely to trigger a military response

from their competitors.

Key Asymmetries

Asymmetries define the balance of power in any domain. This second

section of the net assessment explores the underlying causality and

examines how the parties are pursuing the competition in the United

Kingdom’s cognitive domain. This exploratory study will concentrate on

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three key asymmetries: doctrinal maturity, the relative ease of waging

cognitive warfare compared to defending against it, and freedom of

maneuver.

Asymmetry 1: Doctrinal Maturity

Russia and China both have established doctrines for waging cognitive

warfare. The United Kingdom does not. Furthermore, institutional

reluctance to explore this capability area weighs against its development.

Geoffrey Sloan’s concept of doctrine highlights its cognitive

connection as the means by which a commander combines their perception

of the battlefield with theory to arrive at actionable orders: military doctrine

“interprets ideas about war, and how they affect its conduct and its

character, by combining strategic theories and operational plans into

functional guidelines for action.”46 Of the many available, this definition of

military doctrine fits best with the subject of this monograph.

Russia’s cognitive warfare doctrine is well documented under various

pseudonyms, but the foundational concept is known as maskirovka.

Maskirovka is the Russian word for military deception, of which Daniel P.

Bagge provides a detailed contemporary analysis.47 Deeply rooted in Soviet

strategic culture, the Russian military has updated it for the Information

Age. Julian Lindley-French refers to this evolution of the doctrine as

“strategic Maskirovka,” a coordinated disinformation campaign targeted at

NATO member states and the command structure of the alliance itself, with

the aim of discrediting and disrupting its functioning.48

According to Bagge, strategic maskirovka draws its strength from

three sources. The first is the co-option of the internet, in particular social

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media, to deceive the target audience at machine speed while preserving

plausible deniability.49 The second source is cybernetics, the science of

control and communication in animals, people, and machines.50 It is through

this work that Russia has been able to supercharge the third engine of

maskirovka: active measures. The concept of active measures can be traced

back to Vladimir Lenin, the first leader of the Soviet Union. Russia has since

updated it for the digital age. Today, active measures include overt (white)

propaganda through international, state-sponsored media outlets like RT

International and covert (black) information warfare through troll farms and

botnet factories.

Russian attempts to influence public opinion in the United Kingdom

during the 2016 European Union membership referendum and 2017

general election are evidence that the Kremlin is prepared to engage in

cognitive warfare.51 But the threat this poses to democracy is undetermined,

and evidence of actual harm is scant. A parliamentary report into Moscow’s

alleged interference in the politics of the United Kingdom, a redacted

version of which Downing Street allowed to be published in July 2020,

concluded that there was an absence of evidence of Russian interference in

the 2016 referendum.52 This, however, is not the same as a finding of

evidence of absence. The same report found that the government of the

United Kingdom did not commission a retrospective assessment of Russian

attempts to influence voters in the referendum. An opportunity for the

public and security establishment to learn the extent that malign actors

were successful in maneuvering in the United Kingdom’s cognitive domain—

seemingly unopposed—may now be lost.

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 Maskirovka is the mechanism by which the Kremlin tries to

manipulate target audiences. As a doctrine, it explains the general “how”

more than it does the specific “what.” The latter is the realm of reflexive

control theory. This guides the Kremlin’s choice of what reality it wishes its

target audience to perceive. Like active measures, it has evolved through the

decades, with roots in the Soviet Union under Joseph Stalin, but its fruits lie

in contemporary Russian thinking. Timothy L. Thomas’ definition is rigorous:

“Reflexive control is . . . [the] means of conveying to a partner or an

opponent specially prepared information to incline him to voluntarily make

the predetermined decision desired by the initiator of the action.”53

The “reflex” refers to how the opponent’s deliberations are steered in

such a way as to choose a course of action that (unwittingly) is against their

own best interests. At its heart, reflexive control pursues control of the

enemy’s decision-making processes.54 The relevant asymmetry is Russia’s

apparent preparedness to employ this doctrine outside of wartime in the

pursuit of its foreign policy ends. Should the Kremlin successfully exercise

reflexive control over another state’s vox populi, however temporarily, this

would render acutely vulnerable the collective threat perception and

therefore the securitization process that controls the emergency response.

To Chinese military theorist Sun Tzu, this is the most skillful strategy of

attack: to subdue the enemy without fighting.55

China’s approach to cognitive warfare is very different, reflecting its

more ambitious strategic goal. No single organ of the Chinese state is

responsible for what it calls its Grand Overseas Propaganda Campaign.56

Rather than try to co-opt Western social media to deliver its messaging

through subterfuge and brute force as Moscow does, Beijing is taking a

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longer-term and more strategic approach in the information environment:

the pursuit of systemic advantage.57

Shanthi Kalathil points to how, in the past decade, the Communist

Party of China has taken influential positions in international media markets,

especially in the continental United States, which would in theory allow it to

shape reportage and editorial policy to be more sympathetic or positive to

Chinese interests.58 China’s involvement in the main media outlets in the

United Kingdom has to date been modest. The international satellite news

channel China Global Television Network (CGTN) has a regional production

hub in London. However, in February 2021, the United Kingdom’s

communications regulator withdrew CGTN’s broadcast license after finding

that it was “ultimately controlled by the Chinese Communist Party.”59 China

also distributed a monthly pamphlet through The Daily Telegraph newspaper

from 2010 to 2020. Beijing sponsors Confucius Institutes at British

universities, but its most prolific presence is via Twitter from its diplomatic

corps. As of yet, there is no compelling evidence that these efforts are

achieving salience among the electorate of the United Kingdom.

Across a broad spectrum of activity, the asymmetry that China is

exploiting is the lack of reciprocity. In 2020, the World Press Freedom Index

of 180 states ranked the United Kingdom at number 45 and China at

number 177.60 Simply put, neither British journalists nor British diplomats

enjoy the same freedom to participate in the public discourse in China that

liberal democratic principles afford to their Chinese counterparts (and

everyone else) in the United Kingdom.

Little is known of the United Kingdom’s offensive cognitive warfare

capability. London’s equity in the rules-based international order limits its

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appetite to exploit the cognitive domain, especially offensively. The United

Kingdom’s ethics of state communication preclude the peacetime use of

deception in general and troll farms and/or botnets in particular.61 Following

the end of the Cold War and the rapid growth of the internet, state use of

disinformation has become antithetical to liberal democracy. As Thomas Rid

puts it, “it is impossible to excel at disinformation and at democracy at the

same time.”62 Use of the former undermines trust in the institutions on

which the latter depends. However, while deploying a cognitive warfare

capability is fraught with difficulty for liberal democracies, this does not

render the cognitive domain indefensible by them. In fact, the cognitive

domain is vital ground for the correct functioning of democracy itself. So,

while the United Kingdom has no published doctrine for the cognitive

domain, it has not been idle in exploring its options there.

In February 2018, the United Kingdom’s Home Office announced the

development of an AI (artificial intelligence) capable of detecting 94 percent

of Daesh (Islamic State) propaganda videos with 99.995 percent accuracy.63

Separately, the United Kingdom’s National Security Communications Team

was behind a Global Coalition website designed to counter Islamic State

disinformation by providing credible open-source information on the

situation in the territory it had formerly held.64 The British Army’s 77th

Brigade now includes counteradversarial information activity among its

capabilities.65 Furthermore, the government of the United Kingdom has

established specialist units to identify false narratives and coordinate a pan-

Whitehall response.66 Admittedly, these are nascent and somewhat

disconnected capabilities, lacking the binding principles (such as a doctrine)

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that would enable their mutual employment and reinforcement in

pursuance of a common strategic end.

In the United Kingdom, information advantage was reconceptualized

in a 2018 Joint Concept Note known as JCN 2/18. This document describes

the United Kingdom as being threatened in the cognitive domain and sets

out actionable steps that the national security enterprise could take in

response. The foreword, written by Air Marshal Edward J. Stringer of the

Royal Air Force, is a treatise on cognitive warfare, advocating for “a cultural

transformation and a conceptual foundation that puts information

advantage at the heart of 21st Century deterrence and campaign design.”67

Yet, the first print run of this document was pulped following an objection

from the Ministry of Defence’s Directorate of Defence Communications

about the inclusion of the concept of information maneuver to deceive

public audiences.68 As Robert R. Leonhard wrote, “Ultimately, history will

scoff at such [lofty] pretensions just as today we laugh at feudal prejudices

against gunpowder.”69

The United Kingdom published its latest Integrated Review of Security,

Defence, Development and Foreign Policy in March 2021. Like JCN 2/18, the

integrated review acknowledges that weaponized disinformation is a threat

to democracy.70 Government departments, especially the Ministry of

Defence, are now programming the capabilities necessary to meet the

demands of the integrated review. While the report cited Russia and China’s

heavy investment in cognitive warfare as a challenge to democratic

societies, the government of the United Kingdom has not yet committed to

anything beyond “thoughtful investment” in response.71 Should the

integrated review not lead to the development of the thinking and capability

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identified in JCN 2/18, it will not be a failure of imagination but a potentially

pyrrhic victory of ethos over pathos.

Asymmetry 2: The Relative Ease of Waging Cognitive Warfare Compared to

Defending against It

In the long term, cognitive warfare is easier to wage than it is to defend

against. The party with the greatest strategic patience has the advantage.

This is an asymmetry with two axes. The first relates to audience sensing:

defending nations must understand who constitutes their vulnerable

audience if a counterdisinformation campaign is to be properly targeted. An

aggressor need not be so meticulous and may change strategies at will in

the quest for one that delivers results. The second axis relates to tenacity:

the defending state must prevail over every attempt to influence its

democratic processes while the aggressor can achieve lasting advantage

from a single success.

Just as an epidemiologist will look to identify the groups of hosts that

are most susceptible to a pathogen, so a defensive strategy for the United

Kingdom’s cognitive domain would need to identify the audience(s) most

inclined to be persuaded by any given disinformation campaign. The

common aim is to focus intervention efforts where they will have the most

impact on the spreading contagion. Target audience analysis of Chinese and

Russian cognitive warfare capabilities is therefore an important step toward

a risk assessment and/or mitigation strategy. Given the paucity of open-

source analysis of audiences in the United Kingdom, there is value in

examining target audiences in the United States to find parallels. Separate

studies by the Rand Corporation and the Atlantic Council both identified “the

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global ethnic Chinese diaspora [as] a favorable vector of influence for Beijing

to leverage,” particularly in United States.72 However, Chinese people

account for less than 1 percent (400,000 to 600,000 individuals) of the

population of England and Wales.73 Even in the United States, the

proportion of the population estimated to be ethnic Chinese in 2020 was 1.6

percent (5.4 million individuals).74 Neither group seems large enough to

influence the vox populi in either state. Therefore, it can be concluded that

China must address a broader target audience if it is to ever be successful in

influencing the public agenda extraterritorially.

The term target audience is not helpful since it presumes the deceptive

message is hyper-targeted and that the agent provocateur can be sure by

whom their message will be seen and the course that its viral spread will

take. This may be so in electoral campaigns that, quite legally, use features

like Facebook’s lookalike audiences, but Russian methods are more akin to a

viral contagion than hyper-personalized medicine. Consequently, it is more

important to understand which subset of all the potential recipients of a

message will be most susceptible to it than it is to know who the intended

target is. The former provides a tangible locus for action to either prevent

infection (vaccination) and/or to contain its spread (mitigation). The latter

may provide insight into the aggressor’s desired outcome, but this may also

be unknowable within a relevant timescale. The more significant cohort in

cognitive warfare, therefore, is the vulnerable audience: those persons most

likely to be persuaded by a given disinformation campaign and act upon

that persuasion in a way that influences the public agenda.

Fortunately, and as an example of the value of net assessment, the

dearth of research on vulnerable audiences in the United Kingdom does not

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prevent identification of asymmetries. The aggressor in a cognitive warfare

campaign has the relative freedom of measuring, testing, and adjusting the

impact of their actions in the open-source media of their target. Conversely,

the targeted state cannot afford to wait until the public agenda has shifted,

since by then the damage is done. Its challenge of monitoring sentiment and

deploying appropriate interventions must be continuous and upstream

since the other party need only be successful once in influencing a

supposedly democratic decision to effect lasting change. The best form of

infection control is to prevent it taking hold in the first place: digital literacy

is to cognitive warfare as vaccination is to contagion. Therefore, a whole-of-

government defensive strategy in the cognitive domain should include

digital literacy as a central tenet.

Digital literacy is nested under “media studies” in the United

Kingdom’s education curriculum. However, the subject has a reputation for

lacking academic rigor among both educational policymakers and parents.75

As a likely result, the subject is taken by only a small proportion of each

cohort—less than 6 percent of the class of 2019.76 The United Kingdom is

missing the opportunity to equip its citizenry for life with digital literacy skills

and thereby bolster its resilience to disinformation.

Asymmetry 3: Freedom of Maneuver

Revisionist states enjoy freedom of maneuver in the United Kingdom’s

cognitive domain that the United Kingdom chooses not to exploit

reciprocally. State legislatures must strike a balance between the antithetical

ideals of cognitive domain security and the free movement of information

and ideas. Hitherto, the government of the United Kingdom has left

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internet-mediated communications and social media largely unregulated.

China’s approach is the polar opposite, featuring tight central control and

heavily censorship, while Russia’s hybrid model is drifting toward the

Chinese example. A combination of technical means and strict regulation of

all forms of media protects the Communist Party of China from the

galvanizing effect that social networking websites can have when citizens

share dissenting opinions or try to coordinate protests online. At the same

time, light regulation of social networks and messaging services in the

United Kingdom affords Beijing freedom of maneuver in the British

cognitive domain that London does not enjoy in mainland China. Whereas

Russia is years from achieving the same level of internet sovereignty as

China, when compared with the government of the United Kingdom, the

Kremlin is relatively unconstrained in the use of disinformation in its public

diplomacy.

This asymmetry emanates from the legal frameworks of the

protagonist states. The examination of each begins with Russia.77 While its

estimated 91 million users enjoy largely unfettered access to the internet via

some 3,500 internet service providers, the Russian state has shifted

significantly toward digital authoritarianism since the widespread civil unrest

of 2011–13.78 A free flow of information presents Moscow with two

problems. First, the Russian security services lack the technical means of

enforcing their laws online, especially when it comes to content served by

providers based overseas. Second, the popularity of Western social media

services such as YouTube and encrypted messaging services like Telegram

among Russians stays the state’s hand in simply blocking them for fear of

stoking public dissent.79

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 The Russian State Duma legislated to address these shortcomings in

2019.80 Critics fear that the new laws codify state censorship of the internet.

Separately, a series of legislative amendments legalize state monitoring of

information flowing across and within Russia’s borders and require

installation of infrastructure that would theoretically enable the walling-off

of Russia from the global internet. If Moscow can implement this legislation

successfully, which is by no means certain given the expense and technical

challenges involved, the result will be a “centralized management system of

the internet by the state authority.”81

China’s laws on disinformation are among the world’s strictest.82 For

example, in mainland China it is an imprisonable offence to spread “fake

news that seriously disturbs public order through an information network or

other media.” Furthermore, there is no press freedom; online news

providers may only share stories that have been published by the state

press agency, Xinhua, or by one of its provincial equivalents.83

In addition to its strict regulation of all media, China has designed and

constructed its domestic internet infrastructure with information control at

its heart. The Golden Shield Project, known colloquially as the “Great Firewall

of China,” is a tightly integrated system of hardware and software filters that

permits a variety of censorship techniques at the national scale.84 Many

foreign websites, including Google, Twitter, and YouTube, are inaccessible to

Chinese users, who instead use domestic equivalents such as Baidu

(replacing Google) and Sina Weibo (replacing Twitter).85

Relative to China and Russia, the United Kingdom currently regulates

its domestic internet very lightly. This looks set to change. Parliament is

consulting on an Online Safety Bill that, if passed into law, would hand

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substantial powers to the United Kingdom’s communications regulator, the

Office of Communications.86 The bill would impose many new legal duties

on online platforms, including one to protect their users from coming to

harm. Contentiously, the bill extends these duties to include protection from

content that is legal but might be harmful to adults, such as misinformation

on vaccines. Such a move is described by free speech campaigners as “the

most significant change in the role of the state over free speech since 1695,”

a reference to the lapsing of the English government’s legal power to censor

printed material before publication.87 The bill seeks to balance new duties

toward the individual with new duties toward public goods, in particular its

agenda. Social networking websites would be required to protect “the right

of users . . . to freedom of expression within the law” and “content of

democratic importance.”88 In this latter case, the legislation would protect

content that “is or appears to specifically intended to contribute to

democratic political debate in the United Kingdom.”89 To give the legislation

teeth, the Office of Communications would be empowered to levy fines on

social networking websites up to 10 percent of their annual global revenue.

In Facebook’s case, this would represent a maximum fine of more than $8

billion USD.90 However, until and unless Parliament passes the bill into law,

the United Kingdom’s internet will remain largely unregulated space.

Turning to the use of the internet in public diplomacy, international

law prohibits the publication of bellicose propaganda or material intended

to incite civil disobedience in another state but is silent on the waging of

disinformation campaigns with a subthreshold intent to, say, influence

democratic processes.91 One of the principles of liberal democracy—

freedom of expression—is being used as a weapon against it.

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 The United Kingdom’s national security community is aware of the

growing threat to the cognitive domain. Perhaps understandably given the

sensitivity of the subject, the nation’s policy and capability toward cognitive

warfare is not in the public domain and is therefore beyond the reach of

academic analysis here. Certainly, competition in the cognitive domain did

not feature in the United Kingdom’s most recent National Cyber Security

Strategy nor has the issue been the subject of a specific inquiry by the House

of Commons Defence Select Committee.92 The single outward

demonstration of the United Kingdom’s intent to acquire the capability to

counter online threats is the announcement of the creation of the National

Cyber Force in October 2019.93 From what is known about this force, it is not

clear whether its mandate will extend beyond scientific and technical cyber

security and defense into the cognitive domain.

Major Uncertainties

This third section identifies four recognized unknowns in the assessment

above that have the potential to significantly impact the conclusions

reached should they play out unexpectedly.

First, the reasonable worst-case scenario is highly speculative. The

hypothesis that the public agenda could be steered by a foreign power or

nonstate actor is unproven. It could be that the threat to national security is

misquantified in either direction.

Second, without intervention from the state, the pace at which digital

literacy will evolve to naturally regulate the impact of disinformation is

unknown. If swift, then this would reduce the salience of cognitive warfare in

security terms.

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 Third, the pace at which social media networks will develop and

implement effective frameworks of self-regulation is unknown. If self-

regulation can be achieved and sustained such that the networks are

substantially less conducive to the viral dissemination of disinformation, this

would mark an important development in redressing the asymmetry

between liberal and illiberal societies in the cognitive domain.

The final unknown relates to the magnitude of the threat faced by the

United Kingdom in the cognitive domain relative to threats in other

domains. One international commentator argues that, left unaddressed, the

potential damage to the United Kingdom’s interests in the cognitive domain

will still be less than the damage it is inflicting on its own soft power with its

drift toward populism.94 The priority that the United Kingdom should afford

to securing its cognitive domain is therefore deeply uncertain.

Opportunities and Threats

The final step of this net assessment is the identification of opportunities

and threats. The former are defined as forthcoming events and/or trends

that can be turned to one party’s own advantage. The latter are events

and/or trends that are likely to be disadvantageous to that same party.

The first opportunity lies in flexing the United Kingdom’s considerable

soft power to seek consensus among its allies on developing the policy

measures necessary to counter state-sponsored disinformation without

undermining liberal democratic principles. The United Kingdom sustains a

vibrant academic community, a world leading AI research and development

capability, and a well-established Development, Concepts and Doctrine

Centre.95 Together, these are the wherewithal necessary to codify a

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workable whole-of-government response to the disinformation threat. The

draft Online Safety Bill is a tangible example of the United Kingdom

providing such thought leadership on regulating internet-mediated

communications while also protecting freedom of expression.

A second opportunity is the near certainty that AI will play a pivotal

role in identifying deepfakes, inauthentic user profiles, and other hallmarks

of disinformation at the speed of relevance. The United Kingdom’s edge in

AI research and development makes it well-placed to serve this market to

the benefit of its prosperity agenda and soft power status.

The first threat is the trend toward declining political support for

democratic institutions. As Leila Alieva at the Foreign Policy Centre puts it,

“The new generation of politicians and media . . . are balancing a tightrope

of risks and dangers of moving farther away from what so far has

constituted the identity and core of the democratic states; stable institutions

resistant to absolutism, autocratism and illiberalism.”96 If sustained, such

political values would be deeply damaging to the United Kingdom’s soft

power. The consequence would be diminished British convening power,

credibility, and political authority on the international stage. With its

competitors emboldened, it would become harder for the United Kingdom’s

diplomats and politicians to defend the status quo of the rules-based

international order.

A second threat is the limited supply of academics and software

engineers at the leading edge of research into computational

disinformation. Here, the public sector is competing against the social

networking websites themselves for the talent. As a result, it seems likely

that some form of collaboration between public and private sectors will be

Expeditions with MCUP 29

essential if liberal states are to maintain a credible and relevant capability in

the cognitive domain.

The final threat is time-bound. The internet can amplify and

broadcast disinformation across platforms and borders at a pace measured

in minutes. The public agenda itself is dynamic and constantly evolving. Yet,

current human-driven analysis of the information that flows through social

networking websites achieves source attribution, intent determination, and

response decisions at a pace measured in days and weeks. In military terms,

this suggests a need for a “recognized picture” of the cognitive domain, a

processing task so demanding that the use of AI would be essential. Such a

live threat picture of the narratives flowing through and between the most

popular social networking websites would represent unprecedented state-

sponsored surveillance of its citizens’ communications. The legislative and

ethical barriers to the development of such a capability would be

substantial, even if the political appetite existed.

Conclusions

The aim of this study was to identify the competitive dynamics in the United

Kingdom’s cognitive domain. The three asymmetries exposed can be

summarized thus:

1. Doctrinal maturity. Russia and China both have well-established

doctrines for waging cognitive warfare. The United Kingdom does not,

and institutional reluctance to explore this capability area weighs

against its development.

2. Cognitive warfare is easier to wage than it is to defend against. For

any counterdisinformation campaign to be maximally effective, the

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 United Kingdom would need to identify its vulnerable audience,

requiring a level of surveillance of its cognitive domain that is at odds

with liberal principles of privacy and freedom of expression. An agile

and/or patient aggressor faces no such constraints, especially so if

their maneuvers go unchallenged.

3. Revisionist states enjoy freedom of maneuver in the United

Kingdom’s cognitive domain that the United Kingdom chooses not to

exploit reciprocally. The United Kingdom’s defence of democratic

principles such as net neutrality, privacy, transparency, and freedom

of expression is laudable and a significant source of British soft

power. However, it is difficult to reconcile this with the United

Kingdom’s apparent reluctance to impose costs on actors that exploit

those principles with revisionist intent, since this weighs heavily

against the country’s national interest. Prevarication in this policy area

may represent a pyrrhic victory of ethos over pathos and logos.

In the cognitive domain and beyond, the United Kingdom is facing a

strategic situation in relation to China and Russia that is analogous to that

which it faced with the Soviet Union in 1946, the beginning of a long Cold

War. On one front, the United Kingdom faces a malign, revanchist, and

decaying Russia whose opposition to the liberal democratic order is as

implacable as it is fundamental. On the other front, it has the rising,

revisionist, and techno-authoritarian China, which is intent on reshaping the

global order to its lasting strategic advantage. With unipolarity giving way to

bipolarity, the great power competition between the global West and China

appears to be set for the long term.97 Russia is a danger to the United

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Kingdom’s national security because of its weakness; China is a danger

because of its strength.98

The diagnosis is that, in the cognitive domain specifically, a

tenaciously antagonist Russia and a strategically patient China are

outmaneuvering the United Kingdom. Both are generating and deploying

cognitive warfare capabilities that have no obvious countercapability in the

United Kingdom. Through their will to co-opt social networking websites as a

delivery method for disinformation, both China and Russia are maneuvering

in the United Kingdom’s vital territory largely unopposed. Inaction risks

ceding an increasingly influential engine of the public agenda and platform

for security speech to parties outside the democratic franchise. While social

networking websites remain only lightly regulated and concerns about

liberal principles preclude development of a countercapability, the United

Kingdom’s democracy lies exposed to increasing risk of malign foreign

influence.

Recommendations

Mitigations for the three asymmetries are likely to be self-reinforcing and

interdependent for their success. For doctrinal maturity, reconciliation of the

ethics of public diplomacy with the reality of the contemporary security

environment will be an important step toward developing a credible

capability for information maneuver in the United Kingdom. While pursuit of

an offensive cognitive warfare capability is antithetical with liberal

democratic ideals, this does not absolve the state of its responsibility to

provide security as a public good. As a minimum, the United Kingdom’s

national security enterprise should establish a doctrine for, and then

Expeditions with MCUP 32

acquire, a rigorous defensive and/or surveillance cognitive warfare

capability.

The second asymmetry—the inherent advantage of the aggressor—

calls for greater resilience to disinformation among the population, since the

competition is chronic and persistent. A liberal state must vaccinate its

public agenda against illegitimate external influence or risk the sovereignty

of its democratic decision-making process. In an age of disinformation,

digital literacy should join subjects such as reading, writing, and arithmetic

as curriculum priorities for those in full-time education.99 Investment in such

measures will pay dividends over generations. To meet the threat more

immediately, an ethical and technical framework is required to define an

acceptable role for AI in protecting the public discourse from malign

influence without critically undermining liberal principals.

Of the three, the third asymmetry—the regulation conundrum—is the

most profound. If tighter regulation of social media in the United Kingdom

proves ineffective, then policymakers must explore alternative options to

redress the balance. These may lie in other domains or may require new, or

new interpretations of, international law, but they should include measures

that extend the United Kingdom’s deterrence effect over its cognitive

domain. Actors that maneuver there against the United Kingdom’s interests

must face unacceptable costs for doing so. Seemingly, the only reason that

the United Kingdom is not pushing back reciprocally in its competitors’ own

cognitive domains is that it chooses not to. With sufficient technical skill and

determination, the former of which the United Kingdom enjoys in

abundance, any firewall is permeable. Beyond an illiberal firewall lies an

Expeditions with MCUP 33

audience similarly interconnected by social networks and a polity vulnerable

to the illuminating light of transparency and freedom of expression.

Final Thoughts

Whether acknowledged as a warfighting domain or not, the cognitive

domain is conceptually real. It is the maneuver space for the battle for

hearts and minds and the vital ground of democratic decision-making. In

securitization terms, it is a referent object in the societal sector. In

Clausewitzian terms, its sovereignty is the center of gravity of liberal

democracy.

China and Russia are threatening the United Kingdom’s cognitive

domain. Both have the capability and demonstrated will to distract and

confuse public discourse in the United Kingdom. As the United Kingdom’s

Institute for Statecraft puts it, when “people start to say ‘You don’t know

what to believe’ or ‘They’re all as bad as each other,’ the disinformers are

winning.”100

Weapons exist to counter most threats in the more tangible domains

of land, maritime, air, space, and cyberspace. Battalions, ships, aircraft,

satellites, and server farms are all vulnerable to destruction by

counteraction. Threats in the cognitive domain are different. Ideas and

narratives, once lodged in a society’s hive mind, are tenacious and resilient,

like a pathogen resistant to medicine. Therefore, prevention is a better

defensive strategy than cure. To protect its democracy, the population of the

United Kingdom needs a digital literacy campaign to vaccinate it against the

spread of disinformation. More immediately, the country’s national security

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enterprise requires a credible capability that will deter malign actors from

any future interference in British democratic processes.

The vulnerability of the cognitive domain makes it possible that the

next war may be won or lost before the vanquished party even recognizes

that its interests are threatened. Liberal democracies must now choose

whether and how to prepare for that war if they are to be successful in

deterring it from ever happening.

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13
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Diaspora,” Academy for Cultural Diplomacy, accessed 15 November 2021.
74
Abby Budiman and Neil G. Ruiz, “Key Facts about Asian Americans, a Diverse and Growing
Population,” Pew Research Center, 29 April 2021.
75
Julian McDougall and Julian Sefton-Green, “Media and Information Literacy Policies in the
UK” (paper, London School of Economics and Political Science, London, 2014), 4.
76
GCSE (Full Course) Results, Summer 2019 (London: Joint Council for Qualifications, 2020).
77
The author would argue that political appetite is embodied in the national legislative
base. In the cases of China and Russia, there is a strong theme of lawfare there. Political
appetite is a little too intangible for the author’s liking as an analytical concept. The author
has deliberately chosen asymmetries that can be measured in some fashion. The author
cites similar reasoning for not analyzing psychological asymmetries either.
78
“Russia: Number of Internet Users, 2015–2022,” Statista, 2020; and Lily Hay Newman,
“Russia Takes a Big Step toward Internet Isolation,” Wired, 5 January 2020.
79
Alena Epifanova, Deciphering Russia’s “Sovereign Internet Law” (Berlin: German Council on
Foreign Relations, 2020).
80
Gabrielle Tétrault-Farber, “Putin Signs Law Making Russian Apps Mandatory on
Smartphones, Computers,” Reuters, 2 December 2019; and “Russia’s Putin Signs Law
Banning Fake News, Insulting the State Online,” Reuters, 18 March 2019.
81
Epifanova, Deciphering Russia’s “Sovereign Internet Law,” 2.
82
Daniel Funke and Daniela Flamini, “A Guide to Anti-Misinformation Actions around the
World,” Poynter, last updated 13 August 2019.

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Initiatives to Counter Fake News in Selected Countries (Washington, DC: Library of Congress,
2019), 18.
84
Roya Ensafi et al., “Analyzing the Great Firewall of China over Space and Time,”
Proceedings on Privacy Enhancing Technologies 1 (2015): 61–76,
https://doi.org/10.1515/popets-2015-0005.
85
Sonali Chandel et al., “The Golden Shield Project of China: A Decade Later—An in-Depth
Study of the Great Firewall,” 2019 International Conference on Cyber-Enabled Distributed
Computing and Knowledge Discovery (CyberC) (2019): 111–19,
https://doi.org/10.1109/cyberc.2019.00027.
86
Draft Online Safety Bill (London: Her Majesty’s Government, 2021).
87
Right to Type: How the “Duty of Care” Model Lacks Evidence and Will Damage Free Speech
(London: Index on Censorship, 2021), 4.
88
Draft Online Safety Bill, 29–31.
89
Draft Online Safety Bill, 12.
90
“Facebook Reports Fourth Quarter and Full Year 2020 Results,” Facebook, 27 January
2021.
91
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2019.
92
National Cyber Security Strategy, 2016–2021 (London: Her Majesty’s Government, 2016);
and “Defence Committee,” UK Parliament, accessed 15 November 2021.
93
Ben Wallace, “Address to the NATO Parliamentary Assembly 2019” (speech, Queen
Elizabeth II Centre, Westminster, London, 14 October 2019).
94
Sir Adam Thomson, KCMG, email to author, 19 May 2020.
95
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96
Leila Alieva, “Brexit in the Context of Democracy under Threat,” Foreign Policy Centre, 3
October 2019.
97
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Strategy Review 1, no. 2 (2019): 223–37, https://doi.org/10.1007/s42533-020-00034-y.
98
Julian Lindley-French, interview with author, 26 May 2020.
99
Online Harms White Paper (London: Her Majesty’s Government, 2019).
100
The Integrity Initiative Guide to Countering Russian Disinformation (London: Institute for
Statecraft, 2018).

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