The Cognitive War & Why We Must Overhaul our IC

The Cognitive War – The failure to overhaul our Intelligence Community

leaves democracy in doubt and tyranny unhinged

There is an ongoing war taking place today – a deceivingly quiet war, yet the most deadly kind of war.  While it may involve actions in the physical and kinetic domains (e.g., soldiers and bombs respectively), it’s mostly a war of ideas and ideology.  It’s a cognitive war being fought between two fundamentally different ideologies – democracy or tyranny. 

Freedom is a light for which many men have died in darkness

 George Washington, 1796

The cognitive war pits those who seek to advance an individual’s humanity, independence and freedom against those who seek to dispose of humanity and independence to subjugate and impose tyranny on the individual.  While many understand these challenges, few understand how they are related.  Although the “2018 National Security, and Defense Security, Strategy” addresses this new character of warfare – they offer few solutions.  Our options remain fundamentally unchanged as we continue to apply mostly kinetic solutions over the last two-hundreds plus years. 

Any significant kinetic war today would likely result in attacks that would bring our national infrastructure to its knees.  Within 72 hours or even less, as basic supplies (i.e., food, water, and gas) evaporate, mayhem would ensue very quickly.  Our military might try to respond, but without basic infrastructure, how would they be able to move?  The onset of Marshall Law for major regions of the country would be inevitable.  Calamity would come not with thousands, but likely with tens of millions of deaths.  This is the path we are on. 

Given the horrors of such an event, the natural human tendency is to dismiss it, ignore it, or denounce it as unlikely or improbable.  However, that was our thinking before Pearl Harbor, the World Trade Center bombing, 9-11 and even the rise of ISIS.  Will we ignore reality until it’s too late once again?  We can either proactively build towards the future we desire, or be forced to react to it.  Our biggest challenge:  We are in the midst of a cognitive war that will last a millennia or longer, and our Intelligence Community (IC) – our sentry for warning - remains mostly reactive, tactical and unaware. 

Our country can ill afford to not apply a remedy.  The prospect of a second Trump term offers the best –and likely the last – opportunity to drive the fundamental restructure required of our IC’s organizations, functionality, policy and culture.  

Why and how?  Because such an overhaul requires leadership not beholden to – nor unwilling to upset –the IC’s many bureaucratic establishments.  The IC’s industrial age factory floor must be retooled to empower a far more proactive, agile and effective IC to bring it rapidly into the information age. 

Immediate realignment of IC investments, organization and policy are required to avoid the next major surprise.  The biggest hurdles are cultural (policy) and structural (organizational).  Such transformation requires an overhaul of our production lines and building a new factory floor.

We saw varied successes with the IC during the Cold War – which is exemplary of a Cognitive War.  Yet, over the last three decades the number of threats, agility, and capabilities from adversaries expanded greatly.  Why?  Because our adversaries filled the ideological vacuum left when we (the USA) took our 30 year “peace dividend.”  While the giant of democracy and freedom slept, our adversaries pressed on. 

We then saw warning shots across the bow of democracy.  They included a nuclear North Korea, the rise of the Bin Laden and the Taliban, the World Trade Center bombings, and 9-11.  These events caught our IC near totally off-guard, and resulted in a major restructure of the IC which came largely out of the 9-11 Commission. 

Simultaneously, The democratization of technology (access to nearly any technology is commercially available) and advances in the information age have served as steroids for our adversaries. They took full advantage of the democratization of technology and information age capabilities and outmaneuver us daily.  But our reactive, stoic and sloth-like IC remains comfortably embedded in industrial age tradecraft and processes. 

Our Intelligence Community (IC), our sentry, also slept as well in the midst of a multi-faceted cognitive war – a war which we are losing badly.  While our IC does some terrific work, in today’s cognitive war it appears incapable of identifying the problem, is way too slow to react, and is typically so late as to either have little impact – or actually exacerbates the problem.  Information & democratization of technology has changed the character of warfare.  We must understand that technology is not the problem, it’s defining the problem.

Some examples:  Russian election interference. Chinese theft of intellectual property and creation of military outposts in the South China Sea. Russia’s incursion into the Crimea. Chinese use of students and businessman to steal research and technology.  The Arab Spring or Hong Kong democracy demonstrations.  Chinese and Russian military build ups and their adjustments in strategy and tactics. 

So once again, we reacted.  We are moving back towards major power competition yet we do not understand the real problem.  Our sentry, the IC, remains on duty but is oblivious that this is a cognitive war for which they are ill equipped, trained or prepared to address.  Our IC remains a relic of the industrial age and is quickly losing its relevancy in the information age. 

Americans understand today’s battleground includes cyber-attacks, social media, disinformation, and propaganda campaigns.  We also understand the rise, fall and reconstitution and recruitment of groups like ISIS and the Taliban.  And, we understand we’ve been playing “whack a mole” for two decades in Afghanistan and Iraq, now Syria, with little to show (Whitlock, 2019) while laying bare some hard truths.  These are the battles in the cognitive domain – a strategic battle of ideas and ideologies for which our IC offer few solutions. 

Political Warfare is back, and the United States is losing.

(Yoshihara, 2018)

The IC has failed multiple times since its creation (Gallington, 2014), with the magnitude of impact ever increasing.  Over the last two-decades since 9-11, we’ve heard multiple times from our IC colleagues that it will take “another 9-11, or worse”, to truly fix the problems.  Ignoring the ineffectiveness of our IC is akin to national suicide:  If we fail to overhaul the factory floor to address today’s intelligence needs and gaps, we will inevitably face much greater perils than 9-11, and our recovery is not guaranteed. 

Adding to concerns about our IC should be actions by former leadership before and after the 2016 national elections.  These actions strongly suggest our IC was weaponized against our own democracy empowered the IC’s unelected bureaucracy to act more like an insurgency, than an apolitical arm supporting the executive branch.  Unfortunately, despite such awareness by insiders for over two decades, it took recent events to raise awareness outside the IC.  Any retooling of the IC’s factory floor must re-instill and reinforce an apolitical culture.

Today’s “Cognitive War” requires a long-game mentality, and this runs counter to today’s federal, and especially the IC’s reactive culture.  Success in the cognitive domain requires a well thought out strategy, tailored to each specific region, to address national security priorities that bridge multiple administrations.  Success comes only by rapidly addressing the IC’s reactiveness, inadequacies, ineptness, and its cultural resistance to change. 

The oceans that once protected our homeland no longer offer us refuge.  The democratization of technology enables evil elements from the lone-wolf, to small groups to nation states to inflict immeasurable harm to our nation whether we are in a kinetic conflict or not.

 So, do we simply wait for the next major catastrophe?

Let’s not do this again!  An overhaul of our IC’s factory floor is a critical step to enabling proactive operations in the cognitive domain, and providing this and future President’s options other than the kinetic hammer.  We must remove ourselves from the perpetual cycle of conflict.  Time is short. Risks are increasing. Options – one.  A second term for the Trump administration is likely our only chance to undertake such an overhaul, less another major catastrophe.  Does anyone truly think we should wait?

  The only way human beings can win a war is to prevent it.

George C. Marshall

©2020, Edward L Haugland, All Rights Reserved