The Cognitive Domain of CBRN: Cognitive Weaponry Beyond Warfare, and the Need for Cognitive Security
By Dr. James Giordano
Weapon (n): Instruments and means of contending against others to affect their patterns of behavior or actions. Anything used to gain an advantage, advance a point or perspective, and/or defeat an opponent.
Recent discussions of the cognitive domain have tended to primarily (and sometimes exclusively) situate cognition within the emerging concept and practices of cognitive warfare. Certainly, as construed, cognitive warfare explicitly seeks to access, influence, manipulate, disrupt, or otherwise affect individual and collective processes of perception, emotion, decision-making, and behavior. But limiting consideration of the cognitive domain to cognitive warfare risks mistaking a particular application for the broader operational reality. To wit, cognition is a fundamental substrate through which virtually all forms of military threat, deterrence, response, and governance are engaged and thus upon which depend.
This is particularly evident as regards attitudes and postures toward chemical, biological, radiological, and nuclear (CBRN) weapons. To be sure, CBRN weapons possess physical capabilities for mass destructive effect, but their strategic influence has never been reducible to their physical effects alone. Indeed, such weapons acquire much of their military and political power through what populations, warfighters, leaders, allies, and adversaries believe that they can do; fear that they might do; perceive what an opponent is willing to do; and judge what should or should not be done in response. Thus, the cognitive domain is instrumental to the CBRN enterprise from threat perception and intelligence assessment to force protection, deterrence, doctrine, arms control, and international governance.
CBRN Weapons as Physical and Cognitive Instruments
The defining characteristics of CBRN weapons make cognition especially important to their strategic effects, as they frequently involve hazards that are overwhelming and/or uncertain in geographic or temporal extent. Such perceived characteristics of threat generate a distinctive relationship between the physical hazard and its cognitive representation, and resultant response of relative dread.
For example, a biological agent can produce morbidity and mortality. Yet the possibility that an infectious agent has been released can additionally produce fear, changes in interpersonal behavior, altered use of public spaces, distrust of authorities, stigmatization of particular populations, disruption of military operations, and substantial economic effects. Chemical weapons possess both toxicological and psychological effects because sensory cues, or merely reports of possible exposure, can alter individual and collective behavior. Likewise, radiological weapons may exert effects that greatly exceed the immediate physiological consequences of radiation exposure if populations perceive entire geographic areas as permanently dangerous. And nuclear weapons provide perhaps the most obvious illustration. Since 1945, their strategic utility has been dependent upon both their destructive capability and the cognitive apprehension of these effects. In this sense, CBRN weapons are simultaneously material and informational, physical and cognitive.
Cognition, Public Attitudes, and Societal Response
The cognitive dimension becomes particularly important when considering public responses to CBRN threats. Risk is rarely perceived solely according to quantitative probabilities. Public attitudes toward chemical contamination, infectious agents, radiation, and nuclear weapons are influenced by familiarity, perceived controllability, voluntariness of exposure, trust in institutions, historical memory, cultural narratives, and the perceived magnitude and reversibility of consequences. This creates vulnerabilities that adversaries can exploit to leverage opportunity. Indeed, an adversary need not necessarily produce mass casualties to generate strategically consequential effects. A relatively limited CBRN event (or credible allegation of such an event) could be amplified through traditional and social media, disinformation, misinformation, and deliberate manipulation of uncertainty; the manifest effects of which could include public anxiety, demands for certain governmental responses, erosion of confidence in military and/or political leadership, disruption of infrastructure, and pressure upon and tension within alliances.
The contemporary information ecosystem amplifies these possibilities. Generative artificial intelligence, automated influence operations, deepfakes, and rapidly propagated narratives can create competing representations of an event before technical attribution has been established. Thus, the first strategically meaningful effects of a suspected CBRN incident may occur within the informational and cognitive domains before its physical characteristics have been fully determined. Thus, I opine that any genuine approach to CBRN preparedness must incorporate public communication and cognitive resilience as components of national defense.
The Warfighter and the Cognitive Burden of CBRN Operations
CBRN environments impose similar cognitive burdens upon military personnel. Warfighters must make consequential decisions while confronting uncertain exposure, incomplete information and/or protection, physical discomfort, changing operational tempo, concern for unit members, and potentially ambiguous symptoms. These conditions can degrade attention, situational awareness, and decision-making. Therefore, effective CBRN defense must also entail and obtain means through which personnel can maintain cognitive and operational performance while operating under conditions of perceived or actual hazard.
In this light, training assumes defined importance. Realistic preparation can establish cognitive schemas that enable personnel to distinguish actionable indicators from ambiguous stimuli and to respond through practiced procedures rather than uncontrolled fear or uncertainty. Conversely, inadequate training can allow uncertainty itself to become operationally disruptive. Thus, I posit that cognitive aspects of human performance should be explicitly incorporated into CBRN doctrine, exercises, equipment development, and force-protection assessment.
Political Cognition, Deterrence, and Escalation
At the strategic level, CBRN engagements are profoundly cognitive given that deterrence is an exercise in influencing decision-making. Capabilities alone do not deter; they must be perceived, intentions must be communicated and resolve must be credible and thresholds must be sufficiently intelligible to influence behavior. In short, adversaries must be cognizant that defined actions will produce consequences the anticipated costs of which exceed expected benefits. This creates a complex cognitive architecture of signaling, perception, interpretation, attribution, and prediction.
Deterrence of chemical and biological weapon development and use can be somewhat more challenging because unlike a nuclear detonation, chem-bio events can initially resemble naturally occurring disease. Chemical incidents may be localized or ambiguously attributed, and emerging biotechnologies may further enable agents and methods the provenance of which are difficult to establish. Such ambiguity places extraordinary demands upon political cognition.
Decision-makers must assess what occurred, who was responsible, whether the event was deliberate, the level of attributional confidence, what allies believe occurred, and what response(s) will deter subsequent action without producing unnecessary escalation. Thus, intelligence focal to CBRN threats must include technical characterization of adversarial capabilities as well as assessment of adversarial risk perception, doctrine, strategic culture, values, incentives, and anticipated responses to any action(s) taken. This is cognitive intelligence in a most literal sense.
Cognition and CBRN Governance
The cognitive domain is equally important to governance. Treaties, conventions, policies, norms, and doctrine are frequently discussed as juridical mechanisms. But as matter of fact, governance actually functions by affecting cognition and behavior. A proscription or prohibition is meaningful only insofar as relevant actors recognize it, understand its boundaries, perceive incentives for compliance, anticipate retribution for violation, and regard enforcement mechanisms as sufficiently credible and consequential. For example, the Biological Toxin and Weapons Convention (BTWC), Chemical Weapons Convention (CWC), and regnant nuclear treaties, narratives and norms contribute to international expectations about what constitutes legitimate and illegitimate conduct in research, testing, and military deployment. Thus, the normative opprobrium of chemical, biological and nuclear weapons affects political calculations even when technical capabilities remain available. In this way, governance engages both cognitive and socio-political effects.
This becomes increasingly important as emerging science and technology complicate conventional categories. Synthetic biology, genome engineering, AI-enabled biological design, advanced manufacturing, radiopharmaceutical technologies, novel chemical synthesis, and convergent biotechnology may blur distinctions between peaceful, dual-use, and potentially weaponizable activities. Governance cannot depend exclusively upon enumerating prohibited objects, but instead should shape expectations regarding activities, intentions, thresholds, responsibilities, and acceptable conduct. Doing so requires understanding how scientists, commercial actors, military organizations, policymakers, allies, competitors, and adversaries conceptualize benefit, burden, risk and responsibility. Effective governance should seek to influence those conceptualizations to the extent necessary to foster shared expectations and fortify mechanisms for verification, accountability, and response.
Cognitive Engagement as a Component of Deterrence
Traditional deterrence often emphasizes retaliation or denial by convincing an adversary that an attack will incur unacceptable consequences or will fail to achieve intended objectives. Both processes are cognitive because they are intended to alter an adversary’s calculus of expected-value. However, contemporary CBRN threats may require a broader, temporally extended approach. We have advocated “left-of-bang” deterrence to delay progress toward operational utility, discourage investment, complicate acquisition, disrupt enabling networks, and reduce developmental and missional success of CBRN weapons. Such approaches need not rely exclusively upon threatening greater force. Indeed, deterrence can be bolstered by combinations of intelligence capability, surveillance, attribution science, economic measures, diplomatic engagement, technological denial, alliance coordination, and strategic communication. Herein, the objective would be to alter an adversary’s cognitive calculus such that development, deployment, and use progressively appear less feasible, and more costly.
Toward Cognitive-Informed CBRN Policy and Doctrine
If cognition is understood as being intrinsic to CBRN security rather than peripheral to it, I offer that several implications follow.
First, CBRN intelligence should systematically integrate technical intelligence with behavioral and cognitive analyses. Knowing what an adversary can build is necessary but insufficient; it is also important to understand what adversarial leadership believes such capabilities can accomplish, what risks are considered acceptable, and US and allied deterrence signaling is interpreted.
Second, CBRN exercises should incorporate cognitive and informational factors to test decision-making under conditions of uncertain attribution, contradictory reporting, escalating public anxiety, proliferating adversarial disinformation, and incomplete technical information.
Third, strategic communication should be regarded as an operational component of CBRN preparedness and response. Communicating uncertainty while conveying confidence and not surrendering credibility should be mandatory elements of any strategic communication paradigm.
Fourth, CBRN governance should incorporate insights from cognitive science, behavioral science, decision theory and ethics. Policies should be evaluated for what they formally prohibit or permit as well as for the incentives, interpretations, behaviors, and potential misperceptions they establish.
Fifth, deterrence planning should explicitly model adversarial cognition. Such models need not (and arguably should not) assume enterprises of perfectly rational actors. Rather, planning models should incorporate constructs of bounded rationality, organizational dynamics, comparative ideology, strategic culture, asymmetric valuations, differential risk tolerance, and variable susceptibility to misperception.
Toward Genuine Cognitive Security
This reinforces the aforementioned titular distinction; namely, that consideration of cognitive security must be considerably broader than current discussion cognitive warfare. Cognitive security encompasses protection, sustainment, and appropriate influence of cognitive processes through which individuals, and various collectives (e.g.- institutions, militaries, governments, and societies) interpret threats and determine responses. For CBRN security, this distinction is consequential in that the objective is to recognize that every CBRN interaction involves cognition. CBRN security is surely a contest over available technology and force capability, but it also entails meanings, interpretation, expectation, confidence, fear, resolve, and choice.
Thus, cognition is instrumental across the entire spectrum of CBRN discourse, engagement, deterrence, defense, and governance. Accordingly, future CBRN policy and doctrine should explicitly recognize the cognitive domain as a cross-cutting operational concern. Such an approach does not redefine CBRN operations as cognitive warfare, but instead acknowledges that CBRN weapons operate within a strategic ecology in which physical capabilities acquire military and political consequence through cognition. I believe that this recognition should become integral to contemporary CBRN doctrine and serve as a foundational principle for developing the policies, practices, and governance necessary to deter and defend against current and near-future CBRN risks and threats.
Disclaimer.
The views and opinions expressed in this essay are those of the author and do not necessarily reflect those of the United States government, the Department of War, or the National Defense University.
Dr. James Giordano is Head of the Center for Strategic Deterrence and Studies of Weapons of Mass Destruction of the Institute for National Strategic Studies at the National Defense University, and serves as Special Advisor to the Assistant Secretary of War-CBRN.
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