{"id":7487,"date":"2026-09-15T00:02:48","date_gmt":"2026-09-15T00:02:48","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/cisanewsletter.com\/?p=7487"},"modified":"2026-09-15T04:44:09","modified_gmt":"2026-09-15T04:44:09","slug":"from-the-battlefield-to-the-mind-the-changing-character-of-warfare-in-the-age-of-artificial-intelligence","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/cisanewsletter.com\/index.php\/from-the-battlefield-to-the-mind-the-changing-character-of-warfare-in-the-age-of-artificial-intelligence\/","title":{"rendered":"From the Battlefield to the Mind: The Changing Character of Warfare in the Age of Artificial Intelligence\u00a0"},"content":{"rendered":"\n

1. Introduction<\/strong> <\/p>\n\n\n\n

Warfare has traditionally been understood as the organised use of physical force to defeat an adversary, destroy military capabilities and gain control over territory (Wright, 2023). The First and Second World Wars represented this conception most clearly, as military power depended heavily on manpower, industrial capacity, weapons and territorial occupation. Although these features remain central to contemporary conflict, technological and political transformations have expanded the battlefield far beyond physical territory. States and non-state actors can now employ proxy forces, political manipulation, information operations, cyber capabilities, social-media networks and emerging technologies to weaken an adversary without necessarily engaging in direct conventional combat. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

These developments have contributed to the emergence of hybrid and cognitive warfare as important concepts for understanding contemporary conflict (Danyk & Briggs, 2023). While kinetic warfare is primarily concerned with physical destruction and territorial control, hybrid warfare exploits political, institutional and social vulnerabilities through a combination of conventional and unconventional instruments. Cognitive warfare moves further into the domain of human perception, seeking to influence how individuals and societies interpret information, understand threats and make decisions. The purpose of this article is to examine this changing character of warfare and, particularly, the growing importance of cognitive warfare and artificial intelligence. It argues that contemporary warfare should not be understood as a linear transition from kinetic to hybrid and ultimately cognitive warfare. Rather, these forms increasingly operate as interconnected layers of the same strategic environment, with artificial intelligence accelerating the ability of actors to influence information, perception and decision-making at unprecedented speed and scale. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

2. Kinetic Warfare: The Traditional Battlefield<\/strong> <\/p>\n\n\n\n

Kinetic warfare represents the conventional understanding of military conflict in which physical force is used to destroy an adversary’s military capabilities and establish control over strategically important territory. Its principal instruments include soldiers, tanks, artillery, aircraft, naval vessels, missiles and other weapons capable of producing physical effects. Victory is consequently measured through material indicators: the destruction of enemy forces, the capture or defence of territory, the disruption of supply lines and the ability to sustain military operations for longer than an opponent (Martel, 2008;  Hen\u00e5ker, 2020; Viswanathan, 2026). <\/p>\n\n\n\n

The First and Second World Wars demonstrated the importance of this material conception of warfare. Industrial capacity became inseparable from military power because states required enormous quantities of weapons, ammunition, vehicles and supplies to sustain prolonged campaigns (Roy, 2022). The ability to mobilise populations and economies therefore became as important as battlefield tactics. NATO’s post-war system of collective defence similarly rested heavily upon the credibility of conventional and nuclear military capabilities and the capacity to deter territorial aggression (Karpaviciute, 2020). <\/p>\n\n\n\n

Contemporary warfare demonstrates that kinetic power remains relevant. The war in Ukraine, for example, has shown that artillery, missiles, infantry and control over territory remain fundamental despite the growing importance of drones, satellites, cyber operations and information warfare (Magill, 2026). Technology has not eliminated the physical battlefield; rather, it has changed the systems through which physical force is organised and applied. A conventional weapon may destroy a physical target, but its effectiveness can depend upon surveillance, intelligence, satellite imagery, communications networks and increasingly sophisticated data-processing systems. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

Kinetic warfare therefore remains the foundation of military power, but it increasingly operates within a much wider technological and informational environment. The transformation of warfare begins when actors recognise that an adversary can be weakened without necessarily confronting its military forces directly. Instead of destroying the enemy’s army, an actor may exploit its political divisions, institutional weaknesses or social grievances. This expansion of the battlefield provides the basis for hybrid warfare. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

3. Hybrid Warfare: Conflict Beyond the Conventional Battlefield<\/strong> <\/p>\n\n\n\n

Hybrid warfare expands the battlefield from physical military confrontation into political, social, economic and institutional spaces. Rather than relying exclusively upon conventional armed forces, hybrid strategies combine different instruments of power, including proxy actors, covert operations, political interference, economic pressure, cyber operations, sabotage and information manipulation (Global Power Desk, 2026). A central characteristic is ambiguity: the actor seeks to achieve strategic objectives while remaining below, or operating around, the threshold at which an overt military response becomes unavoidable. The logic behind hybrid warfare is not entirely new. During the Cold War, powerful states used intelligence operations, covert action, political alliances and local actors to advance strategic interests without necessarily engaging in direct military confrontation. Africa became an important arena of this geopolitical competition following decolonisation. The 1966 overthrow of Ghana’s Kwame Nkrumah, for example, occurred within a broader international environment in which Western governments were deeply concerned about Nkrumah’s political orientation and relations with the Soviet bloc. Although the precise extent of direct foreign operational involvement remains historically contested, the case illustrates how domestic political instability could become intertwined with wider geopolitical competition. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

Contemporary hybrid warfare has expanded these possibilities through digital technologies. Political divisions, economic grievances, ethnic tensions, migration controversies and distrust in institutions can become vulnerabilities that external actors seek to exploit. Importantly, an adversary does not necessarily need to create these divisions. It can identify existing fractures and amplify them. The objective is consequently not always to defeat a state’s military forces but to increase the political and social costs of governing. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

This distinction is important because hybrid warfare introduces a new strategic question: what happens when an adversary’s vulnerabilities are not merely exploited physically or politically, but psychologically? A military attack may produce destruction, but its consequences depend partly upon how the population understands the event. A political crisis can be presented as evidence of government incompetence, an economic problem can be attributed to a particular social group, and a migration crisis can be transformed into a broader narrative about national decline. The battlefield therefore begins to move from institutions and political structures toward the perceptions of the people who constitute them. This is where cognitive warfare becomes particularly important. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

4. Cognitive Warfare: The Mind as a Battlespace<\/strong> <\/p>\n\n\n\n

Cognitive warfare represents a further expansion of the battlefield into human perception, emotion, identity, attention, memory and decision-making (Nilsson et al., 2026). Unlike kinetic warfare, which seeks to destroy physical capabilities, or hybrid warfare, which exploits political and institutional vulnerabilities, cognitive warfare seeks to influence how individuals and societies understand reality and respond to it. It is therefore broader than conventional propaganda. Its objective is not necessarily to persuade populations to accept a single false narrative, but to create confusion, polarisation, distrust and disorientation, making it increasingly difficult for societies to establish a shared understanding of events (Miller, 2023). The People’s Liberation Army has paid particular attention to this emerging domain. PLA Daily<\/em>, the official newspaper of China’s People’s Liberation Army, argued in 2022 that future cognitive confrontation could increasingly weaken the influence of rational factors such as science and logic relative to emotion, while also noting that cognitive operations could move across online and offline environments through telecommunications networks, the internet, the Internet of Things and advanced algorithms (PLA Daily, 2022). The implication is that the cognitive battlefield is no longer confined to the individual mind but extends into the technological environments through which people communicate, consume information and construct social reality. Social-media platforms like Facebook, X and more recently TikTok intensify this vulnerability by allowing political, ethnic, religious and ideological identities to become highly visible and continuously reinforced. Content that generates fear, anger or outrage can receive greater attention than nuanced explanations, while the gamification of identity can encourage individuals to treat political disagreement as a contest between opposing groups rather than an evaluation of competing claims. Cognitive warfare can exploit these existing divisions without necessarily creating them. Its effectiveness lies partly in identifying social fractures and amplifying them until they become politically consequential. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

The Russian interference campaign surrounding the 2016 United States presidential election provides an important illustration. Investigations into the operation identified hacking, information releases, fabricated online identities and coordinated social-media activity intended to exploit existing political divisions. Russian-linked actors used personas that presented themselves as Americans and engaged particular political communities with narratives suited to their existing concerns (see Center for Strategic and International Studies, 2019). The significance of the operation should not be reduced to the claim that Russia determined the outcome of the election; rather, its importance lies in the attempt to manipulate the information environment within which Americans formed political perceptions and made political choices. The operation demonstrated how existing grievances, ideological divisions and distrust of institutions could become strategic vulnerabilities. The objective was therefore not necessarily to create a new political reality, but to intensify divisions within an existing one. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

Migration provides another contemporary illustration of this logic. Immigration is particularly susceptible to cognitive manipulation because it connects economic insecurity, employment, national identity, public security, cultural change and sovereignty. Recent investigations into the information environment surrounding the migration crisis in Ceuta found that accounts linked to Russian military structures amplified far-right narratives and reached hundreds of thousands of users (Down, 2026). Russian-linked networks have also repeatedly amplified anti-immigration narratives within European information environments. Importantly, Russia did not create Europe’s migration debate; migration was already politically contentious. The strategic opportunity lies precisely in the existence of these underlying grievances. By selectively amplifying fears about migrants, economic competition or national identity, information operations can intensify hostility, undermine trust in governments and deepen political polarisation. Cognitive warfare  therefore becomes difficult to distinguish from ordinary political disagreement because it often works by exaggerating or selectively presenting real social problems rather than inventing entirely fictional ones. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

Artificial intelligence is now accelerating these capabilities by transforming the scale, speed, personalisation and adaptability of cognitive influence. AI does not create cognitive warfare, propaganda and psychological manipulation long predate contemporary computing but it enables influence operations to be conducted with a level of automation and precision that was previously difficult to achieve. AI systems can generate large volumes of content, translate and adapt narratives for different audiences, analyse patterns of engagement and potentially modify subsequent messages according to how individuals respond. This creates the possibility of increasingly personalised cognitive operations in which different social groups encounter different versions of a broader strategic narrative. Generative AI also introduces synthetic images, audio and video that can make individuals appear to have said or done things that never occurred. During a political or military crisis, such material could spread faster than governments, journalists and fact-checkers can establish its authenticity. More profoundly, the widespread availability of synthetic media creates a liar’s dividend: once people know that convincing evidence can be fabricated, genuine evidence can also become easier to dismiss as artificial. Cognitive warfare therefore does not necessarily have to convince populations of a particular falsehood; it can succeed by making people uncertain about what is true, whom they can trust and whether objective truth can be established at all. AI consequently does not represent a separate form of warfare but an accelerator of cognitive warfare, transforming influence from predominantly mass communication into a potentially personalised, automated, adaptive and continuous process. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

5. The Convergence of Warfare<\/strong> <\/p>\n\n\n\n

The significance of these developments lies ultimately in the convergence of different forms of warfare. Kinetic warfare seeks to destroy physical capabilities and control territory; hybrid warfare exploits political, institutional and social vulnerabilities; cognitive warfare seeks to influence how those vulnerabilities are perceived and how populations respond to them; and artificial intelligence increasingly provides the technological capacity to connect and accelerate these activities. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

A single strategic campaign could therefore combine conventional military pressure with proxy actors, cyber disruption, targeted information operations and AI-generated narratives designed to deepen existing social divisions. The physical, political, digital and cognitive components would not necessarily represent separate conflicts. They could constitute different layers of the same operation. The contemporary battlefield is consequently no longer simply a geographical space in which armies confront one another. It increasingly encompasses physical territory, political institutions, digital networks, information environments and human cognition. The strategic objective is correspondingly expanding from territorial dominance toward what might be described as decision dominance: the ability to shape the conditions under which an adversary interprets events, determines what is credible and decides how to respond. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

6. Conclusion<\/strong> <\/p>\n\n\n\n

The changing character of warfare does not represent the disappearance of the conventional battlefield but its expansion. Kinetic warfare remains essential because physical force continues to determine control over territory and military capabilities. Hybrid warfare broadens the range of political, social and institutional vulnerabilities that can be exploited, while cognitive warfare takes the struggle further by making perception, identity, emotion, trust and decision-making strategic targets. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

The cases of the 2016 U.S. presidential election and migration-related information operations demonstrate how cognitive warfare can exploit divisions that already exist within societies rather than creating them from nothing. Artificial intelligence is accelerating this process by enabling information operations to be generated more rapidly, distributed more widely, personalised more precisely and continuously adapted to changing circumstances. Its significance therefore lies not simply in the production of deepfakes or autonomous systems, but in its capacity to transform the scale, speed and sophistication of influence operations. This has important implications for Africa, where expanding digital connectivity, political polarisation, institutional vulnerabilities and relatively uneven information-literacy capacities create conditions that can be exploited during politically sensitive periods. The concern is particularly relevant to Nigeria, which is scheduled to hold general elections in 2027, and Ghana, which will hold its next general election in 2028 and is also expected to conduct a referendum on constitutional reforms. In such contexts, AI-enabled cognitive warfare could be used to amplify ethnic, religious, regional or partisan tensions; manufacture or manipulate political narratives; impersonate political actors; undermine confidence in electoral institutions; and create uncertainty about the authenticity of information circulating among voters. The danger is therefore not necessarily that external actors will manufacture entirely new social divisions, but that they may identify existing grievances and strategically intensify them at moments when societies are most politically vulnerable. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

The future of warfare may therefore be determined not only by who possesses the most powerful weapons or controls the greatest territory, but also by who can most effectively shape the informational and cognitive environment within which populations perceive reality and make decisions. The battlefield is no longer confined to the spaces where armies confront one another; it increasingly extends into the digital and social environments where societies determine what is true, whom they trust, which institutions they believe, and how they choose to act. For African democracies, therefore, cognitive warfare should not be treated merely as a distant technological threat but as an emerging security and governance challenge requiring stronger electoral institutions, strategic communication capabilities, media literacy, AI governance and mechanisms for detecting and responding to coordinated information manipulation. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

Reference <\/strong> <\/p>\n\n\n\n

Center for Strategic and International Studies. (2019, May 28). Russian meddling in the United States: Historical context and the Mueller report<\/em>. <\/a>CSIS article<\/a>  <\/p>\n\n\n\n

Down, A. (2026). Russia-linked accounts spread far-right narrative online during Ceuta migration crisis, analysis finds<\/em>. www.theguardian.com. August 19, 2026. https:\/\/www.theguardian.com\/media\/2026\/aug\/07\/far-right-narrative-russia-online-accounts-ceuta-migration-crisis-analysis<\/a> <\/p>\n\n\n\n

Danyk, Y., & Briggs, C. (2023). Modern Cognitive Operations and Hybrid Warfare. Journal of Strategic Security<\/em>, 16(1), 35-50. https:\/\/doi.org\/10.5038\/1944-0472.16.1.2032<\/a> <\/p>\n\n\n\n

Hen\u00e5ker, L. (2020). Exploring military victory in battle: a qualitative study on contemporary tactics. Defence Studies<\/em>, 20<\/em>(2), 163\u2013181. https:\/\/doi.org\/10.1080\/14702436.2020.1750300 <\/p>\n\n\n\n

Global Power Desk. (2026). Hybrid warfare explained: How modern conflicts are fought beyond the battlefield<\/em>. <\/a>Global Power Desk article<\/a>  <\/p>\n\n\n\n

Martel, W. C. (2008). Formulating Victory and Implications for Policy. Orbis<\/em>, 52(4), 613-626. https:\/\/doi.org\/10.1016\/j.orbis.2008.07.001<\/a> <\/p>\n\n\n\n

Magill, P. (2026, June 4). Artillery lessons from the war in Ukraine spotlight future capability priorities. Shephard Media<\/em>. <\/a>Shephard Media article<\/a>  <\/p>\n\n\n\n

Miller, S. (2023). Cognitive warfare: An ethical analysis. Ethics and Information Technology, 25<\/em>, 46. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

Nilsson P-E, Haga A and Hellstr\u00f6m K (2026) Definitional ambiguity in cognitive warfare: a critical and systematic conceptual review through ideal-type analysis. Front. Big Data 9:1762571. doi: 10.3389\/fdata.2026.1762571 <\/p>\n\n\n\n

PLA Daily,. (2022). Cognitive domain warfare from an intelligent perspective: Emotional conflict has become a prominent attribute of cognitive domain warfare<\/em>. southasiajournal.net. August 19, 2026. https:\/\/southasiajournal.net\/china-gears-up-for-cognitive-warfare <\/p>\n\n\n\n

Karpaviciute, I. (2020). NATO\u2019s defence and deterrence in a changing security environment. In Lithuania in the global context: National security and defence policy dilemmas<\/em> (pp. 131\u2013150). General Jonas \u017demaitis Military Academy of Lithuania.  <\/p>\n\n\n\n

Roy, K. (2022). Industrial Warfare: Circa 1770\u20131990s. In: A Global History of Warfare and Technology. Springer, Singapore. https:\/\/doi.org\/10.1007\/978-981-19-3478-0_9 <\/p>\n\n\n\n

Viswanathan, K. (2026). The Changing Face of Warfare and the New Definition of Victory<\/em> . southasiamonitor.org. August 19, 2026. https:\/\/southasiamonitor.org\/contributors\/22930\/Col%20KL%20Viswanathan%20%28Retd.%29<\/a> <\/p>\n\n\n\n

Wright, W.J. (2023). A (Brief) History of War and Its Limits. In: Norm Clusters of Non-State Armed Groups. Springer, Cham. https:\/\/doi.org\/10.1007\/978-3-031-45914-6_5 <\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

1. Introduction  Warfare has traditionally been understood as the organised use of physical force to defeat an adversary, destroy military capabilities and gain control over territory (Wright, 2023). The First and Second World Wars represented this conception most clearly, as military power depended heavily on manpower, industrial capacity, weapons and territorial occupation. 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