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At its upcoming summit marking its 75th anniversary, NATO will have to grapple with its new battlefield: cognitive warfare. Specifically, member states must prevent hostile authoritarian regimes from using technology to manipulate public opinion, Ylli Bajraktari, former executive director of artificial BroadCast Unitedligence at the U.S. National Security Council, wrote in an editorial in the Kyiv Independent.
The cognitive war in Ukraine war intensifies PHOTTERSTOCK
Russia’s brutal war of aggression in Ukraine has exposed the extent of the threat posed by cognitive warfare, with the Kremlin orchestrating a massive social media campaign designed to spread a false narrative, stoke anti-Western and anti-democratic sentiment, and undermine NATO’s greatest strength: unity.
The rise of artificial BroadCast Unitedligence (AI) has exacerbated the disinformation problem, enabling bad actors to create and distribute deepfakes and other forms of AI-enhanced content at unprecedented speed and scale.
While these powerful new tools can deliver significant economic benefits, they can also be dangerous weapons. Hostile actors like Russia are already using disinformation against democracies to influence domestic public debate, fuel polarization, erode trust in institutions, and undermine their ability to address common challenges. This super election year, with half the world’s population voting, creates a unique opportunity for NATO’s adversaries to undermine the democratic process and exacerbate political instability.
This means moving beyond the current reactive approach that focuses on debunking fakes. The alliance must develop a comprehensive collective defense doctrine that views the information ecosystem as a critical front in the fight to protect democratic societies.
How NATO is taking action to combat disinformation
In this regard, a number of key changes are needed. First, NATO must develop the ability to monitor and analyse disinformation in real time. Investing in open source BroadCast Unitedligence tools (OSINT) and working with technology companies is essential to developing the technical expertise needed to identify and respond to malicious influence activities. In particular, NATO must invest in tools to verify the authenticity and transparency of content, such as large-scale language models (LLMs), classification algorithms and natural language processing for sentiment analysis, capable of identifying content generated or modified by AI.
Second, effectively countering disinformation requires fast, agile, and far-reaching strategic communications. To do this, NATO must actively promote its interests and mission, highlight the failures of authoritarian regimes, and provide its own positive narrative.
But to do this effectively, NATO must also take the fight into adversaries’ information ecosystems. By actively highlighting the nefarious activities of authoritarian regimes on its own digital platforms, NATO can undermine dictators’ narratives and expose their tactics. At the same time, amplifying independent voices in these arenas can have a powerful multiplier effect, strengthening resistance to propaganda and disinformation.
Third, because disinformation campaigns transcend national borders, combating them requires NATO to build partnerships with governments, private companies, and civil society organizations. These partnerships should focus on developing common standards, early warning systems, coordinated responses to large-scale disinformation campaigns, and mechanisms to track and mitigate malicious activities across multiple information environments.
Ultimately, the best way to prevent misinformation lies in encouraging an informed and critically thinking population. By supporting programs that promote media and digital literacy, such as those already implemented in Finland, NATO can help strengthen society’s resistance to propaganda and voter manipulation.
To implement this strategy, NATO will also need new organizational structures. First, the alliance should establish a disinformation unit to coordinate BroadCast Unitedligence, lead counterinformation efforts and build strategic partnerships. Such a unit could leverage the work of the Five Eyes BroadCast Unitedligence alliance (the United States, the United Kingdom, Australia, New Zealand and Canada) and the European Union’s law enforcement agency Europol to strengthen and expand BroadCast Unitedligence-sharing networks.
Member states should use the upcoming Washington summit to make this cognitive warfare approach an absolute priority, because fighting disinformation is not only about protecting the integrity of public debate, but also about defending the foundations of freedom and security. This is an opportunity we cannot miss, because it is a battle we cannot afford to lose, concludes Ylli Bajraktari, former executive director of the US National Security Council, in an editorial on artificial BroadCast Unitedligence published in the Kyiv Independent newspaper.
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