‘Society as battlefield’: NATO cites Indian military paper on cognitive warfare. What it says

In a seminal work, former military officers Lt. Gen. D.S. Hooda & Lt. Col. Pavithran Rajan put forth a framework to approach cognitive warfare, called Socio-Technical-Cognitive Battlespace.

Representational image | Commons

New Delhi: An Indian research paper on how the human brain is the next site of modern warfare and the battlefield now social has been used as a reference for a publication on hybrid warfare co-funded by the North Atlantic Treaty Organisation (NATO).

In a seminal work, former Indian military officers Lt. Gen. D.S. Hooda and Lt. Col. Pavithran Rajan put forth a framework to approach cognitive warfare known as STCB—Socio-Technical-Cognitive Battlespace—which places social structures, technology and human cognition at the centre of strategic analysis. “In modern warfare, societies themselves have become battlefields,” the paper says.

The paper, titled ‘Beyond the Kinetic: Deconstructing Warfare in the Socio-Technical-Cognitive Battlespace’, was written in January 2026 and used the Russia-Ukraine war to establish how “strategic success and national resilience increasingly depend on the capacity to comprehend, adapt to, and leverage the intricate dynamics binding social cohesion, technical infrastructure, and cognitive influence into an integrated whole”.

The framework was cited in the Polish Association for National Security’s monograph, ‘Hybrid War: Threats to Power Grid Infrastructure’, which had a similar argument that a state can be weakened without its adversary first destroying its armies or occupying its cities. It simply needs to work around the mind to influence society.

The Polish volume, written by political scientists Jarosław Tomasiewicz and Michal Piekarski and defence studies expert Marcin Lipka, attempts to look at how hybrid warfare is evolving rapidly alongside artificial intelligence, cyberoperations and increasingly interconnected societies.

Their central argument by the Polish authors is that hybrid warfare is moving toward what they describe as ‘algorithmic warfare’. In this conception, artificial intelligence acts as a force multiplier, allowing adversaries to identify vulnerabilities, generate tailored messages, distribute them at scale and adjust campaigns in response to their effects.

The objective is no longer simply to destroy an opponent’s physical capabilities. It is to disrupt the systems through which a society perceives events, makes decisions and maintains confidence in its institutions. Ukraine is presented as an important laboratory for understanding these changes.

Hooda and Rajan’s paper for Indian think tanks, the Council for Strategic and Defense Research (CSDR) and Centre for Land Warfare Studies (CLAWS), puts forward the same argument.

“The rapid advance of digital technologies, deeply ingrained in modern life, is having a decisive effect on the conduct of warfare. Interactions across social, technical, and cognitive domains, mediated by an algorithmic substrate—the underlying layer of codes, data, and platform governance that selects, ranks, routes, and optimizes information flows—now constitute a new battlespace as consequential as any physical terrain,” it says.

The STCB framework

Rajan and Hooda in their paper detail three core components of the STCB framework. First is the social domain, with shared identities, trust networks, collective narratives, and the fault lines that can fracture them. Its subcomponents include cultural narratives and historical memory, social networks and trust, public opinion and political will, identity/group dynamics and societal fault lines, and governance/institutional legitimacy.

Then comes the technical domain with cyber capabilities, Artificial Intelligence/Machine Learning, data analytics, communication platforms, and surveillance/sensing technologies that enable warfare and control over the platforms themselves and not just activity on them, which the report frames as a key source of strategic advantage. A key example they cite is Musk’s Starlink being provided to Ukraine.

And the third is what they call the ‘ultimate nerve centre’ — the mental processes of perception, belief, decision-making, and meaning construction. Its mechanisms include perception/meaning management, targeting of cognitive biases, disinformation/misinformation/malinformation, attacks on the adversary’s Observe, Orient, Decide, and Act (OODA) loop, and psychological operations (PsyOps).

These three domains are bound together by what the report calls the algorithmic substrate which is the underlying layer of platforms, models, and control policies that determines who sees what, when, and with what credibility. The report is careful to note this substrate isn’t a fourth domain in the same sense as the other three, but rather the connective ‘nervous system’ that mediates how the social, technical, and cognitive domains interact recursively with one another.

The framework also draws on the OODA loop developed by the American strategist John Boyd, something that the Polish paper cites in detail in one of its chapters. Cognitive warfare, the paper argues, aims to attack the adversary’s OODA loop directly by ‘injecting disinformation and ambiguity (affecting Observe), exploiting cultural biases (affecting Orient), and inducing uncertainty (affecting Decide)’, which allows an attacker to slow or even paralyse an opponent’s decision-making process.

‘The aim is not merely to alter what people think, but to fundamentally reshape how they think, reason, and act,” the paper says.

Both the paper and the monograph then end with how democratic governments, military organisations and even private entities can use the shifting trends in warfare to be better equipped. It’s no longer predicting weapons but about predicting vulnerabilities and the panic it produces in a country or region as a whole and the tools that use narrative warfare.

Democratic governments can make strategies without waddling into propaganda. According to Hooda and Rajan, governments should have a threat assessment framework, national objectives, resource allocation and institutional mechanisms to address this.

The Polish paper argues the same. “The foundation of national security against asymmetric conflicts is and will invariably remain societal resilience and the nation’s capacity to absorb crises without falling into paralysis. The state must continuously shape civic attitudes based on vigilance, solidarity, and trust in legitimate public institutions…without renouncing their essence, namely civil liberties, with freedom of speech at the forefront.”

It is what the Polish paper cites with British historian Mark Galeotti’s quote: “The ‘good guys’ […] can use the same tools just as effectively as the ‘bad guys’.”

(Edited by Nardeep Singh Dahiya)