War is among humanity's oldest social institutions. Despite efforts to achieve peace, people have never fully escaped it. Yet warfare has changed with society, technology, and ways of thinking. Today's shift involves more than new weapons: the structure and logic of war themselves are changing.
War must be understood beyond the battlefield. Its structure includes personnel and equipment, but also education, laws, policy, doctrine, the economy, ideology, social capital, and collective historical experience. Anything that affects the outbreak, duration, or outcome of war is part of that structure.
This view helps explain successive generations of warfare. Bladed weapons gave way to firearms and machines. Air and sea power, communications, intelligence, and computing then gained importance, followed by soft power, psychological operations, and cyberwarfare. Cognitive warfare, ideas, asymmetry, and the coordinated use of multiple capabilities now have greater weight.
Some familiar principles no longer operate as they once did. Surprise was fundamental for centuries, yet attackers in recent wars have sometimes announced a strike's approximate time or location. This can aim to limit casualties or escalation, avoid deepening hatred, leave room for negotiation, or demonstrate capability and instill fear before an attack. What happens in an adversary's mind can matter as much as what happens on the ground.
Cognitive warfare seeks lasting influence over perception. Psychological operations may pursue immediate effects; cognitive warfare aims to alter the processes by which people understand the world. Perception grows from sensation, experience, and knowledge. Errors inserted at any of these points can change the conclusions drawn from events.
Society is no longer merely behind the front lines. In the past, feeding false data to an enemy commander could produce a mistaken decision. A similar logic now operates at the scale of a whole population. Social capital is particularly exposed. Loss of trust among citizens and in institutions, and declining participation, weaken society's ability to withstand crisis. Greater trust and public support strengthen resilience against cognitive pressure.
This matters for terrorism too. An attack's impact is measured not only in casualties and damage but also in fear, the disruption of safety, and the erosion of social trust. Cognitive warfare can amplify those effects far beyond the original event.
New conflicts also include forms of “fighting without war,” in which states continuously threaten, contain, or pressure one another without a formal war, and “endless wars,” in which neither side achieves its objectives or imposes decisive defeat. Technology has changed the field as well. Its volume, diversity, and pace of change are unprecedented, while the boundary between civilian and military applications has narrowed. Armed forces consequently need closer links with civilian scientists, researchers, and technology firms.
But cognitive error can target science itself. The path to knowledge starts with data, properly analyzed into information and developed into knowledge, science, and eventually insight. Distortion and forgetting can derail that path. If data are manipulated or parts of reality omitted, misleading information can displace sound information and pseudoscience can take the place of science.
False data can cause a commander to make a poor military decision. Distorted information in public debate can likewise affect judgments, trust, participation, and social behavior. The cognitive arena is thus a decisive part of 21st-century warfare.
No single technology determines outcomes there. Artificial intelligence, cyber systems, autonomous platforms, bioscience, quantum technologies, and other advances matter together. Their convergence enables new operations, analysis, decision-making, and cognitive influence. As science and technology increasingly affect security, scientists are no longer outside the field of conflict. A country's capacity to innovate and analyze is linked to its strength. Defense institutions that neglect research risk weakness and surprise; ties with scientists and research organizations can enhance their capabilities.
New warfare requires sound understanding as well as new weapons. A society that substitutes distortion and selective forgetting for analysis may make bad decisions despite abundant data and technology. Pseudoscience then becomes more than an academic problem; it can become part of war. Countering terrorism and conflict also means protecting society's ability to judge evidence and preventing cognitive error from turning into action.
In this century, part of a battle may be decided before the first shot, when data are received, analyzed, and turned into knowledge. War remains on land, at sea, in the air, and in space. The human mind has become another crucial arena, and the line between science and pseudoscience may itself be a front line.
By Dr. Reza Jahanfar, a commentary for the Habilian Association
University lecturer and postdoctoral researcher in knowledge management