Understanding at Tempo

Join the discussion or just get in touch


News & Blog

News

By Ewen Sime 23 Mar, 2024
Embracing Change: The Shift from Product-Centric to Problem-Centric ISR in Modern Warfare
By Ewen Sime 22 Mar, 2024
Understanding in Complex Environements
By Ewen Sime 17 Mar, 2024
Navigating the Future of ISR: From Targeted Collection to Algorithmic Insight
By Ewen Sime 19 Feb, 2024
Analysing the Opportunity of 2024 General and Organisational Elections for Foreign Information Manipulation and Cognitive Interference
By Ewen Sime 20 Oct, 2023
Cognitive Warfare – Why we tiptoe around the issue?
By Ewen Sime 03 Oct, 2023
ISR and Cognitive Shift Warfare has insidiously shifted into the cognitive domain, seemingly catching NATO forces off guard. This is somewhat surprising, as all Western military academies teach that the purpose of warfare is to change the will and/or perceptions of the target audience. However, operations conducted in Afghanistan, Iraq, and Libya were all focused primarily on the tactical level and mainly in the physical domain. Operations to affect the cognitive domain were considered but not fully understood, leading Western forces to revert to their comfort zone of tactical action in the physical domain. Domains are widely defined. William Dries, in a War on the Rocks article, used the Miriam Webster definition for domain: 'a region distinctively marked by some physical or virtual feature(s).' This definition was further refined by Peter Garretson: 'A domain is a space in which forces can manoeuvre to create effects.' Dr. Jeffrey Reilly, Director for Multi-Domain Operations, defines a domain as a 'Critical macro manoeuvre space whose access or control is vital to the freedom of action and superiority required by the mission.' Dr. Riley's definition is widely used across NATO. While it's relatively simple to imagine a physical domain where access can be restricted and superiority contested, it's more challenging to deny access to a cognitive domain or achieve superiority within it. Yet, this is essentially what Russian forces achieved in Crimea. This presents a significant issue for the ISR community: how to track changes in the cognitive domain? ISR was developed to support decisions, most of which were targeting decisions and a vast majority were physical domain targets. "If the other guy turned up with a tank…" the ISR community would find, fix, and track that tank, providing a decision advantage to our forces. But the adversary didn't turn up with a tank, they didn't even turn up, rather they used social engineering to create a cognitive shift and we were left staring into the void. General Sir Nick Carter summarises this issue well in his speech introducing the UK's Integrated Operating Concept. He describes threats from adversaries as aiming "to win without going to war: to achieve their objectives by breaking our willpower, using attacks below the threshold that would prompt a war-fighting response." Warfare became truly multi-domain and the ISR community, charged with creating understanding at tempo, was implicitly asked to understand the multiverse of madness. 
By Ewen Sime 29 Sep, 2023
Adapting to a Dynamic Battlespace.
By Ewen Sime 28 Sep, 2023
In the beginning, there was… an idea
By Ewen Sime 17 Jul, 2023
Should the Military Listen to Social Listening?
More Posts
Share by: