Great power competition is a popular yet misunderstood concept. Many falsely assume this term simply marks a transition from irregular warfare to prepare for high-end war (see the obsession with lethality in Pentagon reports) against China or Russia. This view overlooks the reality that “competition” already is occurring below the threshold of armed conflict, mostly in the information and cognitive domains. In them, intellectual preparedness, buttressed by an effective education system, is the most important contributor to an active defense.
While the United States commits significant resources to defending its interests in the physical domain, those deployed in the cognitive domain remain dangerously exposed. U.S. political institutions and global alliances are under constant attack, yet we fail to comprehend the severity of this political activity. There are two reasons this occurs. First, psychological warfare does not conform to our traditional image of conflict. As an institution, we hold a mental image of warfare in places such as the South China Sea which resembles World War II naval operations. Such an institutional history is important until it becomes a liability.
Second, in psychological warfare, most activity occurs at levels that fail to stimulate the cognitive interests of U.S. elites and institutions. Thomas Schelling’s concept of “salami tactics,” gradually eroding resistance, provides great insight into this type of activity. Unlike conventional attacks in the physical domain, attacks in the cognitive domain often are intended to go unnoticed or are ignored completely. Because of socio-political schisms, reliance on untrustworthy sources of knowledge to shape diverse reality sets, and the direct connectivity to foreign audiences, the U.S. public and national leaders are extremely vulnerable to two specific aspects of psychological warfare: deception and influence operations. Competing great powers are conducting “active measures” and are using them against the United States and our Allies to gain influence, undermine the credibility of the U.S. political system, and veil their true intentions.[1]
In modern great power competition, U.S. forces must be prepared to combat two types of attacks on these vulnerabilities: deception through incongruity and deception through false congruity. The best defense against these types of operations is to develop the intellectual skills to detect them and counterattacks on our own cognitive systems. In modern warfare, intellectual readiness must be placed on a par with physical and material readiness.
The late Naval Postgraduate School professor Barton Whaley’s work on counterdeception provides valuable insight on cognitive defense. Deception can be defined as any attempt to distort an individual or collective perception of reality in one of the following ways: First, a deceiver can introduce an incongruity to the information environment meant to confuse or overwhelm a target. This can be accomplished by either displaying a false piece of information or by concealing a true piece of material. Second, a deceiver can introduce a false congruity, a piece of information meant to encourage an adversary to stay on their current course and ignore signs of changing conditions. Deceivers can use false congruities to crystalize a target’s perception of the information environment, increasing the chances the target will act in a particular way. A target with a concrete and unambiguous worldview is unlikely to either recognize the significance of contradictory information, or to take actions introducing needed cognitive dissonance. Therefore, individuals and organizations seeking to combat deception must have two goals: first, to identify incongruities and false congruities and weight them according to a priori worldviews; and second, to either incorporate or dismiss them, as appropriate to their goals.
Consequently, detecting deception requires individuals or groups to make continuous comparisons of information from their external environment to their pre-established assumptions and beliefs; from these comparisons, inferences are made and meaning is given to the information. Because individuals and groups weigh evidence in terms of a priori assumptions instead of evaluating each piece of new evidence on its own merits, the resulting perceptions are highly susceptible to human error. Over the past 20 years, the United States has grown comfortable in its position as a global hegemon, and has evaluated evidence on the rise of Russia and China by assuming the global order will not change. This is not the case. Essentially, the United States is vulnerable to an anchoring bias, which prevents strategists and policymakers from revising their estimates of these competitors and their political behavior as new information arrives. While the United States should be treating incoming signals encouraging strategic stagnation with extreme skepticism, this is not happening. As a result, China and Russia are successfully eroding U.S. strategic advantages in many policy areas.
The most dangerous aspect of anchoring bias is that it is likely to persist even if a target is aware of it, making this form of information warfare particularly persistent. Awareness of this bias is insufficient to offset its harmful effects; therefore, the United States must seek active cognitive defense. This can be pursued in two ways: First, individuals must be continuously aware of their vulnerabilities to incongruous or falsely congruous information. If this awareness is attained, individuals can monitor external inputs and effectively parse any deceptive attempts in the information environment. Second, individuals must rethink problems from scratch, disregarding the influence of their own previous judgments. Policymakers and analysts must continually revisit strategic problems in response to changes in the information environment. Both of these methods of counterdeception require that an individual hone cognitive skills like sense-making and critical thinking.
Deception via incongruous or falsely congruous information is also dangerous at the organizational level. Cognitive defense measures for groups rely heavily upon their ability to overcome “groupthink,” or artificially high levels of conformity in decision-making organizations. According to Irving Janis, groupthink results in an inadequate assessment of the information environment which fails to consider otherwise reasonable alternatives. Anchoring bias at the individual level magnifies groupthink at the organizational level, creating vulnerabilities for deception. The best cognitive defense against these mechanisms at the organizational level is what Janis refers to as “vigilant problem-solving.” Policymakers should provide opportunities for accepting cognitive dissonance and be willing to approach problems from different perspectives; thus limiting avenues for deceptive activity. Similar to those cognitive defenses for individuals, awareness of groupthink at the organizational level must be coupled with deliberate measures to combat strategic stagnation.
In modern great power competition, defending the cognitive domain is as important as physical defenses. To do so effectively, leaders in the naval services must recognize the importance of formal education to expand each individual’s valid knowledge base and hone the cognitive skills essential to making sense of the environment. While operational experience is necessary for professional development, it alone is not sufficient to prepare for modern warfare. As noted in the Education For Seapower Study, “a most urgent national security task before us today is to intellectually prepare our leaders for such uncertainty, by equipping them with a strategic framework of how to think about the future . . .” Competitors such as Russia and China will neither play to current U.S. strengths nor wait for a level playing field to exploit vulnerabilities in the information environment. Our adversaries are waging war against our national interests, but through intellectual preparation and fortified cognitive defenses, we will be the ones to prevail.
Endnotes
[1] For an excellent weekly report on known political warfare activities, subscribe to Salve Regina University’s “Active Measures” found at https://www.pellcenter.org/
