The Missing Domain of War: Achieving Cognitive Overmatch on Tomorrow’s Battlefield
Todd Schmidt | April 7, 2020
O divine art of subtlety and secrecy! Through you we learn to be invisible, through you inaudible; and hence we can hold the enemy’s fate in our hands.
— Sun Tzu
In December 2018, the US Army Training and Doctrine Command published a document—The U.S. Army in Multi-Domain Operations, 2028—outlining how the Army will “compete, penetrate, disintegrate, and exploit†adversaries in future conflict. The document predicts that in an era of great-power competition, where our enemies seek to avoid conventional military conflict, they will confront and challenge US power unconventionally and asymmetrically to fracture and erode our strategic advantages. The document also describes how adversaries are developing and deploying capabilities “in all domains—Space, Cyber, Air, Sea, and Land†to fight and defeat US forces.
There is a missing domain, however, and it will be decisive in modern war and the future strategic environment. The cognitive domain of war has been explored and contested for centuries. Chinese strategist and philosopher Sun Tzu believed that wars are won through intelligence, information, and deception; attacking enemies where they are least prepared; and breaking resistance and subduing adversaries indirectly without fighting.
https://mwi.usma.edu/missing-domain-war-achieving-cognitive-overmatch-tomorrows-battlefield/
