“The human brain will be the battlefield of the 21st century” – Dr James Giordano, Chief of the Neuroethics Studies Programme at Georgetown University shocked everyone when he made this statement while addressing the cadets at the United States Military Academy. Obviously, there was pin-drop silence…as no one believed that such a thing which was only possible in science fiction could become a reality so soon.
Dr James Giordano is a globally recognised expert on cognitive warfare, neuroscience, and national security. He is Professor of Neurology and Biochemistry at Georgetown University Medical Centre in Washington, D.C., and Executive Director of the Institute for Biodefence Research. Giordano has advised the Pentagon, NATO, and intelligence agencies on how advances in neuroscience may reshape defence, intelligence, and geopolitical power. His work explores topics such as neurotechnology, cognitive warfare, and the ethical challenges of using the human brain as a domain of competition and conflict.
You have been saying that human brain is the future battlefield. Why, and what makes you say so?
It’s a very good question. I think one of the things that we’re seeing more and more is that a number of the scientific developments and technological innovations that are allowing both access to the brain and the ability to affect the brain in a variety of ways are being leveraged in what are known as dual use applications. In other words, a number of militaries around the world, certainly here in the United States, as well as many of the NATO nations and many of the trans-Pacific nations, have expressed great interest in the viability of utilising brain and cognitive science in those ways that would be useful to either optimise the performance of their own military and intelligence personnel and in some way affect the cognitions, emotions, behaviours of competitor personnel, if not adversaries. So, we’re actually seeing more and more vested interest and dedicated programs in the neurocognitive sciences in agendas of national security, intelligence and defence.
As I understand, if we are going to use the brain as a future battlefield, it is going to be a war which will be fought without weapons at all.
Well, I think that’s an interesting perspective, but I think one way to perhaps look at that a little more insightfully is that the nature of what will be a weapon will be somewhat different. In many ways, we may move away from the more traditional weapons of bullets, bombs, guns, armour, ships, although those will certainly be part of the equation, but we will move to things that are far more influential and disruptive.
Information, the capability to directly access individuals’ biology and manipulate those biologies. And in those ways, what we begin to see is a weaponisation of many of the tools and technologies of bioscience and biomedicine.
Is it going to be something new or something that has already happened, which has been happening all over the years that way?
I think there’s been a longstanding interest in a number of things that can affect not only the brain and central nervous system, but its functions in a variety of ways.
A number of militaries around the world have expressed great interest in the viability of utilising brain and cognitive science to either optimise the performance of their own military and intelligence personnel and in some way affect the cognitions, emotions, behaviours of competitor personnel, if not adversaries
I mean, realistically, we can look back to the entirety of the 20th century and begin to see an iterative history of the use of nerve agents, for example, and then the use of a variety of psychotropic drugs, for example, to optimise the performance of military personnel. Case in point, primarily being the use of an amphetamine agent, which was known as Pervitin, that the Wehrmacht, the German army, used to be able to sustain the vigilance and capability of its troops throughout the majority of the Second World War. And then, of course, the experimental uses of a variety of agents, both for performance optimisation of one’s own forces and the possible degradation of other forces.
Probably the most notorious of these was a CIA project that was conducted, known as MK-ULTRA, that was examining to what extent the use of psychedelic agents may be used to either change the capabilities of one’s own operational personnel or to affect, degrade, and manipulate the capabilities, cognitions, and behaviour of others. So I think there’s been a longstanding interest in the ability to access the brain and in that way, modify or at very, very least, gain insight to its functions of thought, feeling, and behaviour in ways that would be in some way instrumental to the conduct of either non-kinetic engagements, such as influence engagements and deterrence and disruptive engagements, or in some cases, the uses of the brain and cognitive sciences directly in the kinetic battlefield.
Would you mind explaining what is going to be different in this new kind of warfare, which has been classified as a sixth level of warfare?
I think what we’re going to begin to see is less of an emphasis upon weapons of destruction and more a use of weapons and instruments of disruption, where the things that are going to be disrupted are the thoughts, the emotions, and the resulting behaviour of those personnel who may prove to be the competitors and or adversaries on the one hand, and then the capabilities that the brain and cognitive sciences afford to be able to maximise and optimise the performance of one’s own forces.
So how will cognitive warfare change the future or the face of things to come and help design and develop new weapons to harm or manipulate the functioning of the captive brain?
I think there’s a number of points there. And of course, we’re limited here to time, but we could spend a very long time discussing this. So in short, I think what we’re really looking at is what would be the categorisations of the types of techniques and technologies that could be used.
So what we’re really talking about here is the use of novel drugs, the development of precision pathogens, what are sometimes referred to as novel emerging or newly created bugs, the development and harnessing of specific toxins that could affect the central nervous system of a variety of devices, for example, the use of various forms of pulse radio frequency or electromagnetic energy, as well as the use of data. And one of the things we’re very, very concerned about is that the ubiquity of data, biomedical data, and increasingly neurological neurocognitive data, coupled with other forms of data, such as individuals, genomes and information about their medical history and metadata being so conspicuously available, and in many cases, having commercialised interests that are corruptible, allow those data to be used in ways to develop what our group has been referring to as precision pathogens. In other words, the idea of being able to understand individual as well as collective vulnerabilities, and then to be able to access and manipulate those vulnerabilities in directable and disruptive ways.
Cognitive warfare has been categorised as a science to exploit the vulnerabilities of the brain through a process called social engineering, as well as psychological manipulation to trick the target and make them commit silly mistakes or give away sensitive information. Is it true?
I think that the social engineering component certainly represents a viable aspect of what cognitive warfare could be. And if we look retrospectively, as well as if we look at the radiant forms of what might be cognitive engagements, particularly in the non-kinetic domain, what we see is that it is very much a level of psychological engagement through the use of manipulated narratives, images, symbols, messaging, and appealing to the sensibilities and sentiments of target groups.
And that is, in fact, psychosocial engineering of a sort. But I think what we’re also seeing is a new dimension that adds to that, which is the biological frontier. And we can think of that in two ways.
We can think of the biological frontier as a passive source of information acquisition with which we can understand perhaps more insightfully how it is that brains do what brains do to create particular cognitive and emotional patterns that can therefore be influenced by a variety of psychological and social means, inclusive of narratives, media, interpersonal interactions, and human terrain team dynamics, as well as the direct capability to be able to actually manipulate that biology in a variety of ways that goes from the cellular all the way to the social.
“I think the nature of what will be a weapon will be somewhat different. In many ways, we may move away from the more traditional weapons of bullets, bombs, guns, armour, ships, although those will certainly be part of the equation, but we will move to things that are far more influential and disruptive.” – Dr James Giordano
They say social engineering has the ability to magnify or exploit human error or mistakes which are unpredictable and harder to detect. What do you have to say to that?
You know, that’s a very interesting view.
I think that one of the things that social engineering is able to do is to look, as I said, both retrospectively and to then in some ways look prospectively to be able to determine what were the patterns of behaviours of individuals and groups in the past, what were the factors that were influential to those patterns of behaviour, and how could those factors then be engaged and perhaps manipulated in the present and future so as to be able to evoke particular patterns of individual and collective behaviour in targeted and vulnerable groups.
This is not new. I mean, we’ve seen this in the past with such things as messaging and propaganda and the use of, you know, large-scale social engagements to be able to generate particular sentiments and pathos in populations that range from the very, very small collectives to the whole population at large, national populations.
But I think, as I said, one of the more interesting phenomena that’s occurring of late is that many of the insights that we’re getting to about the ways brains work both in individuals and in groups of individuals, and those groups of individuals being defined either by virtue of their geographic collective, their phenotypic and genotypic collective, their ideological collective, can then be understood to sort of gain a better understanding of what things could be done with regard to messaging, narratives, symbology, interpersonal and international interactions to be able to generate those types of desirable and directable effects that one group would wish to then incur in another.
So, I think what we’re seeing is social engineering with the additional dynamic of a deeper understanding of the psychological factors that are participatory and both a better understanding as well as increased capability to affect the biological substrates that are correlated and contributory to those psychosocial behaviours and outputs.
–The writer is a seasoned media professional with over three decades of experience in print, electronic, and web media. He is presently Editor of Taazakhabar News. The views expressed are of the writer and do not necessarily reflect the views of Raksha Anirveda
