NATO has begun testing a neoteric form of unconventional warfare aimed at the very minds of its perceived enemies utilising PSYOPs, economic sabotage, informational, cyber warfare, and a new, technologically revolutionised aspect of war. This entirely new branch of combat – designated as ‘cognitive warfare’ – aims to weaponize neuroscience by ‘hacking the individual’ through means of exploiting ‘vulnerabilities’ in the human brain with the desired effect of administering a more desirable ‘social engineering’ into its subjects.
Prior to this development, NATO had sorted warfare into five aspects of operation: the traditional ground, aerial and naval warfare with the relatively recent additions of cyber and space warfare. However, now it has come to consider opening a sixth front of battle – the human mind.
Ranging from cyberpsychology to genetic modification, the new frontier of military neurosciences aims to envelop nanotechnology, biotechnology, and the cognitive sciences with the worrying but, nonetheless, true claim that ‘everything could be weaponised’ declared on the NATO 2040 operations study by the NATO innovation hub – forming an unorthodox but inevitable upcoming front.
An even more worrying declaration made by the NATO affiliated study was that the objective of ‘cognitive warfare’ was to ‘harm societies and not only the military.’ The report claims that the ‘democratisation of automated tools and techniques using AI’ would ‘undermine trust in open societies’, yet it does not take into account how significantly more undermining their proposed militarisation of the brain would be.
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