FPI / June 12, 2025
Geostrategy-Direct
People’s Liberation Army (PLA) researchers' approach to cognitive warfare is in tune with ancient Chinese military strategist Sun Tzu’s belief that subduing the enemy without fighting is the acme of skill.
They are developing advanced warfare capabilities that combine high-technology hardware with biotechnology research focused on the human brain.
Cmdr. Robert Bebber, a Navy intelligence officer, said in a recent report for the Hudson Institute that war is evolving from precision strike and stealth warfare used in the Cold War era to operations and technologies that target an opponent’s decision-making.
Bebber said cognitive warfare is highly disruptive, threatening democratic institutions and sovereignty, and likely changing the basic character of war.
U.S. policymakers have been slow to recognize and respond to the threat because it is new and “perhaps because the American public has remained under a persistent state of cognitive manipulation, which has debilitated the people,” Bebber said.
American and allied military forces and national security policymakers have not “organized their institutions and infrastructure to detect, track and combat cognitive warfare campaigns that adversaries are waging against the American public,” he said.
Washington and Western allies need to develop their own cognitive warfare capabilities to support security needs, Bebber added.
Cognitive warfare specialists cited evidence that China has embraced the development and eventual use of weapons designed to affect the mind. Potential targets range from troops and commanders of adversarial militaries to entire civilian populations.
Details of the work on Chinese cognitive warfare are closely guarded U.S. government secrets.
But clues to what China is developing surfaced officially in December 2021, when the Commerce Department Bureau of Industry and Security announced sanctions against the PLA’s Academy of Military Medical Sciences and 11 related Chinese research institutes.
Commerce banned U.S. companies from doing business with the labs, which were working on biotechnology which was purported to include brain-control weaponry for use by the Chinese military.
In December 2024, the Pentagon disclosed in its annual report on China that Beijing had launched the China Brain Project in 2016. The multiyear program is designed to unlock human cognitive functions and neural pathways.
The Pentagon said the research has included brain-computer interface activities that enable humans and computers to interact and exchange information through brain implants or skull implants.
The report said other work includes “emotion detection,” which is helpful in cognitive warfare to influence enemy troop morale in war and establish control over civilian populations.
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