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Imagine an AI system analyzing the social media history of a deployed soldier and his spouse. Within seconds, it identifies a vulnerability to jealousy and violence. At negligible cost, it generates a deepfake video of marital infidelity and delivers it to the soldier’s device. An hour later, the soldier — an experienced warfighter — is psychologically neutralized, driven to a catastrophic personal act. This chilling scenario captures the 21st century’s newest battlefield: the human mind.
What NATO calls “cognitive warfare” is not simply information operations rebranded. It transcends land, sea, air, space, and even cyberspace. Its purpose is not to control what people know, but to shape how they know it, altering the orientation process that underpins judgment and action. Russia and China treat this as a primary instrument of power: a way to fragment societies and achieve strategic effects below the threshold of armed conflict. The center of gravity is no longer fleets or factories but the shared grasp of reality itself.
The key to navigating this battlespace lies in the work of U.S. Air Force Colonel John Boyd. Known as “40 Second Boyd” for his prowess in the cockpit, he was more profoundly a strategist of adaptation. His 1976 essay “Destruction and Creation” explained how humans adjust their mental models to a changing world. What Boyd framed as the engine of survival, adversaries today have learned to weaponize against their targets.
Boyd argued that survival depends on a relentless cycle: destroy outdated mental models and create new ones that better fit reality. He called the first step destructive deduction — breaking apart frameworks when they no longer match the facts. The second step was creative induction — assembling new connections, often from unrelated domains, into a more coherent picture. His famous thought experiment showed how pieces from a boat, a skier, a tank, and a bicycle could be recombined into a snowmobile. Adaptation, in Boyd’s view, was the decisive act of creation.
This dialectic powers his better-known OODA loop: Observe, Orient, Decide, Act. Most focus on speed, but Boyd’s real insight was the centrality of orientation. Those who can dismantle outdated assumptions and synthesize new ones under pressure gain the advantage. Those who cannot fall into confusion, disorder, and paralysis.
To underscore the point, Boyd gestured to Gödel, Heisenberg, and the Second Law of Thermodynamics. Each revealed limits on knowledge: No system can prove itself fully consistent, no observation is perfectly precise, and all closed systems drift toward disorder. The implication is clear. Any person, institution, or state that seals itself inside rigid doctrines will eventually misalign with reality. Only open systems — capable of destruction and creation — can endure.
Boyd’s focus on orientation as the essence of adaptation resonates with older traditions that grappled with collective cognition. Philosophers and scientists have long suggested that societies operate within a larger ecology of thought. Teilhard de Chardin described the Noosphere as a global “thinking layer” that emerges beyond the biosphere and geosphere, a shared cognitive environment vulnerable to disruption as much as any physical terrain. Cybernetic traditions, from Norbert Wiener’s theory of feedback loops to Chile’s Project Cybersyn, likewise wrestled with how control, adaptation, and learning could scale across complex systems. Boyd did not explicitly draw from these schools — although he did cite Malz’s Psycho-Cybernetics and Spencer-Brown — but the convergence is striking. His model of destruction and creation at the level of individual orientation mirrors the same dynamics of feedback, adaptation, and vulnerability visible in whole societies.
Adversaries have drawn the opposite lesson. Instead of cultivating their own agility, they aim to paralyze ours. Russia’s campaign against Ukraine and the West illustrates the method. Long before the 2014 annexation of Crimea or the 2022 invasion, Moscow seeded separatist narratives in eastern and southern Ukraine, cultivating vulnerabilities that could later be exploited. Since then, Russia has combined overt lies (the Bucha massacre dismissed as a “stage performance”), false framing (Ukraine blamed for the Kakhovka Dam’s destruction), and menacing actions (nuclear blackmail, missile strikes) to generate conceptual chaos. The aim is not persuasion but disorientation — preventing any stable understanding of events.
This approach is rooted in the Soviet concept of reflexive control: feed premises to an adversary so they make choices favorable to the attacker. But today it is supercharged by technology. Attention-based algorithms on TikTok, Facebook, and Instagram deliver content not by credibility but by emotional impact. Shocking or divisive material is propelled to the most vulnerable audiences, bypassing traditional filters of trust and reputation.
Into this system adversaries can inject deepfakes and AI-generated content. Their true value is not in a single deception but in corroding the very idea of truth. If anything can be faked, then anything inconvenient can be dismissed as fake. This “liar’s dividend” breeds cynical exhaustion. People stop trying to discern reality at all.
The flood of disinformation ensures that no creative induction can occur. Societies fracture into tribes, each clinging to its own internally consistent but externally false reality. The adversary wins not by imposing one story but by destroying the possibility of shared orientation.
If destruction can be weaponized to paralyze orientation, resilience lies in mastering creation. Traditional defenses — fact-checking, debunking — are necessary but insufficient. They fight at the level of observation while the attack is aimed at orientation. Real defense requires the capacity to dismantle hostile narratives and synthesize stronger, reality-based ones faster than the adversary can generate chaos. That means agility at three levels: individual, institutional, and national.
At the individual level, the front line is the human mind. Education and training should go beyond information delivery to develop metacognition — thinking about thinking. Military members, analysts, and citizens need tools to recognize cognitive biases, regulate emotional triggers, and withstand manipulation. “Cognitive inoculation,” where people are exposed to weakened forms of manipulation in controlled settings, has proven effective. Games like Bad News teach disinformation tactics by making players use them. The goal is a cognitive warfighter able to run their own cycle of destruction and creation under pressure.
Bureaucracies pose the greatest risk. Their slow decision cycles and resistance to challenge make them vulnerable to disruption. Boyd argued for “Organic Design for Command and Control” — systems built on trust, shared purpose, and decentralized initiative. But here the obvious objection arises: can rigid bureaucracies really move with Boyd’s agility? The answer is no — not fully. Yet even incremental reforms that reward curiosity, encourage dissent, and build rapid feedback loops make institutions far harder to paralyze. They do not need to be perfectly Boydian. Rather, they only need to adapt faster than adversaries can fracture them.
At the national scale, the idea of applying concepts built for fighter pilots may seem strained. Can orientation theory really guide entire societies? The analogy is imperfect: Democracies cannot act with the speed of a pilot or the centralization of an authoritarian state. Yet the logic of openness still applies — closed systems collapse. Resilience at the national level requires seizing the cognitive initiative, moving beyond reactive “strategic communications” to shaping the environment itself. The foundation is a compelling, inclusive narrative that provides coherence and shared purpose. Democracies, often derided as chaotic, hold the advantage here: Their openness allows constant correction, while authoritarian regimes — closed by design — must rigidly enforce brittle state narratives. Boyd’s logic suggests such regimes are doomed to misalignment; their need to project cognitive warfare outward reveals an inability to adapt within.
Democracies can export adaptability. Authoritarians can only export rigidity.
Skeptics will ask whether bureaucracies can ever embody Boyd’s ethos, or whether concepts built for fighter pilots can really scale to societies. These are fair questions. But the contest is not about perfection. It is about orientation under pressure and adaptability at all levels.
The future will not be won by the side with the most data or the fastest AI. It will be won by the side whose people and institutions can best execute the timeless human cycle of adaptation. Winning the war within our own minds is the prerequisite for winning the wars of the future.
J. William “BILL” DeMarco, D.Prof is the director of innovation and analysis Air University where he is also an assistant professor. He is a retired U.S. Air Force colonel with five command tours spanning mobility, refueling, and joint operations. A former Hoover fellow at Stanford and research fellow at Cambridge University, he focuses on operational design, intrapreneurship, and leadership innovation in complex military systems. The views in this article are those of the author and not those of Air University, the Air Force, the Department of Defense, or any part of the U.S. government.
