The Invisible War

Recently, I had the privilege of speaking before the Philippine Air Force’s Public Affairs and Family Conference at the Villamor Air Base in Pasay City.

I was requested to discuss a concept that was gaining urgent traction in defense and strategic communications circles around the world: the cognitive domain.

I admit that this topic was not all too familiar at first instance. But the longer I sat with the subject, the more I was convinced that understanding the cognitive domain was not just a military imperative, it was also a civic and economic one.

Every institution that depended on public trust, whether it was the Armed Forces of the Philippines or even a mining company, had a stake in this conversation.

Military strategists have long organized conflict across defined domains: land, sea and air. As technology advanced, two more were added: cyberspace and outer space.

Scholars contended that human cognition itself constituted a sixth domain of military competition, one that sits alongside land, sea, air, cyber and space.

This was not metaphorical. Cognitive warfare can be compared to propaganda, disinformation, and psychological operations, and its ultimate goal was to plant ideas, change public opinion, and bring about the active or passive participation of a target, whether a group of individuals or an entire nation.

The author, chairman of the Chamber of Mines Philippines

The crucial distinction from old-fashioned propaganda was the scale and precision now enabled by digital technology. Cognitive warfare sought to exploit vulnerabilities in how the human brain processed information, with the objective of changing not only what people thought about, but also on how they acted.

It operated below the threshold of kinetic conflict and was, therefore, far harder to detect, attribute, and counter. False information was known to affect judgment and decision-making even after being refuted, and exposure to disinformation posed a major challenge to the functioning of societies in the Information Age.

The speech I delivered to our Air Force communicators centered on the implications of this reality for those of us in the business of shaping and defending narratives. And I wanted to be clear: “shaping narratives” was not a euphemism for deception. It was the deliberate, principled work of ensuring that truth reached people before falsehood did, and that it reached them in a form they can receive and believe.

The Philippines was not an abstraction in the cognitive domain — we were an active theater of operations in it. The country was confronting conflict that unfolded without ships crossing our waters or troops landing on our shores, beginning quietly through unseen hands on keyboards.

We saw this most vividly in the West Philippine Sea. By claiming as its own the entirety of the South China Sea under a nine-dash line with no coordinates, one state had embedded a disinformation architecture into its geopolitical posture, seeking legitimacy for deployments that the international community had rejected but cannot easily reverse.

Cognitive warfare had become a vital domain in modern conflict, with adversaries aiming to “win without fighting” by embedding influence operations across both civilian and military sectors. Social media was the delivery mechanism and artificial intelligence or AI accelerated it.

The target was not just military morale. It was also institutional credibility, democratic cohesion, and public willingness to support policies that served the national interest.

I also knew this from mining as chairman of the Chamber of Mines of the Philippines. Mining in the Philippines had long been fought on two fronts: the geological and the narrative. The cognitive attacks against the mining sector — misinformation about environmental practices, fabricated statistics, coordinated disinformation campaigns amplified on social media — were not incidental. They followed a recognizable pattern of perception management. They were designed to erode the social license upon which our operations, and thousands of Filipino jobs, depended upon.

This was why I found it deeply encouraging to speak with the PAF’s public affairs and family conference participants. The Philippine Air Force had invested in strengthening its public affairs leadership and enhancing its strategic communication practices, including through exchanges with allied forces. This is exactly the right instinct and I laud its current commanding general, Lt. Gen. Arthur M. Cordura, PAF (GSC), for taking big strides in this respect.

But building resilience in the cognitive domain required more than communications training. It required a doctrine of truth telling that was faster, more agile, and more trusted than the disinformation it competes with.

The Air Force’s public affairs officers were not just information clerks. They were, in the fullest sense of the phrase, defenders of the institution’s integrity in a contested information environment.

We live in a world where a smartphone can be a weapon of mass persuasion, where a manufactured video can undermine an institution’s reputation overnight, and where foreign interests can wage a campaign against a country’s sovereignty without ever declaring war.

The cognitive domain is the battlefield of our time, and it is already active. Those of us who lead institutions, whether in uniform or in corporate offices, have a shared responsibility to understand it, to communicate with discipline and honesty, and to build the kind of trust that makes communities resilient against manipulation.

In a VUCA (Volatile, Uncertain, Complex and Ambiguous) yet connected world such as ours, perception is not merely optics. It is power.

The ones who understand this earliest, such as the women and men of the Philippine Air Force, will be the ones best positioned to defend it. *