Nathan Beauchamp-Mustafaga, Jackson Smith
The People’s Liberation Army (PLA) is updating and expanding its long-standing efforts to target countries with cyber-enabled influence operations (IO). It is already planning for IO against Vietnam, while similar efforts are likely underway against Burma, India, and others. Vietnam provides a useful case study as it demonstrates that Chinese efforts go beyond what is most often captured in the headlines and because the PLA rarely states so blatantly that it is employing specific operational concepts against specific adversaries.
Cognitive domain operations (CDO; 认知域作战) is the new primary operational concept for Chinese military IO. It serves as a technologically-driven update to the more widely known “Three Warfares (三战)”—psychological warfare, public opinion warfare, and legal warfare (see China Brief, September 8, 2023). [1] The US Department of Defense (DoD) defines CDO as “combin[ing] psychological warfare with cyber operations to shape adversary behavior and decision making,” with the assessed intention to “use CDO as an asymmetric capability to deter US or third-party entry into a future conflict, or as an offensive capability to shape perceptions or polarize a society” (DOD, October 19, 2023). DoD further explains that the PLA is interested in leveraging artificial intelligence (AI) and other emerging technologies such as big data and brain science for CDO, as the PLA “perceives that these technologies will lead to profound changes in the ability to subvert human cognition” (see also, RAND; June 1, 2023; September 7, 2023, February 1).
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