When Perception Becomes the Battlespace: What a Military Exercise Revealed About Cognitive Warfare
Beyond naval manoeuvres: Perception as battlespace in Mare Aperto 2025 – strategic communication and cognitive warfare in joint-force training
“The next battlefield is not only where forces manoeuvre. It is where people interpret what is happening.”
Over the last few years, cognitive warfare has become one of the most discussed concepts in defence and security. NATO, national militaries, policymakers, and researchers increasingly recognize that modern conflict extends beyond land, sea, air, cyber, and space.
Yet despite the growing attention, one question remains surprisingly underexplored:
How do cognitive effects actually emerge?
Most discussions focus on doctrine. Others analyse disinformation campaigns after they happen.
But far fewer studies examine the communication dynamics that generate those effects while they are unfolding.
That is precisely what motivated our latest article, co-authored with Martina Frizzo and Kirsten Wild, recently published in Media, War & Conflict.
We often think conflict begins with an attack.
Increasingly, it begins with an interpretation.
Before people decide what to believe... before institutions decide how to respond... before political leaders make decisions...
they first interpret reality.
And those interpretations are increasingly shaped inside complex communication environments.
In other words, perception itself has become operational terrain.
This idea is not entirely new.
But we still know remarkably little about the mechanisms that make some messages spread, some narratives dominate, and some actors become unexpectedly influential.
A military exercise as a research laboratory
Our research was conducted during Mare Aperto 2025, the Italian Navy’s largest annual joint exercise.
Rather than studying real-world crises retrospectively, we observed communication dynamics as they emerged inside a controlled yet highly realistic operational environment. The exercise included simulated information operations, strategic communication activities, and interactions on a dedicated Mastodon platform where institutional, anonymous, and hybrid actors engaged in real time.
To analyse these dynamics, we combined:
Natural Language Processing
Social Network Analysis
Qualitative communication analysis
Real-time sentiment monitoring
The objective was not to identify who was “winning” the information battle.
It was to understand how cognitive disruption emerges.
One finding surprised us
Many assume that the most influential messages are simply those containing the most information.
They were not.
Instead, we consistently observed that messages sharing three characteristics generated the greatest engagement:
🧠 High emotional salience
⚡ Strong temporal relevance
✂️ Low informational density
Short.
Emotional.
Well timed.
These messages produced deeper conversations, more replies, and greater interaction than longer, information-rich communications.
This suggests that communicative effectiveness in contested environments depends less on informational completeness than on the interaction between emotion, timing, and ambiguity.
Ambiguity may be more powerful than falsehood
Perhaps the most interesting result concerns strategic ambiguity.
We often discuss misinformation as something that is either true or false.
Reality appears considerably more nuanced.
Actors whose identity remained intentionally unclear, mixing irony, satire, neutrality, or hybrid positioning, generated disproportionate levels of interaction and interpretive disagreement. Rather than persuading audiences directly, ambiguity delayed attribution, fragmented conversations, and created uncertainty about who was speaking and with what intent.
This suggests that influence does not necessarily require convincing people.
Sometimes it is enough to make them uncertain.
Cognitive warfare is fundamentally communicative
One of the central arguments of the article is that the cognitive dimension should not only be viewed as a doctrinal concept.
It should also be understood as a communication phenomenon.
Communication does not merely transmit information.
It structures attention. Shapes interpretation. Builds trust. Creates identities. And ultimately influences decision-making.
This perspective connects cognitive warfare with strategic communication, organizational communication, and hybrid media theory rather than treating them as separate conversations.
Why this matters
The implications extend well beyond military exercises.
The same dynamics appear across contemporary crises:
Hybrid threats
Strategic competition
Election interference
Crisis communication
Humanitarian operations
Public trust
National resilience
Understanding how communication shapes cognition may become just as important as understanding the technologies that distribute it.
Looking ahead
This research also raises broader questions.
How should organizations train for environments where attribution is uncertain?
How can institutions respond before ambiguity turns into polarization?
Can we develop forms of cognitive situational awareness that detect disruption while it is emerging rather than after it has already spread?
These are some of the questions we continue to explore in our broader research on cognitive warfare and strategic communication.
Because if perception increasingly becomes part of the battlespace, understanding communication is no longer simply a public affairs issue.
It becomes a strategic capability.
A personal note: Research is rarely a linear process. During the exercise, one particular user challenged our assumptions, and even managed to deceive our analytical expectations. That experience became a valuable reminder that, in cognitive warfare, ambiguity is not just something to study; it is something researchers can experience firsthand. Sometimes, a single user can open an entirely new perspective. To that member of the exercise community: thank you for challenging us.
This work would not have been possible without the dedication of the StratCom Analysis Team during Mare Aperto 2025, the opportunity provided by the Centro Alti Studi Difesa School of Advanced Defence Studies (CASD), and the support of the Italian Navy in making this unique environment possible.
📖 Reference
Russo, Sara, Martina Frizzo, and Kirsten Wild. 2026. “Beyond Naval Manoeuvres: Perception as Battlespace in Mare Aperto 2025 – Strategic Communication and Cognitive Warfare in Joint-Force Training.” Media, War & Conflict. https://doi.org/10.1177/17506352261462749.
#CognitiveWarfare #StrategicCommunication #CognitiveSecurity #HybridThreats #InformationWarfare #MilitaryInnovation #MediaWarConflict #NATO #DefenceStudies #SocialNetworkAnalysis #OrganizationalCommunication #InfluenceOperations #StrategicStudies #SecurityResearch #MilitaryExercises #CognitiveWarfareResearchOSINTInsights Giulio Boffo
I don’t want to digress on the topic... My academic track literally explores hybrid warfare and strategic interaction but mind is a goof and I can’t help but make the link a book I read a while ago called “Unseen Warfare” which is to a very interesting degree about how to fight spiritual warfare…
How far is cognitive from spiritual warfare … Maybe not that far except maybe a minor semantic discussion away …