The essence of cognitive confrontation is knowledge confrontation and intellectual competition. Adversaries need to have full cognition, deep understanding and rapid response to the cyber environment, threats, targets, and opponents, and the analysis, judgment, decision-making, will and other cognitive level.  We will cover concepts in Cognitive Warfare, Gray Zone Tactics, Disinformation, Influence Operations, Information Operations, Color Revolutions, Neuro-Linguistic Program, Private Intelligence Firms, Psychological portrait according to the method of 7 radicals and more.

Ability, will directly affect cyber confrontations, the organization of the campaign, the decision of the strategy, and the trend and success or failure of the engagement. The concept of winning and losing in cognitive warfare has expanded from "hard damage to compete for battlefield space and focus on destroying the enemy's living forces" to "soft penetration affecting morale and people's hearts, and cognitive games interfering with the adversary's command and decision-making". Cognitive confrontation in human warfare will be upgraded from intellectual competition and knowledge confrontation between people to AI. But first, we as humans need to learn all we can about cognitive warfare.

We include review of cognitive warfare approaches, a potential framework, historical examples, rational processes, bias in perception and cognition, decision making and time pressures, domains of conflict and combatants, factors influencing decisions, speed and overload, manipulating situational awareness, inducing behavioral change using deception, distraction, distrust, chaos, and confusion.

Students learn to assess adversaries for susceptibility to cognitive weapons and what to observe for potential impacts. Students will learn methods of deception to deceive adversaries, distraction tactics, content creation for distrust, as well as methods of deployment. These methods are included in student created cognitive campaigns that are continuous from multiple vectors. Students will learn cognition of targets while understanding worlds of social media, information, intelligence, and other online vectors. We also cover the issues associated with measuring campaign effectiveness and influence analysis

Validated and registered students receive preparation information 1 week prior to class start.

Corporate accounts are not Gmail, Hotmail, Yahoo, Mail, Hushmail, Protonmail, and the like). Treadstone 71 reserves the right to restrict course registration based upon certain risk factors. This course presents the student with foundational concepts and processes in the discipline of cyber counterintelligence with a focus on cyber counterintelligence missions, defensive counterintelligence, offensive counterintelligence, and counterespionage as these realms apply to traditional tradecraft, and how they are or will evolve into the cyber domain. The course includes a very different approach to counterintelligence using models exhibited online over the past few years to steer the conversation to the desired outcome