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Tag: Cognitive warfare

Expert Workshop on Collaborative AI-Enabled Sensemaking at USC Capital Campus, Washington, DC

On 25–26 February 2026, I had the pleasure of co-hosting the workshop “Collaborative AI-Enabled Sensemaking: Strategic intelligence in an era of hybrid threats, cognitive warfare, and disinformation” together with Mind-Alliance Systems in Washington, DC. The workshop was held at the USC Capital Campus.

Bringing together senior practitioners working on intelligence and security issues, the workshop explored how AI-enabled collaborative analysis can strengthen strategic intelligence in an increasingly complex threat environment shaped by hybrid threats, cognitive warfare, and disinformation.

A central feature of the workshop was the “Frostbite Fracture” scenario, a realistic grey-zone operations exercise involving Russian hybrid threats to Swedish infrastructure. Within this setting, an AI-enabled decision-support prototype called Sentinel was used to stress-test how intelligence is framed, challenged, disseminated, and acted upon at the intelligence–policy nexus.

The workshop provided an excellent opportunity to examine how human expertise and AI-supported analytical tools can be combined to improve shared situational awareness, sensemaking, and decision support under conditions of uncertainty. It also offered a valuable forum for discussion on the future of strategic intelligence and the practical implications of AI for professional analytical work.

Many thanks to David Kamien & Mind-Alliance Systems, to all participants, and to USC Capital Campus for hosting an engaging and timely workshop.

New publication: Hybrid Threats, Cognitive Warfare, and Psychological Defence

A new practitioners’ toolbox, Hybrid Threats, Cognitive Warfare, and Psychological Defence, has been published by the Hybrid Threats Research Group.

The toolbox consolidates key practitioner takeaways from five publications into a single, coherent framework for countering hybrid threats and cognitive warfare and for strengthening psychological defence and societal resilience. It links short-term threat–response cycles with long-term resilience-building and operationalises national-level psychological defence in a ready-to-use format.

The publication integrates three complementary analytical tools:

  • The hybridity blizzard model, illustrating how an aggressor’s targeting of vulnerabilities interacts with defensive responses over time and situating intelligence at the interface between detection, countermeasures, and resilience-building.
  • The intelligence analysis interaction (hourglass) model, capturing the coupled processes of analysis, aggregated and tailored communication, and reception and absorption among societal actors.
  • The assess–address–evaluate (AAE) framework, a six-dimensional structure guiding analysis, action, and learning for psychological defence and resilience.

Together, these tools provide practitioners with a practical workflow for diagnosing hybrid activity, improving intelligence interactions, and strengthening resilience through a coordinated whole-of-society approach.

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