Cognitive Warfare, AI, and Security: Insights from East Asia

The popular understanding of cognitive warfare focuses on disinformation and AI-generated content. In his opening keynote remarks, Japanese AI pioneer Dr. Tomabechi will explain why that framing is dangerously incomplete — and what cognitive warfare actually is, based on 30+ years of classified and operational research. Following these opening remarks, Stimson senior fellows Jenny Town and Allison Pytlak will connect these general lessons to actual security threats faced by the United States and its security partners in East Asia – hearing from Dr. Tomabechi about how his company, Cognitive Research Laboratories, is working to offer AI-powered solutions to such threats. Before opening to audience Q&A in-person and from online, Dr. Tomabechi will conclude with operational implications, including how to achieve maximum behavioral effect with minimum intervention — and how to design information operations whose combined effect point toward strategic integration rather than fragmentation; that sound deductive mathematical foundations encompassing both kinetic and cognitive operations are necessary to avoid inconsistency — since kinetic warfare and cognitive warfare are no longer separable.