Emotionally based strategic communications as a new tool in defensive cognitive warfare

In modern cognitive warfare, adversaries deliberately target human cognition, emotion, belief, trust, and decision-making processes, seeking to destabilize democratic societies through disinformation and divergent media campaigns. This article argues that the growing accessibility and vulnerability of the human emotional brain to external influence in a technologically connected world has important repercussions for global defense and security strategy. Recent EU/NATO strategic documents emphasize the need to strengthen resilience, counter hybrid/cognitive threats, and protect societies against disinformation and manipulation. Resilience to cognitive warfare, however, depends on distributed societal capacities for emotional literacy, deliberation, and comprehension-grounded in emotional and cognitive superiority, political culture, robust democratic institutions, and an informed public. Deep security crises and prolonged military conflicts arouse strong negative emotions among affected individuals, groups, and societies. Accordingly, this article proposes Emotionally Based Strategic Communications (EBSC) as a scientifically and ethically grounded approach for applying cognitive neuroscience and artificial intelligence (AI) to design emotionally resonant, legitimate, and strategically aligned communications, aiming to strengthen societal cohesion, counter adversary narratives, and build societal resilience against cognitive threats. EBSC provides tools for identifying and transforming dominant emotional states within target populations through the intentional design of structured multimodal narratives, language, imagery, and symbolic framing, with the aim of positively reconfiguring collective emotions without coercion. EBSC is conceptualized as a Large Language Model (LLM)-based systematic approach to strategic communications, which senses the emotional climate of target populations via social-sentiment analysis algorithms applied to various open digital sources; interprets and contextualizes this emotional climate; conducts design and development of appropriate output messages; delivers these messages across mass media; assesses their impact; and adapts them in a real-time closed loop, under supervision of accountable human decision-makers. The article calls for integrating the proposed closed-loop, LLM-based EBSC approach into the European defense ecosystem and strategic communications policy, aligned with EU frameworks on resilience and counter-disinformation. Such integration may offer a means of bridging cognitive neuroscience and AI into operational, scientifically informed, and emotionally resonant strategic communications that counter adversary narratives, prepare the public to resist disinformation and psychological pressure, and strengthen trust, cohesion, and overall societal resilience among EU/NATO allies.