What, exactly, does a Director of Cognitive Advantage do? It’s not a title most Americans encounter, and it sits far outside the familiar contours of diplomacy, military force, or economic leverage. But as Chenoweth explains, the contest for influence no longer stays neatly within those lanes either.
His focus is often on the gray space - where information, perception, culture, and behavior collide, and where adversaries like China, Russia, Iran, and North Korea are operating with staggering resources and strategic focus.
In this Cipher Brief conversation, Chenoweth breaks down how cognitive operations actually work, why the U.S. has struggled to keep pace, and what it means to give the President an “information option” that’s not simply kinetic or economic.
He offers rare, candid insight into how technology, AI, and social platforms—from TikTok to algorithmically driven personas—are reshaping the battlespace faster than policymakers can write doctrine.
Our conversation is a deep dive into one of the least understood - but perhaps most consequential - fronts of modern national security. Our conversation has been lightly edited for length and clarity.
Shawn Chenoweth
Shawn Chenoweth is the Director of Cognitive Advantage at the US National Security Council.
The Cipher Brief: How do you explain the role of the director of Cognitive Advantage?
Chenoweth: When you look at traditional elements of military power, you probably think of the DIME construct. It's not a perfect construct, but it's pretty good. DIME, is broken down into Diplomatic, Information, Military and Economic, and it's very clear who owns the Diplomatic, Military, and Economic components. But there hasn't been, at least in several decades, a good example of where people have really come to the president and the administration with an "I" option, for Information. And it's a shame because when you actually look at the DIME construct, you don't want to break it into stove pipes. We should think of it as a cell. Each of those elements acts as part of a functioning cell, and removing any of those elements means you have an imperfect or failing cell.
So, I was asked to help put the "I" back in DIME so that we can provide additional options and advantages across the other elements of DIME to national power and provide the president with opportunities to accomplish the Administration’s objectives that aren't just warheads on foreheads or threatening economics or expending political leverage. We can enhance those things, but we can also gain advantages by using cognitive effects through the information environment.
Kelly: Let’s set the stage a bit further. If you were to explain to the average American what is happening in terms of cognitive warfare in the gray zone – the area where conflict occurs below the level of warfare - how would you describe it?
Chenoweth: I think if you look through your military histories, philosophers, politicians, political science, it's all pretty clear. You can pick out the elements. They all have one underlying thread, which is that political victory is the one that matters at its core. That's really what we're talking about. Nothing's changed. How human beings are connected, how technology is affected has certainly changed. But what we really care about is what people do in the real world and the geophysical world, the world we live in.
So, the point of a cognitive advantage is to leverage that so that human beings are taking behaviors favorable to outcomes, to national objectives, which most of the time are also - in the case of the United States - favorable in their own right. So it's core. And that is what we're driving to get: those advantages in what people do in the real world through their sensing, to make decisions that come back to the real world and have the effects that you want.
Kelly: Can you give an example of what that would look like?
Chenoweth: Let's say you're negotiating for a piece of land or a base that you need for overflight intel collection. You're going to conduct a trade-off in negotiations. Maybe it's going to look like, - if you pay more, you'll get more - based off what the value proposition is. But very rarely is it that blatant and simple. So, what you want to be able to do is understand, what advantage would we need in the negotiation? What's actually driving this other party other than maybe just cost or just danger? What’s the risk calculus?
There are cultural nuances that affect things: their understanding of influence, political implications. So, the point would be to understand why they would be interested in this in the first place? What advantage does it give them? What are the cultural nuances? Why wouldn't they do this in the first place? Why aren't they taking this action and what can we do to make sure that the outcome is what we want?
There are other areas where that applies across the spectrum.
Let's say we're conducting counter-terrorism operations, and we know an objective tends to use a particular cafe. Well, what if they were using a different one that day? What can we do to influence them to go to a place that's more favorable for options to decrease our own risk calculus, either because we want to conduct a kinetic strike or make an arrest? Maybe we can't find them. So, what if we use that for our intel collection and our methods to basically make them come up on comms and change their behavior so it's easier to find them, collect on them, and build the data so that we can conduct physical actions to stop or disrupt them? And you can kind of see how that applies across the board.
If you know more than the person you're dealing with, chances are that you're going to be better at accomplishing your outcome. It’s very similar with the werewolf theory. It's a game where two people are chosen to be the werewolf of the village and everyone else in the group doesn't know who the werewolf is. Most of the time the people who are the werewolves win the game because they have an information advantage over everyone else playing the game. So, it's a human norm.
And again, I point out that nothing's new under the sun. It's just that we haven't really thought through the implications of what it means in the information age that we live in - where everyone is connected through software defined radios. We're a long way away from direct sensing where it's communication and things happening in the real world. Now we have sort of indirect sensing where you're fed data feeds and everything else. We can affect cognitive behavior in ways we never imagined, and we really haven't thought through just as we can reach people and sell items. And if I want to find a person whose favorite color is red, who's a military age male who's really into Magnum PI, I can find that person thanks to their radio, and I can craft messages specifically for someone who fits that demographic and move them in a particular direction. That's the first time in history that that's been the case.
Kelly: You have a background that combines both government and private sector experience. Given that technology is being rapidly developed in the private sector, how do you think that background gives you an advantage in this role?
Chenoweth: There are a lot of people who've served in the military and have been contractors but just by happenstance, I happen to have been in a lot of critical locations at critical times. I think one of the advantages that has brought me is that I saw the frustration within the military when the contracting apparatus didn't work. I was also empowered by industry to go and fix a lot of those structures and enable the government to do it, and now I'm getting afforded the opportunity to work on policy to make the system really hum.
I think the advantage with that is that when it comes to the information space, there's no control. And I try to emphasize this to any policy maker or power broker or decision maker that I can find. You can put an armored brigade in an intersection - fully equipped, fully supported – and a U.S. Armored Brigade could own that intersection. There are things you can control. But when it comes to the information space, there is no control. It is constantly shifting, constantly changing. You have a binary decision. You are either going to participate, preferably at a level that matters, or not, and whatever's going to happen is going to happen.
So, you could find yourself in an advantageous information space in the morning, lose it by the late morning, get a stalemate in the afternoon, and win it back in the afternoon – just to lose it again at the end of the day. And when you wake up the next morning, you're going to have to do it all over again. There is no, "We have information dominance and we're done and we can crack our beers and go on with other things."
That's not how this works because every day new information is being injected into the system. People are changing and developing new opinions. Things are occurring and people are going to react to those things, change their opinions, adapt, age out, age in, so those cultural references may change. It's a constant flux. One of the things that from the U.S. government side we're getting our head around is that we need an information carrier group constantly operating afloat in the information environment, effectively. One that’s engaged 24/7 to affect these changes.
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Kelly: It's not just the United States that has gotten pretty good at understanding the impact of cognitive advantage. We see these tactics from China and Russia being used with stunning success. In this role, how focused are you on their activities when it comes to doing the exact same thing that you're tasked with doing?
Chenoweth: They absolutely practice these activities. I call them the ‘CRINKETT’. Every challenge we're generally dealing with falls in the CRINKETTS. It's China, Russia, Iran, North Korea, Terrorists and Trans[national] criminals. And particularly for the nation states, this is exactly how they want to compete.
From their perspective, there are two ways to deal with the United States: asymmetrically and stupidly, largely because of our economic and military power. They get that. They're not interested in a kinetic fight; that is an awful prospect. So the way they want to do this is in gray zone activities, in the information space, in the cognitive domain.
And they outspend us. I'm not going to say necessarily outperform, but I'll say if you want to compete at a level that matters, they outspend us, period. Iran probably spends around $1.8 billion plus-minus a year, maybe more with their proxies and everything else they do in this particular space. Russia - post Ukraine invasion, spends about $2.6 billion, something like that. China - 48 plus billion dollars a year. The U.S., if I take all of the activities from the DoD, the State Department and everything else, and you put those together, you might approach $1.2 billion.
It doesn't mean we're executing those funds either. It just means that that's what we've allocated. When you think about how we outspend to have an advantage on the other parts of DIME, we're hideously underperforming here. And again, all props to the administration. They're acutely aware of this and the support I've had at the National Security Council and across the elements of government - the departments and agencies - has been stellar. And we're going to continue to work on this and get it right because we have three and a half more years of President Trump's administration to get this right, do the reps and sets, and make this a durable policy so that the American people can start enjoying those benefits that come when we're really focused on this space.
Kelly: What does success look like for you in this role and how do you measure it?
Chenoweth: Measurement has always been a funny thing. People will constantly tell me how hard it is to measure these activities. And what I’ve found time and time again is that we're actually pretty good at these activities. The issues with the measurements are, again, participating at a scale that matters. We need to measure behavior change, and in order to do that, we need to have clear objectives. What are we after?
The big part of that is who is the target audience that has the agency to do the thing we want? We spend a lot of time making plans and CONOPS [Concept of Operations] on sub-target audiences that don't actually have the agency – in hopes that they affect agency - and that's perfectly fine. But why are we doing assessments against this? We spend a lot of time and money generating assessments to target audiences that don't have the agency you want. So, let's focus on the target audience that has the agency and let's do this at scale.
For example; I'm in the DC area and I can go down to the Potomac River, drop a bucket of water in the river, and I have objectively molecularly increased the amount of water in the Potomac. There isn't a sensor on this planet that is going to detect that molecular change.
The fact is that you might be having an effect, but you don't have a sensor that is going to pick that up. So, you need to increase your scale or customize your sensing system to the effect you're having. That tends to be where the assessments fall apart.
I’ve heard all the time for decades now that assessments are so hard. I don't find that to be true. What I find is that you've sacrificed assessments for effect, which is fine. It's risk calculus. If I had a low amount of resources and I decided to put as much into the effect I've wanted, that's fine. But at the end of the day, you're looking for the real behavior change in the targeted audience that matters. What are the sensors you have on that and what are you doing to collect that data: public opinion, research surveys, building the networks. We're going to see this exacerbate further as the AI revolution continues at pace.
Kelly: How is technology impacting what you're trying to do, your mission, and then how are you also working with the private sector because the private sector is controlling so much of the technology and the innovation that the government needs to work with. So how are you doing that?
Chenoweth: One of the challenges I see emerging from AI is that there's sort of an assumption that AI will fix all your woes. I've seen the best tools out there do one thing: they model the data they have, and that's the core issue. We don't have the data. So again, I'm back to there's not a whole lot of new things under the sun. And the AI models are really good, and it can allow you to find new insights from the data that you have, but new data needs to be created. So, sacrificing collection methodologies and new approaches to gather the data at the foot of a model is terrible.
The AI snake oil salesman I would deal with in industry all the time would come in and say, ‘Oh, you're interested in that? I could absolutely model you the thing.’ Cool. How does that work? ‘Well, all you have to do is provide me the data and we'll put all this together and give you the insights.’ I'm like, whoa. We don't have the data either. No one has the data. That's kind of the problem. So, let's be honest about what we're doing.
AI is going to be a great boon for industry and for the government and everyone else under the sun. It's going to obviously have impact, but I think as that moves forward, we need to start looking at how we actually employ it. Building an agent or a token for every worker so that they're augmented by an AI that does the thing that they themselves may not be good at or saving them time is going to be amazing, but it needs to be undergirded by being able to detect what's actually happening out in the real world. And those two things are not necessarily - not interrelated. As I said, most things are kind of a whole cell that operate in one unit, and we can't necessarily bifurcate these things and then expect good outcomes.
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Kelly: So you have a mission that is difficult to measure, is hugely impactful, adversaries are using it as well against American citizens effectively, and in some cases, those adversaires are dedicating a lot more resources to this. If you could explaine to the average U.S. citizen how they might be targeted by cognitive operations that are conducted by U.S. adversaries, what would you tell them to look for?
Chenoweth: You need to be mindful of sources obviously. When I look at the construct of how we approach cognitive warfare, I think one of the biggest problems I've had for at least the last 10 years has been the construct of dis- and misinformation. My issue isn't the dis- and misinformation construct. It's the overuse of it.
Disinformation and misinformation are things. They have meaning. But they mean something that is true and people use it for things that are not true. For example, disinformation are lies. The person projecting the information knows it's a lie. They're doing it to accomplish an objective. The bigger problem of disinformation is misinformation. Those are people who are sharing those lies, not knowing they are lies, or taking things out of context like satire, et cetera, and propagating as if it were truth. Those are what those are.
But not everything we have to deal with falls into that construct. There are two other portions to this that we have to be mindful of.
One is missing information, which used to mean that the target audience wasn't informed enough to make a correct decision, favorable to them or anyone else. ‘It's a tragedy that your family member died and you should mourn their loss, but stop touching the body. That's how you're spreading Ebola’, right? Pretty straightforward, pretty simple.
Now that we're dealing with nation states with deep pockets, that's been flipped up on its head and they're practicing active missing information, where they will provide wire services into a country saying, ‘Congratulations, you can use our wire service for free and we'll provide you all the stuff, and that's your biggest cost except for labor. Isn't that wonderful? The catch is that you just have to use our wire service’.
If you think [contextual] stories are going to get into the press through those channels, good luck. This isn't happening in the third world. These are happening in major countries and places that would shock you.
Imagine something like, ‘If you run this story, all our connected businesses that are connected through us or other means are going to pull their advertising budget from you.’ So again, good luck talking about the story in your environment. No one's going to touch it. No influencer wants a piece of it because they're going to lose their incentive structure and their revenue stream. It's things like that.
On the other side of the coin, and the bigger problem, is the rhetoric information. These are the things that aren't necessarily true or false. They are framed by your value system, how you view things, what you think truth actually is.
There are people out there who will say, I think a communist socialist form of government that is highly authoritarian is more stable and therefore better than a liberal democracy. There are people who believe that, and just by saying, well, history would prove you otherwise, it's not a good enough argument. You need to engage with those people at a scale that matters and be prepared to win the argument.
We've seen this time again on the counter-terrorism front where we would shut down the comms of a nobody, and suddenly that person would come back with the reputation that was so valuable, and now they're a terrorist thought leader because the Western world thought that they were so dangerous they needed to be shut down instead of just accepting the fact, that maybe we should just engage with this guy because no one's ever heard of him and maybe we should just point out that he's a moron.
There are ways to deal with this, and just because we don't like something doesn't mean it's a lie to the person that's spreading it. They might believe it. Before we just title something disinformation and say, well, it's a lie and we can ignore it — that is not adequate in the modern era where everyone is connected because, again, this person has connective tissue to the internet. They have web platforms. They can be just as connected as a government if they should choose to be and if they have the popularity, because at its core, regardless of whether or not you're a government or a celebrity or anything else, you are fighting for attention.
Kelly: It’s sometimes difficult for busy Americans to navigate the information space today and know what to believe without inviting some serious time into the source. Do you look at part of your mission in this role as helping people understand more of the context they need in order to make good decisions?
Chenoweth: I've been more on the side dealing with foreign audiences. But even in that regard, I think that it really matters to ask what are the things that we know to be what we feel are objective truths and things that matter? Things that we want target audiences to know because we know it would be better for them and better for our objectives?
And then what are the things where we just want to make sure that if a debate needs to be had, we facilitate the debate so that the target audience, particularly with an American target audience - which again, it's not my forte, we don't do that in government or shouldn't — that needs to be facilitated by Americans pointing out to each other that we do need to have these debates and come to kind of consensus, understanding that there will be disagreements.
Kelly: Do you think your job is going to be even more important in the future or maybe less?
Chenoweth: I've never thought the job wasn't important. I think the thing I'm enjoying right now is that everyone's kind of getting their head around what this means. The overused expression that ‘We need to do some things on Facebook,’ when you would have policymakers say, ‘Well, I'm concerned that that would destroy Amazon and internet commerce’ and your head would explode as you're trying to explain, ‘That's just not how the internet works, man.’
We can be comfortable operating on these platforms and doing things that we need to do without destroying internet commerce or the internet. And now I think a lot of policy makers and industry are all connected. They're a lot more comfortable doing these things. Now is the time when we need to get to where the resources and the permissions really match the ability to get us where we need to be.
I've generally not found too many authority problems. I generally find permissions problems. I find that when it comes to authorities, you almost always find that every organization actually has a framework that allows them to do things. It's just that someone somewhere in the chain can say no and is all too comfortable saying no, because, particularly in the past administration, they were very comfortable at avoiding risk and not as comfortable at managing risk. And that is a dynamic that we have to change. The world is a risky place, and we need to be out there participating in it, throwing our elbows around and managing the risk, not avoiding it.
Kelly: How hard of a job is it to give the U.S. the cognitive advantage in today’s world?
Chenoweth: It's hard, tremendously hard because you're talking about changing culture. I don't think the activity itself and the policy and the things that can be done are hard. I think the hard part will be changing the culture and changing people's mindsets.
We've talked about the fact that there used to be three domains: physical domain, information domain and cognitive domain. We have to explore the information domain and actually call it what it is. There is the physical domain, the geophysical domain. But I like the ‘kill web’ approach. A good kill web will constitute a kill chain that is disrupted, and we have to get out of just a kill chain. We need to get into a kill web mentality when it comes to cognitive effects.
Kelly: Explain what you mean by a “kill web”?
Chenoweth: You have your geophysical world where things exist in the real world, the place where we all live. When it comes to the information domain, though, it used to consolidate a bunch of things.
The reality is that when we break that down into a kill web, you're looking from your physical domain up to your logic layer. The internet is not some amorphous cloud that wanders around. It's composed of a system of systems that live in the real world. It's data centers, servers, modems, et cetera. Where does that infrastructure actually exist? Sometimes the files are in the computer. So, we need to be mindful of where does that work? How does the internet, how do these structures work, the mobile networks, et cetera.
From there, it then creates the digital layer, where all the trons are that exist. You can have effects, that's where your real cyberspace comes into play. That's how the mobile devices work, but that is just data.
Then it goes up to the persona entity level. These are the real human beings, sometimes fake human beings, they're personas, organizations but entities that potentially could be targeted or addressed or engaged, et cetera.
And then there's the cognitive space. The trick in the cognitive space is what happens in the mind. And that mind is influenced by the sensing that goes up through that chain when they process it. You're able to interdict on its way up or influence, and you're able to influence on the way down when a decision is made.
For example, when something happens in the real world, it's communicated to a decision maker, but it's going to go through the logic layer transmitted through sensors, computers, emails, phones, et cetera, to people and entities who are going to process it themselves, communicate it to a decision maker who's going to make a decision based off that information, or an individual or a bunch of individuals.
They're all going to make decisions on how to react to that or not react to that. And that's going to go back down to the physical world when they say, ‘I don't really like what is happening’, or maybe ‘I do like what's happening. Let's do the thing’. They're going to communicate that down to ‘Yes, launch the missiles’, or ‘Let's have a protest’. So, you can affect the chain up. You can affect the chain down, but that's how it works.
We as the United States have a pipe that exists inside that kill web structure - so does everyone else. And it doesn't matter if you're a nation state or a family or an individual. You have your sensing sources.
As I mentioned earlier, the direct conversations between people in the real world - even now, you and I are communicating completely over that entire structure - and that structure could be affected on the way up as we're communicating to when this is finally produced and goes back out to the real world where suddenly I have AI effects on me and I'm saying things I never meant to say, but the rest of the world's now interpreting that.
I didn't say that, that wasn't my cognitive decision, but you intercepted on the way down and now you would inadvertently affect everyone else's cognitive approach to what I'm communicating.
Kelly: What does the future from a technology and AI standpoint really look like?
Chenoweth: It's having fundamental changes. It's going to be interesting to see what happens in the entertainment industry as AI takes over and suddenly people can have more access. We've seen how the music industry went through huge change just on streaming music. We're about to witness what this is going to look like from our more traditional platforms. We've seen how things move from streaming. I think there is a level of adaptation that's going to go with that.
One of the things that needs to be addressed is how exactly we're going to engage. There is a point where we need to be comfortable with giving sort of guidance to the AIs - human in the loop - but if you think that you're going to be able to review every single message that needs to go out in an AI-driven world, you're out of your mind.
So, you need to be able to be comfortable generating for your target audience profiles and give sort of thematic guidance and let the AI do some level of engagements against foreign audiences to steer conversations in a particular direction, or at least identify where a conversation might be going so you can intervene when it looks like decisions are being made in a bad way, and then find out if that is an open and honest cultural nuance thing where it is about engagement or if it's being steered by your opponent.
I think that we are not far, and we're probably already in a game, where there are AIs versus AIs as we speak in the information environment.
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