Study of the Development of Concept Creation
“The date of September 11, 2001 is not only the symbolic marker of a change of era, it is also the expression of an unprecedented dimension of war, one that is waged through information.
The Gulf War, the American intervention in Somalia, and the conflicts in the former Yugoslavia had already provided a glimpse of this transformation.
During the invasion of Kuwait by Iraq, American public opinion was mobilized following disinformation orchestrated by American authorities with the complicity of the daughter of the Kuwaiti ambassador to the United States[1].
The televised landing of American troops on the beaches of Mogadishu, as well as the live lynching of a US Army unit, overshadowed the political-military reality of the local civil war.
In the Kosovo events, the controversy over information manipulation was present from the beginning (diplomatic negotiations) to the end (NATO press releases on the precision of strikes and collateral damage).
This particular dimension of war through information became evident in the staging of the September 11 attacks, shown live by television channels on a global scale.”
Since the Intelco era (see episode 5 for the 1990s period), informational confrontation appeared to us as an increasingly predominant issue in how to prevail against an adversary in an economic confrontation situation.
In the offensive practices of economic warfare as previously conducted, intelligence occupied a decisive place. The main objective was to gain access to the adversary’s secrets: technological secrets (innovations), industrial secrets (manufacturing processes), financial secrets (investment capacity, debt), and commercial secrets (prospects). De facto, the information society broadens the field of possibilities in terms of attack methods.
The Provisional Military Impasse on the Conceptualization of Informational Confrontations
One might have thought that the conceptual approach had been initiated within the military world through the experiences of colonial wars. Starting with the Indochina War, the French army and special services had accumulated a body of expertise in the field of psychological warfare that reached its peak with the “bleuite” operation conducted under the leadership of Captain Paul-Alain Léger.
Captain Léger in civilian clothes at a café terrace in Algiers
Captain Léger in fatigues in the field
This operation highlighted a particularly effective art of intoxication that resulted in the destructuring of an entire part of the FLN’s military apparatus on Algerian territory. The year 1958 was marked by a succession of bloody purges that decimated all the wilayas and particularly wilaya 3 and wilaya 4. Thousands of people were arrested, tortured, and executed under the repressive leadership of FLN leaders who fell into the trap of this intoxication.
In terms of results, it can be compared retrospectively to the operation that the Israeli MOSSAD finalized in 2024 against Hezbollah, eliminating a large part of the pro-Iranian organization’s leadership. The operation conducted under Captain Léger’s leadership was purely human in nature. The Mossad operation was primarily technical in nature.
During the Intelligence at the 2030 Horizon seminar[2], which took place in December 2001, the organizers asked me to speak to highlight new forms of offensive approaches through information operations. The seminar’s assessment underscored the shortcomings of our defensive but also offensive apparatus in terms of informational confrontation. This lag needed to be addressed. But at the time, the Ministry of Defense was blocked in its momentum because of the episodes that destabilized the State at the end of the Algerian War (Algiers Putsch, OAS).
The subject had become taboo.
It was necessary to wait until the Gulf War to timidly relaunch the debate, particularly within the French army’s special forces, which took advantage of the emphasis on psychological operations (Psy-Ops) by Anglo-Saxon military circles to modestly take up the subject in the late 1990s.
Researchers Paul and Marie-Catherine Villatoux analyzed with great lucidity the contributions of the military world in an authoritative work:
The Republic and Its Army Facing the “Subversive Peril”: War and Psychological Action in France (1945-1960).
A Civilian Reading of New Forms of Informational Confrontation
The conceptual contribution I provided in the wake of the work we had conducted within the Intelco/DCI team and extended through the creation of the EGE, helped to “de-demonize” the debate.
It was a way to break out of the impasse created by the aftermath of the Algerian War.
In power relations of an economic nature, the rise of the information society was changing the parameters of victory.
Acquiring the adversary’s secrets was no longer the ultimate objective. The notion of dependence (technological, digital) was taking on growing importance relative to the notion of conquest (territories, markets).
In other words, a State pursuing a policy of power expansion through economics has a growing interest in making a target country durably dependent in terms of innovative industrial solutions, technological systems, and digital data management.
One of the methods to achieve this objective falls precisely within what we had begun to formalize at the EGE under the name “cognitive warfare.” Initially, the definition we formulated was the result of consultation among the co-authors of a collective work[3] entitled “Cognitive Warfare: The Weapon of Knowledge”[4], published in 2002:
“Cognitive wars pit capacities to know and produce or thwart knowledge against each other. The definition we give of cognitive warfare is therefore the way of using knowledge for a conflictual purpose. It differs from the American understanding, which limits cognitive warfare to the way of deceiving the adversary in terms of command.”
At that time, we were caught between two legacies:
- The contribution of the special services world to the military world (with the taboo imposed by the authorities after the Algerian War).
- The Anglo-Saxon contribution—British (with the record of intoxication operations during World War II and then during colonial war experiences in Malaya in particular) and American (OSS apprenticeship from 1941, counter-insurgency operations conducted in the Philippines after World War II, Operation Phoenix in Vietnam, clandestine anti-communist operations in Latin America, the information warfare doctrine conceived in the 1990s[5]).
The influence of thinking from the Western intelligence world and the principles dictated by NATO was decisive. But the approach to reflection on economic warfare in peacetime led us to take into account other issues of informational confrontation.
Power relations between powers studied from a geoeconomic angle led us to the conclusion that we needed to build other frameworks for understanding “civilian” informational confrontations. Political-military legacies did not allow us to understand the informational maneuvers that supported dynamics of power expansion through economics.
The Cold War had opened the way to confrontation strategies of an ideological nature that departed from the classic frameworks of military thinking. The objective was not the intoxication of the adversary’s strategic decision-making centers but the weakening of its societal cohesion[6]. Thus were born strategies of cultural encirclement and counter-encirclement. Between the two wars, communist movements (progressivism), fascist movements (the cult of the State), and National Socialist movements (racist nationalism) had a major objective: the conquest of public opinion. After World War II, the Western camp opposed cultural freedom to progressivism by supporting dissidence within the Communist Bloc. After the fall of the Berlin Wall, American social learning became a decisive element of United States influence in imposing a supremacy of ideas centered around their model of democracy and their way of conceiving the globalization of trade.
The nature of economic confrontations was influenced by these new logics of indirect domination. These cognitive encirclement techniques differed from the modes of territorial and commercial conquest that had previously dominated economic warfare practices.
The concept of cognitive warfare as conceived through the work conducted at the School of Economic Warfare from the 2000s onward, provides a different vision of confrontations between powers than military reading allows.
The current military vision of informational confrontation in a context of lethal war is centered on the detection of intoxication and disinformation conducted by the enemy camp.
The civilian vision of informational confrontation in a context of economic warfare in peacetime is centered on the search for control of the cognitive field in order to isolate the adversary or make them dependent.
It was not a matter of opposing the two cultures but rather of identifying their respective contributions.
