Writes Dr Konstantinos Tsetsos
Head of Foresight | Metis Institute for Strategy and Foresight
Universität der Bundeswehr München
Headline Diplomat eMagazine, LUDCI.eu
Editor:
Dr Vassilia Orfanou, PhD, Post Doc,
Editor in Chief & COO, LUDCI.eu
Summary
This article argues that contemporary warfare has evolved beyond physical confrontation into a continuous, largely invisible struggle for cognitive control. Drawing on Tsetsos’ generational framework, it shows how conflict has shifted from the destruction of military forces to the manipulation of societies themselves, culminating in teleological hybrid warfare (THW), which operates simultaneously to weaken states and capture their perception of reality.
Democracies, due to their openness, pluralism, and reliance on trustworthy information, are uniquely vulnerable to such interference. As disinformation, algorithmic influence, and strategic corruption reshape public perception and decision-making, the distinction between war and peace dissolves. The ultimate risk is not external defeat, but internal hollowing, where democratic systems persist in form while being substantively controlled from within.
Introduction
The notion that war begins with the first shot fired is an anachronism. The generational evolution of warfare, from massed formations on open fields to the algorithmic manipulation of entire populations (Tsetsos 2024), reveals a trajectory in which the boundary between peace and conflict has not merely blurred but effectively dissolved.
Two interrelated questions arise from this trajectory. First, why are modern societies already at war, even absent formal declarations of hostility or kinetic engagement? Second, why are democracies particularly susceptible to destruction from within through the instruments of this new warfare? Drawing on the generational classification of warfare developed by Tsetsos (2023; 2024), this article traces the conceptual arc from physical destruction to cognitive domination and argues that the structural openness of democratic societies has become their principal strategic vulnerability.
From Physical Destruction to Psychological Subversion
The first three generations of warfare (formation, firepower, and movement warfare) shared a common logic: the physical annihilation of the adversary’s armed forces (Tsetsos, 2023). Whether through Napoleonic columns, industrial-scale attrition, or combined-arms encirclement, the object remained the material capacity of the enemy to resist. The state and its military were both subject and object of conflict, and the civilian population, while affected, was not the primary target of strategic action. Despite being present since antiquity, the fourth generation marked a decisive rupture. Warfare became more decentralized and indirect.
Insurgents, operating below the threshold of conventional engagement, targeted the psychological willingness of democratic publics and their decision-makers to sustain a conflict. The civilian population and public opinion shifted from being a peripheral concern to becoming the strategic center of gravity. In societies characterized by high casualty aversion, even modest losses could generate political pressure sufficient to force withdrawal or capitulation. This did not result from a defeated military, but because the political will to fight had been eroded (Tsetsos, 2023).
This shift from the physical to the psychological domain prepared the ground for the fifth generation, in which kinetic (attacks on critical infrastructure, sabotage) and non-kinetic means (social engineering, disinformation, cyberattacks, and the exploitation of artificial intelligence) became the primary instruments of conflict. Here the aim is no longer to destroy armies or influence a target state’s decision makers but to corrupt societies. The adversary’s OODA loop (observe, orient, decide, act) is targeted not for kinetic disruption but for systemic interference. And it is at this point that the question of whether we are “at war” becomes acute because the instruments of fifth-generation warfare operate continuously, silently, and without the signature events that traditionally mark the onset of hostilities.
Teleological Hybrid Warfare: War as Permanent Condition
Tsetsos (2024) introduces the concept of teleological hybrid warfare (THW) to provide analytical clarity to the otherwise diffuse notion of hybrid threats. THW is defined by its purposive orientation as every hybrid measure serves one of two overarching objectives. Both operate on the premise of the maximization of the attribution problem. The first telos – physical THW deploys kinetic and non-kinetic means to paralyze an adversary’s capacity for conventional warfare. Strategic corruption, cyberattacks on critical infrastructure, disinformation designed to fragment social cohesion, and the constant disruption or “resetting” of an adversary’s decision-making cycles all serve the goal of degrading the physical starting position of a potential opponent. This is preparatory warfare in the truest sense as it creates the conditions for conventional conflict by weakening the adversary before the first engagement.
The second telos – psychological-cognitive THW, is more ambitious and, from a democratic standpoint, more dangerous. Its objective is not paralysis but takeover. The complete appropriation of the adversary’s reality. Where physical THW disrupts the OODA loop, psychological-cognitive THW seeks to undermine it entirely. If a foreign actor can determine what a target population observes, how it orients itself, what it decides, and how it acts, the need for conventional force evaporates. The targeted state becomes a puppet, a formally sovereign, procedurally democratic, but substantively controlled from without.
This dual-telos framework illuminates why we are already at war. Hybrid measures of both kinds are not hypothetical or confined to scenarios; they are ongoing, documented, and intensifying. The severing of undersea cables by merchant vessels, social engineering attacks on software supply chains, systematic election interference in Moldova and Georgia, and the instrumentalization of migration flows across NATO’s eastern and southern flanks are not isolated incidents. They are components of a sustained campaign whose coherence lies in its strategic purpose – the physical weakening or cognitive capture of Western societies.
Why Democracies Are Destroyed from Within
The structural features that define liberal democracies (open information environments, pluralistic deliberation, the rule of law, independent media, and the protection of individual rights) are precisely the features that fifth – and sixth-generation warfare exploits. This is not a paradox but a structural consequence of the relationship between openness and vulnerability.
Democratic decision-making rests on the assumption that the information environment in which citizens deliberate is, on balance, genuine. When that environment is systematically contaminated – through AI-generated deepfakes, algorithmically amplified disinformation, and industrialised troll operations – deliberation ceases to function as a corrective mechanism and becomes instead a vector for manipulation. Citizens vote, debate, and form preferences, but they do so based on manufactured facts and psychological triggers. Even rational decisions serve the external actor when they are made based on predetermined information and interpretations. The form of democracy persists; the substance is hollowed out.
Social media platforms have evolved from being battlefields of information into being hybrid means in themselves. The case of TikTok is instructive. The platform collects extensive behavioral and device-level data, including user interactions, device identifiers, and inferred preferences, which are used to construct detailed user profiles for content personalization (TikTok, 2024; Zuboff, 2019). Empirical research suggests that such systems can reinforce existing preferences and contribute to “algorithmic amplification,” shaping users’ attitudes and perceptions over time (Ribeiro et al., 2020). Heavy TikTok consumption among young users correlates with increased political indifference, lower productivity (Shashua, 2025), and more favorable attitudes toward China (Finkelstein et al., 2024). The domestic Chinese version of the same application, Douyin, by contrast operates as an educational and productivity platform. Douyin’s state-required “Youth Mode” restricts users under fourteen to forty minutes of daily use, blocks access between 22:00 and 06:00 and serves an exclusively whitelisted feed dominated by science demonstrations, museum and historical content, skill tutorials, and “positive-energy” material aligned with state cultural priorities (Chen, Kaye and Zeng, 2021).
These architectural differences are not the by-product of identical code deployed in two markets; they are the downstream effect of a deliberately differentiated governance regime in which ByteDance operates TikTok and Douyin as structurally separate platforms subject to divergent legal, algorithmic, and content-moderation obligations (Su and Kaye, 2023). The asymmetry is not accidental; it is strategic. A generation socialized into trivialization, indoctrination and political apathy is a generation incapable of democratic vigilance.
Democratic systems depend on the integrity of their elected representatives and institutional gatekeepers. Strategic corruption, the patient and incremental cultivation of politicians, entrepreneurs, and public influencers through financial incentives, consultancy contracts, honey traps, and social engineering, transform democratic agents into “useful idiots” who, over time, become “weaponised idiots.” The conversion pathway is subtle: what begins as lobbying, networking, or routine commercial engagement gradually becomes alignment with a foreign actor’s strategic agenda. Once embedded in parliaments (national or European) these actors advocate for the lifting of sanctions, the normalization of relations with revisionist powers, and the delegitimation of the very institutions they serve. The opacity of funding channels, often routed through third countries, ensures that the connections to foreign influence operations remain hidden even when scandals surface.
Hybrid warfare is specifically designed to maximize the attribution problem, that is, the structural difficulty a targeted state faces in publicly, defensibly, and rapidly identifying who has acted against it, through what instrument, and on whose authority. Plausible deniability is not a byproduct but a constitutive feature of THW. Democratic societies, bound by evidentiary standards and legal procedures, struggle to respond to threats whose authorship cannot be definitively established. The resulting paralysis itself is a strategic outcome. Each unanswered act of sabotage, each unattributed disinformation campaign, each undetected infiltration updates adversary, ally, and domestic estimates of the cost of acting against the state. The cumulative effect is threefold – demonstrated impunity, eroded internal legitimacy, decaying external deterrence – and compounds as resistance comes to appear futile, alliances unreliable, accommodation rational. The political outcome is secured without a shot fired (Mazarr, 2015; Wigell, 2019). Perhaps the most insidious dimension of cognitive THW is its temporal horizon. The infiltration of education systems, the subtle alteration of curricula, the financing of private universities by oligarchic and foreign capital, the targeted manipulation of young voters through social media, creates a cross-generational distortion of reality. Control over educational institutions secures influence not for a single electoral cycle but for decades. A population educated within a systematically distorted information environment lacks the epistemological resources to recognise its own captivity.
Plato’s Cave as Strategic Metaphor
Plato’s allegory of the cave (Tsetsos, 2024) characterizes the endpoint of successful psychological-cognitive THW – the transition to the sixth generation of warfare. In this framing, the hybrid actor controls the shadows projected onto the wall of the cave: the manipulated narratives, the manufactured crises, the emotionally charged enemy images. The inhabitants of the cave, the citizens of the targeted democracy, perceive these shadows as reality and resist any attempt to reveal the world beyond the projection.
The allegory captures the self-reinforcing quality of cognitive capture: once the information environment has been sufficiently compromised, the population itself becomes an obstacle to its own liberation. Filter bubbles, algorithmic reinforcement, and the delegitimation of alternative information sources create a closed epistemic system in which truth is a manipulative construct and democratic deliberation becomes a performance without content.
The sixth generation of warfare, then, is defined by the complete control of an adversary’s reality, the imposition of will without physical force. It represents the perfection of the trajectory inaugurated by the fourth generation, the shift from destroying the enemy’s body to capturing the enemy’s mind. It is precisely this transformation from – coercion to cognition, from force to epistemology – that necessitates a rethinking of how power, resistance, and agency are understood in contemporary conflict.
Conclusion
The generational model of warfare articulated here compels a revision of foundational assumptions about the nature of conflict, the conditions of peace and the resilience of democratic governance. Modern democracies are not destroyed by external invasion but by the systematic exploitation of their constitutive openness.
Their free information environments, their pluralistic institutions, their procedural commitments to evidence and deliberation. The very qualities that make democratic life possible are precisely those that make it vulnerable to cognitive warfare. What emerges, then, is not simply a new threat vector, but a structural asymmetry in which democratic systems must remain open to function, while adversaries can selectively exploit that openness without constraint. This asymmetry transforms the problem of security into one of calibration rather than defense.
The challenge is no longer how to repel external force, but how to preserve epistemic integrity without undermining the liberal principles that sustain it. In this context, resilience cannot be conceived in purely military or even narrowly technological terms; it becomes a distributed societal function, embedded across informational, educational, and institutional domains. The implications are severe.
Resilience cannot be achieved through military adaptation alone. It requires the strengthening of media literacy, the regulation of platform architectures that function as instruments of foreign influence, the protection of educational systems against epistemic infiltration, and the development of institutional capacities to detect and attribute hybrid operations in real time. Without such measures, the cave will remain sealed – and the shadows on the wall will be mistaken for reality indefinitely.
Call to action
The analytical framework advanced in this article – teleological hybrid warfare in its dual physical and cognitive forms – is not a descriptive exercise. It is a claim about the strategic environment in which European and Alliance institutions are currently operating, and it carries concrete obligations for the actors charged with the defence of the democratic order. European governments must formally integrate hybrid-threat response into the National Security Strategy with named-lead authorities, dedicated budget lines, and measurable readiness indicators. The European Commission and the European External Action Service must accelerate the operationalisation of the Hybrid Toolbox beyond declaratory stages. NATO must translate cognitive warfare from an emergent operational domain into a codified capability area with doctrine, training, and force-generation consequences. The Bundestag and the European Parliament must treat every unaddressed disinformation campaign, every opaque financial flow, and every unattributed act of sabotage as what the preceding analysis has shown it to be – a strategic choice with compounding costs. Recognition without implementation is itself a form of capitulation.
Recommendations
The response architecture required by teleological hybrid warfare must mirror its dual structure. Measures directed against the physical telos – the degradation of an adversary’s material starting position – address a different operational problem than measures directed against the cognitive telos – the capture of an adversary’s perception of reality – and cannot be collapsed into a single policy frame. A third cluster of institutional preconditions underpins both.
Countering the physical telos: Critical-infrastructure resilience must move from sectoral patchwork to integrated protection regimes covering energy, subsea communications, maritime logistics, financial settlement systems, and the industrial supply chains that sustain them. This requires mandatory security-by-design standards for operators, redundant capacity in cross-border dependencies, and accelerated implementation of the NIS2 and CER directives at national level. Counter-sabotage capacity – particularly for subsea cables and pipelines in the Baltic and North Seas – must be built as a standing maritime-domain-awareness function with clear rules of engagement, not improvised after each incident. Supply-chain hardening against software and hardware compromise requires a shift from voluntary vendor screening to enforceable origin-of-manufacture and origin-of-code requirements for critical systems, coordinated at EU level to prevent internal market fragmentation.
Countering the cognitive telos: Platform regulation must move beyond the Digital Services Act’s transparency provisions to enforceable algorithmic-accountability frameworks, with independent audit rights, risk-based obligations calibrated to the demonstrated vulnerability of minor users, and meaningful consequences for systemic manipulation. Media literacy and critical-thinking competencies must be embedded as core curricula from primary education through university, not as auxiliary programs, and their effectiveness must be measured and reported. Academic integrity requires transparent disclosure of foreign funding sources for universities, research institutes, and think tanks, along with due-diligence regimes for transnational research partnerships in strategically sensitive fields. Independent journalism and fact-verification institutions require structural funding insulated from both commercial pressure and political capture, recognising them as strategic infrastructure rather than market participants.
Institutional preconditions: Attribution capacity – the analytical, technical, and inter-agency capability to publicly, defensibly, and rapidly identify hybrid action – is the cross-cutting requirement on which response to both tele depends. This means investment in persistent intelligence collection against hybrid vectors, inter-agency fusion centers with real-time mandate, and legal frameworks that permit action under conditions of calibrated rather than absolute evidentiary certainty. Political-financing transparency, enforceable lobbying registers, and scrutiny of third-country financial flows must be strengthened to close the strategic-corruption pathway through which “useful idiots” become “weaponised idiots.”
Electoral-process resilience – the hardening of voter registries, campaign-finance monitoring, and candidate-screening regimes against foreign-influence penetration – must be treated as a permanent function rather than an election-cycle concern, given the documented targeting of Moldova, Georgia, and the periphery of the Alliance. Finally, Alliance interoperability of attribution and response is the condition without which the Article 5 and Article 42.7 thresholds remain operationally unusable against sub-threshold coercion; Germany’s position as the Alliance’s largest European contributor carries a particular responsibility for driving this consolidation forward.
Societal cohesion underwrites all of the above. Hybrid warfare exploits fragmentation, polarisation, and distrust; policies that reduce systemic inequality, foster inclusive civic engagement, and rebuild confidence in public institutions are therefore not domestic-political concerns separable from security policy – they are its foundation. A society that remains internally coherent is structurally difficult to capture from without, even under sustained pressure. Without such coherence, every other measure above is a technical patch on a political wound, and the shadows on the wall will be mistaken for reality indefinitely.
Biography:
Dr. Konstantinos Tsetsos is the Head of Foresight at the Metis Institute for Strategy and Foresight, University of the Bundeswehr Munich where he advises the German Federal Ministry of Defence on strategically relevant questions of current and future international politics. His work focuses on international security, hybrid warfare, political risk analysis, and strategic foresight, and he contributed to selected NATO and EU expert groups, including NATO MSG-147 and SAS-IST-171. He also teaches in the Intelligence and Security Studies program in Berlin and the Master International Security Studies in Garmisch-Partenkirchen.
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References:
Chen, X., Kaye, D. B. V. and Zeng, J. (2021). #PositiveEnergy Douyin: Constructing “playful patriotism” in a Chinese short-video application, Chinese Journal of Communication, 14(1), pp. 97–117.
Finkelstein, D., Yanovsky, S., Zucker, J., Jagdeep, Anisha, Vasko, C., Jagdeep, Ankita, Jussim, L. and Finkelstein, J. (2024). Information manipulation on TikTok and its relation to American users’ beliefs about China, Frontiers in Social Psychology, 2. Available at: https://doi.org/10.3389/frsps.2024.1497434
Mazarr, M.J. (2015). Mastering the Gray Zone: Understanding a Changing Era of Conflict. Carlisle, PA: US Army War College Press.
Ribeiro, M.H. et al. (2020). Auditing radicalization pathways on YouTube. Proceedings of the ACM Conference on Fairness, Accountability, and Transparency, pp. 131–141.
Shashua, A. (2025). TikTok Brain and Cognitive Costs: Attention, Learning, and Short-Form Video Culture, SSRN Electronic Journal, Working Paper No. 5399417.
Su, C. and Kaye, B. V. (2023). Borderline practices on Douyin/TikTok: Content transfer and algorithmic manipulation, Media, Culture & Society, 45(8), pp. 1614–1631.
Tsetsos, K. (2025). The future of global democratic alliances. METIS Study No. 46. Neubiberg: Universität der Bundeswehr München. Available at: https://metis.unibw.de/en/publications/46-the-future-of-global-democratic-alliances
Tsetsos, K. (2024). Worst cases. METIS Study No. 41. Neubiberg: Universität der Bundeswehr München. Available at: https://metis.unibw.de/en/publications/41-worst-cases
Tsetsos, K. (2024). Scenarios of Russian Influence until 2030: Russia’s Hybrid Influence on the EU/NATO Eastern Flank. Metis Study, No. 42. Metis Institute for Strategy and Foresight, Bundeswehr University Munich. Available at: https://metis.unibw.de/en/publications/42-scenarios-of-russian-influence-until-2030
Tsetsos, K. (2023). Trends and Developments in Hybrid Threats. Metis Study, No. 35. Metis Institute for Strategy and Foresight, Bundeswehr University Munich. Available at: https://metis.unibw.de/en/publications/35-trends-and-developments-in-hybrid-threats
Tsetsos, K. (2021). New hybrid threats. METIS Study No. 26. Neubiberg: Universität der Bundeswehr München. Available at: https://metis.unibw.de/en/publications/26-new-hybrid-threats
Wigell, M. (2019). Hybrid interference as a wedge strategy: a theory of external interference in liberal democracy, International Affairs, 95(2), pp. 255–275.
Zuboff, S. (2019). The age of surveillance capitalism. New York: PublicAffairs.
Further reading:
Further articles and case studies are available and can be accessed via the link below:
https://scholar.google.com/citations?user=sxiHIZEAAAAJ&hl=de
