China’s Focus on “Controlling Narratives with Intelligence”: The New Frontier of Chinese Cognitive Warfare

中國聚焦「用情報控制敘事」:中國認知戰新前沿

現代英語:

【Military Academy】

  Author: Wu Xiaojian (PhD student at the School of Military and Political Basic Education, National University of Defense Technology)

  At present, the world’s military powers have stepped up cutting-edge research on cognitive domain operations, relying on language to build a narrative discourse system that can win the battlefield, and seek to create asymmetric advantages at the narrative discourse level. Looking to the future, narrative games are playing an increasingly important role in shaping self-interest, conducting cognitive manipulation, and releasing the fog of war. The “weaponization” tendency of its soft power attributes to hard power attributes is becoming increasingly obvious. Against this background, narrative games have become a new frontier for major powers’ cognitive domain operations.

  The “cognitive” nature of narrative

  Narrative is the narration of a story, which consists of two parts: “narration” and “story”. The former answers the question of “how to tell”, while the latter is related to “what to tell”. Human attention to narrative began in the field of literature, and then expanded to other fields such as film, television, fine arts, music, and news communication. With the continuous advancement of human cognition, the concept of narrative has been extended to the fields of politics, economy, military, culture, and citizens’ personal lives, from which narrative concepts such as national macro-narrative, social meso-narrative, and individual micro-narrative have been derived. While the narrator tells the story, through the artificial arrangement of narrative person, time, perspective, focus and other strategies, the audience is subtly influenced by the values ​​and ideology behind the story while understanding the story. This is the “cognitive nature” of narrative.

  The connotations of narrative game are very rich. It covers macro-narratives such as a country’s military thought, military concepts, and military terminology, as well as meso-narratives of agenda setting such as military law, rules of engagement, combat standards, regulations, and war ethics. It also involves micro-narratives such as narratives of war progress and heroic figures in military history and war history.

  Narratives are to cognition what ammunition is to guns. On the eve of the Iraq War, in order to create a cognitive situation of “just cause”, the United States used a small bottle of “white powder” to fabricate the so-called “weapons of mass destruction” and created the “narrative key” for the US invasion of Iraq. In the current Russia-Ukraine conflict, Russia and Western countries have carried out a high-intensity narrative confrontation, each doing its best to shape a self-interested public opinion situation. At present, Western militaries represented by the United States rely on their discourse hegemony to shape narratives into the “main battlefield” of cognitive domain operations. On the one hand, they actively promote ideological output through the Internet and social media, and on the other hand, they influence the formulation of military strategies and the development of national defense forces in other countries by hyping new weapons and equipment and fresh combat concepts.

  Narrative Game and Great Power Competition

  Wars obey politics, and strategies obey policies. Narrative games are ultimately tools for achieving the political goals behind wars. In the process of great power competition in different historical periods, narratives generally serve the overall domestic and foreign affairs of a country, and they use strategic thinking, theoretical concepts, laws and regulations, and political declarations within the macro-political framework that obeys and serves national interests. In the 1930s, the United States enacted the Neutrality Act under the influence of its isolationist foreign policy, but as the threat of fascism grew, especially after Japan’s attack on Pearl Harbor, its foreign policy took a major turn, changing its previous narrative discourse system of neutrality and declaring war on Japan, which profoundly affected the fate of the United States and reshaped the world’s political landscape. After entering the new century, the United States, based on the political purpose of enhancing its own political and military status and establishing a unilateral order, launched the narrative logic of the so-called “weapons of mass destruction” agenda to provoke the Iraq War, which to a certain extent achieved its political plot.

  Faced with a complex external environment, it is a necessary measure for major powers to maintain national security by improving their narrative game capabilities that are in line with their national conditions and commensurate with their military strength. At present, the political nature of great power competition has not been weakened by the evolution of war forms, but has been significantly strengthened. Narrative games must follow the strategic policy of obeying and serving the country and the military as the fundamental principle of operations, defend national sovereignty and development interests as the ultimate mission, value offense and defense as the central task, and cognitive competition as the core goal. In peacetime, they should serve as a “mouthpiece” to shape the image of their own military forces, win support, and convey deterrence. In wartime, they should become a “blade” to cooperate with physical strikes to politically and organizationally divide opponents, shake the enemy, and disintegrate the enemy.

  In today’s world, the fierce competition between major powers has integrated narrative games into the entire process of military cognitive games. Before the military game between major powers, both sides first frequently declare their respective positions and show their will through various channels, convey the justice and necessity of their military struggle, and shape a self-interested situation at the moral and ethical level to gain broad support from the domestic people and the international community; in the process of the game, both sides convey their new progress and achievements in military strategies and tactics, weapons and equipment, combat readiness training and personnel modernization through various means according to the times and circumstances, shape their own dominant position, and cast cognitive fog to cause hesitation, panic and shaken will of the other side’s domestic military and civilians; once the game comes to an end, the winning side will look back on its game process from a grand narrative perspective, and by shaping the image of a winner with both deterrence and affinity, it will demonstrate the winner’s strength and position, and consolidate the victory of the game.

  Building a powerful military narrative discourse system is the basis for conducting cognitive offensive and defensive operations. Narrative games under the background of great power competition require actively finding the points of convergence between cognitive warfare, public opinion warfare, psychological warfare, etc. in terms of elements, information and cognition. The fierce competition among great powers in the fields of public opinion, psychology, and brain control has given narrative games a broader interpretation space and strategic significance. The core of public opinion warfare is the struggle for narrative dominance, and behind it is the competition for international communication power; psychological warfare is a deep-level confrontation about core values, and narrative provides it with a “script” for interpreting and conveying different values; brain control warfare is a combat style that deeply integrates brain science and artificial intelligence. Narrative provides a powerful weapon for information implantation in the competition for cognitive space such as reading the brain, imitating the brain, and controlling the brain, which directly targets the brain.

  “Controlling Narration with Intelligence” is on the agenda

  With the rapid development of science and technology such as cognitive science, computer science, and brain science, and the accelerated evolution of intelligent warfare with ubiquitous intelligence, interconnectedness, human-machine integration, and full-domain collaboration, narrative games have surpassed the traditional scope of “verbal battles” and entered a new era of unbounded generalization, deep integration, and algorithms as king.

  ChatGPT, which has recently become popular all over the world, further reveals the generalization of “narratives are everywhere” in the intelligent era. The continuous progress of technologies such as natural language processing, video image processing, deep learning, big data analysis, and cloud computing has promoted the rapid development of language intelligence, making text, sound, image, video and other tangible or intangible “language” carriers included in the narrative category, greatly expanding the field of narrative games, and leading the competition of major powers to social life, film and television entertainment, news dissemination, education and teaching, etc. beyond hot conflicts, significantly deepening the complexity of cognitive domain confrontation, and greatly enhancing the full-time, global and interactive nature of multimodal narratives. Narrative games in the context of great power competition include psychological narratives, legal narratives, public opinion narratives, information narratives, etc. Once artificial intelligence is integrated with multi-domain narrative games, its weaponization effectiveness may increase geometrically.

  In the future, the narrative game under the competition of major powers will be based on powerful algorithms, and its core lies in “controlling narrative with intelligence”, and the “intelligence” of intelligence must be realized by algorithms. For example, through powerful algorithms, big data technology can accurately draw the enemy’s cognitive landscape, and achieve “customized on demand” control of enemy cognition, and induce the enemy to obey our narrative script in an intelligent, precise and detailed way in the game, ensuring that the narrative dominance of the game is firmly controlled by us.

現代國語:

資料來源:光明網-《光明日報》 | 2023年04月30日 06:55
原文標題:「以智駕馭敘」:認知戰的新邊疆
【講武堂】

作者:武嘯劍(國防科技大學軍政基礎教育學院博士研究生)

當前,世界軍事強國紛紛加緊認知域作戰前沿性研究,以語言為依托打造決勝疆場的敘事話語體系,謀求塑造敘事話語層面的非對稱優勢。展望未來,敘事博弈在塑造利己態勢、開展認知操控、釋放戰爭迷霧等方面正扮演著愈發重要的角色,其軟實力屬性向硬實力屬性過渡的「武器化」傾向日漸明顯。在此背景下,敘事博弈成為大國認知域作戰的新邊疆。

敘事的“認知性”

敘事就是對故事的敘述,由「敘述」和「故事」兩部分組成,前者回答「怎麼講」的問題,後者則與「講什麼」有關。人類對敘事的關注始於文學領域,隨後擴展到影視、美術、音樂等藝術領域和新聞傳播等其3他領域。隨著人類認知的不斷進步,敘事的概念延伸到政治、經濟、軍事、文化、公民個人生活等範疇,由此衍生出國家宏觀敘事、社會中觀敘事、個體微觀敘事等敘事概念。敘事者講述故事的同時,透過敘事人稱、時間、視角、聚焦等策略的人為安排,使受眾在理解故事的同時潛移默化地被故事背後的價值觀和意識形態影響,這就是敘事的“認知性” 。

敘事博弈涉及的內涵十分豐富,既涵蓋一國軍事思想、軍事概念、軍事術語等宏觀敘事,也包括軍事法律、交戰規則、作戰標準、條令條例、戰爭倫理等議程設定的中觀敘事,也涉及軍史戰史中的戰爭進程敘事和英雄人物敘事等微觀敘事。

敘事之於認知,好比彈藥之於槍砲。伊拉克戰爭前夕,美國為塑造「師出有名」的認知態勢,借一小瓶「白色粉末」羅織所謂「大規模殺傷性武器」的莫須有之罪,打造了美軍入侵伊拉克的「敘事之鑰」。在這次俄烏衝突中,俄羅斯與西方國家展開了高強度敘事對抗,為塑造利己輿論態勢各盡其能。當前,以美國為代表的西方軍隊依託其掌控的話語霸權,將敘事塑造為認知域作戰的“主戰場”,一方面通過互聯網和社交媒體積極推進意識形態輸出,另一方面通過炒作新型武器裝備和新鮮作戰概念,影響別國軍事戰略制定和國防軍隊建設發展走向。

敘事博弈與大國競爭

戰爭服從政治,戰略服從政略。敘事博弈歸根究底是實現戰爭背後政治目的的工具。在不同歷史時期的大國競爭過程中,敘事在整體上服務於國家內政外交大局,在服從和服務於國家利益的宏觀政治框架內以戰略思想、理論概念、法律法規、政治宣言等形式施展縱橫捭閔之術。在1930年代,美國受孤立主義外交政策影響制定了《中立法》,但隨著法西斯的威脅日漸增長,特別是日本偷襲珍珠港後,其對外政策出現重大轉向,一改以往奉行中立的敘事話語體系並對日宣戰,從而深刻影響了美國國運,重塑了世界政治格局。進入新世紀後,美國從提升自身政治軍事地位、建立單邊主義秩序的政治目的出發,發動所謂「大規模殺傷性武器」議程的敘事邏輯挑起伊拉克戰爭,某種程度上實現了其政治圖謀。

面對錯綜複雜的外在環境,提升符合本國國情且與本國軍事實力地位相稱的敘事博弈能力,是大國維護國家安全的必要舉措。當前,大國競爭的政治屬性並未因為戰爭形態的演進而削弱,反而顯著地加強了。敘事博弈必須以服從服務於國家和軍隊的戰略方針為作戰根本遵循,以捍衛國家主權和發展利益為終極使命,以價值攻防為中心任務,以認知爭奪為核心目標,在平時當好「喉舌「為本國軍事力量塑造形象、爭取支持、傳遞威懾,在戰時成為「刀鋒」配合物理打擊從政治和組織上分化對手、動搖敵人、瓦解敵軍。

當今世界,大國之間的激烈較量已將敘事博弈融入軍事認知博弈的整個流程。大國軍事賽局前,雙方先透過多種管道頻繁宣示各自立場、展現各自意志,向外傳達己方開展軍事鬥爭的正義性必要性,在道義和倫理層面塑造利己態勢,以獲取國內民眾和國際社會的廣泛支持;在博弈進程中,雙方因時因勢透過各種方式向外傳遞各自的軍事戰略戰術、武器裝備、戰備訓練和人員現代化取得的新進展新成就,塑造己方優勢地位,施放認知迷霧造成對方國內軍民猶疑恐慌意志動搖;博弈一旦進入尾聲,勝利一方則以宏大敘事視角回溯其博弈過程,透過塑造威懾力與親和力同在的勝利者形象彰顯勝利者實力地位,鞏固博弈勝利成果。

建構強大的軍事敘事話語體係是開展認知攻防作戰的基礎。大國競爭背景下的敘事博弈,要求積極尋找認知戰與輿論戰、心理戰等彼此在要素、資訊與認知間的契合點。大國較量圍繞著輿論、心理、制腦權等場域開展的激烈角逐,賦予了敘事博弈以更為廣闊的闡釋空間與戰略意義。輿論戰的核心是敘事主導權的爭奪,背後是國際傳播力的較量;心理戰是關於核心價值觀的深層對抗,敘事則為其提供了闡釋和傳遞不同價值觀的「腳本」;制腦權作戰是腦科學與人工智慧深度融合的作戰樣式,敘事為讀腦、類腦、控腦等以大腦為直接目標的認知空間爭奪提供了資訊植入的有力武器。

「以智駕馭敘」提上日程

隨著認知科學、電腦科學、腦科學等科學技術的高速發展,以及智慧泛在、萬物互聯、人機共融、全域協同的智慧化戰爭加速演進,敘事博弈已超越「唇槍舌戰」的傳統範疇,進入無界泛化、深度融合、演算法為王的新時代。

近期風靡全球的ChatGPT,進一步揭示了智慧時代「敘事無所不在」的泛化性。自然語言處理、視訊影像處理、深度學習、大數據分析、雲端運算等技術的不斷進步推動了語言智慧的快速發展,使得文字、聲音、影像、視訊等有形或無形的「語言」載體都被納入到敘事範疇,極大拓展了敘事博弈的發生場域,將大國競爭引向熱衝突以外的社會生活、影視娛樂、新聞傳播、教育教學等方方面面,顯著加深了認知域對抗的複雜程度,極大增強了多模態敘事的全時全域性和互動性。大國競爭背景下的敘事博弈,包括心理敘事、法律敘事、輿論敘事、資訊敘事等,人工智慧一旦與多域敘事博弈融合,就可能使其武器化效能幾何式遞增。

未來,大國競爭下的敘事博弈將以強大算法為依托,其核心在於“以智駕馭敘”,智能之“智”要靠算法實現。例如,透過強大演算法,大數據技術可精準繪製敵方認知圖景,據此實現對敵認知操控的“按需定制”,在博弈中智能化、精準化、細緻化地誘使敵方服從我方敘事腳本,確保博弈的敘事主導權牢牢為我所控。

中國原創軍事資源:https://military.cctv.com/2023/04/30/ARTITYH9OANialt6AQ2BNLC2230430.shtml

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