The U.S. Defense Department’s Office of Strategic Capabilities is launching a program called “Foundational Information Awareness Operations,” designed to conduct cognitive domain warfare using commercial technology. Bill Gertz, a veteran national security correspondent, broke the story on April 1 in The Washington Times.
Sam Gray, the office’s chief technology officer for autonomous systems and artificial intelligence, said adversaries including the CCP and Iran are using cognitive warfare to reshape how entire societies think. The American program aims to match that capacity directly.
Andrew Jensen, a cognitive warfare specialist, notes that CCP military documents define the practice as operations “aimed directly at human will, beliefs, thinking, and psychology, seeking to influence an adversary’s decisions and actions by reshaping their perceptions.” An effective U.S. response, Jensen argues, requires three things: exposing CCP disinformation, amplifying credible Chinese opposition voices, and holding Beijing accountable for treaty violations it has never publicly acknowledged.
For tens of millions of overseas Chinese who have long watched the CCP’s information apparatus operate without a serious institutional counterpart, the announcement carries weight. The program is expected to produce operational capabilities within three to five years.
The CCP’s own doctrine describes what it calls the “three warfares:” opinion warfare, psychological warfare, and legal warfare, a coordinated strategy for dominating the information environment at home and abroad. The Pentagon program is, by its own description, a direct response to that framework.
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Reagan broke the Soviets this way; Trump is trying it on Xi
The historical precedent is well-established. During the Reagan administration, the U.S. government concluded that Soviet psychological vulnerabilities were worth targeting as a matter of deliberate policy. Reagan’s team viewed the Soviet leadership as adversaries whose confidence could be systematically worn down, and they built covert operations around that premise.
The CIA’s psychology division compiled behavioral profiles of senior Soviet officials, drawing on biographies, defector accounts, and diplomatic observation. The assessments examined what those leaders feared, how quickly they recovered from setbacks, and what could shake their self-assurance. CIA psychologists who worked on them later recalled signs that Soviet leaders were operating under sustained psychological strain.
The parallel to the present is not subtle. Xi Jinping has concentrated authority so thoroughly that he is personally legible as a psychological target in ways a more diffuse leadership structure would not permit. And visible failures have been accumulating.
At a routine ceremonial tree-planting attended by the full Politburo Standing Committee, on a day when Beijing temperatures hit 18 degrees Celsius, Xi arrived in a heavily padded, quilted jacket conspicuously thick for the weather. The inference that circulated widely among overseas observers needs no elaboration.
China’s military doesn’t modernize out of strength; it modernizes out of shock
Miles Yu, who served as the State Department’s principal China policy adviser under Secretary Mike Pompeo, published an essay making a blunt argument: the CCP’s military modernization has never been driven by internal innovation. It has been driven by humiliation.
“Nearly every significant leap in the People’s Liberation Army’s capabilities,” Yu writes, “was triggered by a decisive demonstration of American military superiority.” The Gulf War showed Beijing in 1991 what precision strike, stealth, and networked warfare could achieve. The U.S. bombing of China’s embassy in Belgrade in 1999 and the collision between a U.S. Navy EP-3 surveillance aircraft and a Chinese fighter jet in 2001 underscored the PLA’s passivity, accelerating investment in aerospace, cyberspace, and anti-access capabilities.
Recent operations involving Venezuela and Iran followed the same script. Chinese-supplied air defense networks, radar systems, and missile platforms were tested under real conditions against American stealth and electronic warfare capabilities. The results were poor. Systems marketed as capable of detecting and deterring advanced threats proved limited or useless under pressure. The exposure was not about specific weapons; it was about the gap between Chinese propaganda and Chinese reality.
Three defects that no purge can fix
Yu identifies three interlocking weaknesses in the CCP’s defense industrial base.
The first is an innovation deficit. The defense sector depends heavily on reverse engineering and stolen foreign technology. Acquiring blueprints is achievable; replicating the engineering precision and materials science required for stable battlefield performance is a different problem entirely.
The second is a quality control failure rooted in perverse incentives. Even when Chinese engineers possess accurate design data, manufacturing tolerances and material reliability fall short of what operational conditions demand. This is not a series of isolated failures. It is a consistent feature of the system.
Corruption runs through Beijing’s civil-military fusion program, a state initiative to channel commercial technology into weapons development. Instead of accelerating capability, it created conditions in which contractors could extract resources without delivering results. A political system built on propaganda structurally rewards exaggeration and punishes honest reporting. Weapons defects stay hidden until combat exposes them, because admitting problems in advance is more dangerous to a career than fielding a broken system.
Xi’s answer to military failure: arrest people, protect the system
When these failures became undeniable, Xi’s response followed what Yu identifies as the CCP’s defining trap. Rather than acknowledge structural problems, Beijing launched purges targeting individual officers and defense sector officials. The sweeps hit senior military commanders and key figures in the defense science establishment.
Purging experienced commanders and weapons scientists is self-defeating; it destroys exactly the institutional knowledge needed to address the underlying problems. The fear that follows discourages honest assessment. Officers who might otherwise flag capability gaps stay quiet, because accurate reporting has become more career-threatening than the deficiency it describes.
Yu puts the deepest problem in a single sentence: “U.S.-China competition is a contest between systems, not just weapons.” A political system that converts failure into political crisis, rather than institutional learning, cannot produce the sustained, adaptive military development that competing with the United States requires.
