Social Engineering – Major Component of Cognitive Warfare

Abstract

"Industrial revolutions have generated major changes in the economy, politics and military affairs throughout human history and have led to innovation in all social fields, resulting in new approaches to military affairs. Companies are transforming and preparing their transition from an environment based on technological tools (physical) to one based on social mass engineering (mainly in the virtual environment), extremely refined, which subtly combines manipulation with addiction. The industrial society, as we have known it for more than a century, has become an information society and produces major changes in society and, implicitly, in the thinking of military strategies. In this context, due to the unprecedented development of information technology, the military confrontations of the future will change their main feature, namely violence, a component that will be increasingly mitigated and replaced, gradually, with non-kinetic means: political, economic, media, psychological and informational situations. There are, today, new military doctrines and strategies, characterised by the lack of classical rules for waging a war, through the ambiguity of the enemy or through the lack of dichotomy between war and peace, which have as characteristic another way of organising and conducting the fight. The present article focuses on aspects related to non-kinetic and cognitive combat means. We consider that the research is of interest because the implications of these means on the way of waging the war and their long-term effects that have not yet been fully known. In this context, we approach the field of social engineering, starting from the first references to this concept up to the present day, emphasising its applicability in social and political sciences as well as in psychology and cyber security."