This article by Dr Fedir Korobeynikov, Dr Andrii Davydiuk, Prof Volodymyr Mokhor develops a structural model of the human agent in cognitive warfare. In doing so, it extends the structure-centric approach previously applied at the level of socio-technical systems. Its point of departure is the constitutive invisibility of cognitive influence: unlike kinetic, cyber, or space operations, a successful cognitive attack need not appear to the targeted agent as an attack at all, but may be experienced as the natural evolution of that agent’s own views. Existing doctrines of cognitive defence remain largely content-oriented: however sophisticated, they operate at the level of information – its veracity, volume, or provenance – rather than at the level of the structures through which information is processed. Such approaches are insufficient where the object of attack is not what the agent thinks, but the architecture through which perception, judgement, and decision are formed.
The article therefore models the human agent not as an atomic node within a socio-technical network, but as a multiplex structure composed of layer-specific states stabilised by personal invariants. Within this framework, cognitive attack is conceptualised as a perturbation of the connection that governs the agent’s transitions between contexts. The attack exploits the natural asymmetries of this connection – latent zones of reduced resistance, of which cognitive biases are one instance – driving inter-layer incoherence beyond the threshold of transmorphance, up to the point at which the invariant core that sustains identity begins to erode.
The article distinguishes three structurally distinct forms of cognitive attack: the disruption of transition coherence, the accumulative transformation of identity through altered holonomy, and the degradation of the invariant core or of invariant compatibility between agents. It further argues that the invariants of a socio-technical system are derivative of the personal invariants of its agents; consequently, the erosion of agent coherence and invariant compatibility may precede institutional fragmentation even while formal structures remain intact. On this basis, the article outlines two practical directions: early-warning systems based on behavioural misalignment and correlation adaptometry, and a doctrine of topological defence aimed at protecting the coherence of decision-making agents, the compatibility of their invariants, and the points of crystallisation upon which systemic cognitive security depends.
Keywords: cognitive warfare, socio-technical systems, human agent, multiplex identity, topological defence, transmorphance, personal invariants, cognitive security, reflexive control, early-warning systems, cognitive decoherence