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On 03/26/2026, the Pentagon's Strategic Capabilities Office (SCO) quietly announced BIOW, basic information awareness operations, a cognitive warfare program that changes the rules of the battlefield through belief rather than bullets or bombs. The SCO sits inside the Office of the Secretary of Defense, with a mandate to deliver breakthrough capabilities to war fighters typically within three to five years. Sam Gray, SCO's chief technology officer and lead for autonomy and artificial intelligence, leads BIOW. Speaking at the National Defense Industrial Association's Pacific Operational Science and Technology Conference in Honolulu, Gray stated: the goal of cognitive warfare is to disrupt the cognition and the thinking ability of an adversary or person and influence how they perceive, sense make, and act. This is not propaganda in the old sense. This is something fundamentally different. For most of military history, influence operations required a physical observable. In World War Two, the Allies inflated fake tanks to fool German reconnaissance. You needed something the enemy could see. Gray said that era is over. Quote, I don't actually need the physical observable because I can generate both the physical observable and the associated narrative that comes along with it, and I can promulgate it across the digital environment that allows it to go everywhere. BIOW.
BIOW is built on three technological pillars. Pillar one, detection: systems designed to identify adversary generated materials to see what the enemy is pushing into the information space before it takes hold. Pillar two, multimodal effects: AI models capable of generating text, video, and audio, synthetic content designed to shape how target populations perceive events in real time. Pillar three, population modeling: a large scale simulation environment that can model entire populations and produce quantitative metrics. Answering the question Sam Gray himself asked, how good am I doing with this narrative? Did it resonate like we thought it was going to? The technology architecture Gray described is deliberately lean and distributed. Quote, give me 100 Mac minis with 100 different agents on them that are out running and operating, that are lightweight, small, do not require gigawatts of power. This is not a massive fragile supercomputer. This is a swarm. But there's a problem Gray openly acknowledged: the off the shelf AI systems we all use, ChatGPT, Gemini, do not think like Russia. They do not think like China. They were trained on American data shaped by American assumptions. Gray said directly, we have to get to a point where we can understand what it is that they think about and what we can create from a model perspective to emulate and behave like our adversary does. BIOW's goal is to build bespoke AI models specifically tuned to adversary cognitive frameworks. Why is this urgent? Gray pointed to two ongoing adversary campaigns as evidence: The United States is already behind. First, Iran's information operations during Operation Epic Fury. Second, China's large scale efforts to, in Gray's words, change the way that certain populations are thinking. And then Gray stated plainly, The United States is not currently positioned to counter these operations at machine speed. Quote, we need to start to get into that space.
Congress didn't wait. The 2026 National Defense Authorization Act directed the Secretary of Defense to formally define cognitive warfare for the department, assign organizational responsibility, and assess the value of narrative intelligence with a deadline of 03/31/2026. BIOW does not operate in isolation. In 2025, the US Army created Detachment 201, the Executive Innovation Corps, commissioning four Senior Silicon Valley technology executives directly into the Army Reserve at the rank of Lieutenant Colonel: Andrew Bosworth, Kevin Weil, Shyam Sankar, and Bob McGrew. They wear the uniform and serve within the chain of command. Together, BIOW's technology stack and Detachment 201's Silicon Valley expertise represent a deliberate convergence of artificial intelligence, influence operations, and military command structure. NATO's chief scientist framed the stakes: cognitive warfare targets trust networks, identity narratives, and institutional legitimacy. The battle space is continuous, operates below the threshold of armed conflict, and the measure of success is not a message received, but a durable change in how a population thinks, decides, and acts. The human mind is now a contested domain. As of April 2026, BIOW is active: performers are being on-ramped, models are being built, simulations are running. And Gray made one thing clear about the vendors chosen to build this system: those who don't keep up will be cut. Quote, I will offramp you. The battle for cognition has begun. Whether you believe this program is an essential shield against adversary manipulation or a capability that raises profound questions about who defines the adversary and where those tools can be aimed, one fact is not in dispute. This is real. It is funded. It is operational. And you are now aware.