NATO's own C2 centre wants a cognitive-warfare unit. Its procurement arm bought one in February.

A paper published today by the Alliance's Command and Control Centre of Excellence correctly identifies Russia's Baltic target as NATO's decision-making, then prescribes an org chart. The detection layer is already under contract. The consensus layer has no vendor.

What happened

The NATO-accredited Command and Control Centre of Excellence in Utrecht published a position paper on 29 July arguing that Moscow's pressure on Estonia, Latvia and Lithuania is aimed at the Alliance's decision-making rather than its hardware. Its central claim is that Russia does not need to break NATO's command systems physically, because it can contest the information environment in which 32 governments interpret an incident and decide whether it counts as an attack.

The authors are Rear Adm. (Ret.) Mark Montgomery, senior director of the Foundation for Defense of Democracies' Center on Cyber and Technology Innovation, and Ivana Stradner, a research fellow at FDD. Three recommendations follow: a new NATO "Perception Management Warfare Assessment Unit" to monitor and assess Russian influence activity, "counter-reflexive shielding" to limit what Moscow can learn about allied deliberations, and offensive information operations to put Russian analysts on the defensive.

The centre carries a standing disclaimer that its output is "produced for information purposes only" and does "not necessarily represent opinions or policies of NATO and/or the Sponsoring Nations." This is not Alliance policy. The C2COE has been NATO-accredited since April 2008 and works under Allied Command Transformation, which is what makes the paper worth reading closely: it is an argument circulating inside the shop that shapes how NATO thinks about command and control.