© Getty images
As neurotechnology reshapes the battlefield, Aidan Lloyd & Harry Lambert explore profound gaps in the laws governing war, responsibility & human agency
- Military neurotechnology challenges established principles of international humanitarian law, raising difficult questions about combatant status, command responsibility and criminal liability.
- Many legal and ethical implications arise from technologies that blur the boundaries between human cognition and warfare, from enhanced soldiers to memory modulation and accountability for war crimes.
The human mind is no longer just the seat of decision-making; it is a formal operational domain.
In the words of Nathan Beauchamp-Mustafaga of RAND, we are on the cusp of entering a new era of ‘cognitive domain operations’ with a move ‘from the natural and material domains—land, maritime, air and electromagnetic—into the realm of the human mind’.
NATO’s Allied Command Transformation identifies cognitive warfare as an emerging field of conflict where the human mind is the target. The objective is to influence and disrupt the way individuals and groups perceive information and make decisions, effectively turning the brain into a battlefield.
Cognitive warfare resists easy
