This is an interview with Armin Krishnan. Armin Krishnan is an Associate Professor at East Carolina University. He was Director of Security Studies from 2016 to 2025. He has previously taught intelligence courses as a Visiting Assistant Professor in the National Security Program at the University of Texas at El Paso and held research associate positions at the University of Southampton and Salford University.
He has academic degrees in political science, intelligence studies, and security studies from the University of Munich and Salford University, UK. His research has focused on novel aspects of contemporary warfare, including the privatization and outsourcing of military services, the ethics of military robotics, targeted killing and drone warfare, military neuroscience, and psychological warfare. His most recent book is on Havana Syndrome: A Threat to National Security published by Bloomsbury Academic (2025).
DIFFRACTIONS: Your book Military Neuroscience and the Coming Age of Neurowarfare (2016) opens its historical analysis with a chapter titled “Cold War Brain Research and Germ Warfare,” which covers CIA “mind control” research, including MKUltra, LSD experiments, and the mysterious “Moscow Signal” — microwave radiation beamed at the U.S. Embassy in Moscow. Why is it essential to understand these Cold War programs to grasp the current trajectory of military neuroscience? Do you see the current era as a continuation of that research, or has there been a fundamental shift in both the science and the strategic intent?
Armin Krishnan: It is always a good idea to trace back a phenomenon to its origins to understand how it changed over time. This is particularly important with respect to research that is classified, as there is usually more public information about a classified research area from decades ago than there is about it regarding more recent developments. In the 1970s there were Congressional investigations into intelligence activities and classified research related to chemical and biological warfare programs of the 1950s and 1960s that revealed a lot about highly sensitive activities and research that can be described as mind control. The official motivation was to determine whether communist states had achieved a breakthrough in mind control techniques and technology. Although, there is only very rudimentary documentation of MKUltra publicly available, it still provides key insights about what the US government was interested in and what they believed was possible at the time.
MKUltra connects to the Moscow Signal because it happened in the same era with some of the MKUltra projects also looking into the bioeffects and behavioural effects of microwaves. What makes the research of the 1960s very interesting is that experiments were conducted under poor ethical standards, which means that they are not repeatable today. Some of the research from that time indicated that electromagnetic mind control was hypothetically possible. In the late 1970s a new scientific consensus emerged that there were no harmful non-thermal effects of electromagnetic waves and that the Moscow Signal was not resulting in a higher rate of severe illness among U.S. diplomats who had worked at the U.S. Moscow embassy from the late 1950s to 1976. The respective studies were later questioned by other researchers, who discovered some serious methodical flaws and perhaps also signs of an official cover-up. It is quite likely that the U.S. government secretly continued their research into electromagnetic mind control after the public disclosure of MKUltra and the Pandora Project.
Obviously, the science is now much more advanced as indicated in the Havana Syndrome, which is very likely caused by an advanced type of directed energy weapon. It is hard to say as to whether the strategic intent has changed over the years. In the 1960s and 1970s the main intent behind the research into bioeffects and behavioural effects of electromagnetic waves was mostly about determining vulnerability. It seems that the U.S. government may have started to pursue weaponization in the 1980s in the context of non-lethal weapons development. That was at least claimed by Eldon Byrd, who was U.S. Navy researcher working on non-lethal weapons in the early 1980s. It is really hard to say where they are now technologically after more than six decades of research.
DIFF: You describe the book’s core argument as the claim that “nonlethal strategies and tactics could become central to warfare in the first half of the twenty-first century,” and that military neuroscience will “enhance and possibly transform both classical psychological operations and cyber warfare.” For an audience who may associate war with kinetic force, can you explain what you mean by “neurowarfare” and why you believe nonlethal approaches are becoming central to conflict? What is the relationship between neurowarfare and the psychological warfare you discuss in your 5GW work?
AK: Neurowarfare is a general term that describes leveraging neuroscience and neurotechnology for military purposes, which includes human performance enhancement, surveillance and intelligence applications, and human performance degradation. The publicly available literature largely discusses human enhancement and intelligence applications, but there is relatively little information that is available on technologies that can degrade human performance. In the public domain there is only information on a few types of non-lethal weaponry that use directed energy, namely sound cannons (directional audible sound), millimetre wave weapons (Active Denial System), and dazzling lasers. There is hardly any good information on potential infrasound or ultrasound weapons or electromagnetic weapons that may interfere with the human brain or central nervous system. The mainstream argument is that the more speculative anti-personnel directed energy weapons are either not feasible or that they would be wildly impractical. The problem is that there is little published human subject research (except from the aforementioned MKUltra era) that could validate or invalidate that position.
I was perhaps a bit overly optimistic when I wrote the neurowarfare book in 2016. The underlying assumption for the hypothesis that warfare was shifting towards non-lethal modes of conflict was that kinetic war between the great powers had become unlikely because of the risk of nuclear escalation and that this would cause great powers to rely on more covert and indirect means for conducting hostilities. I also assumed that there would be increasing political instability in many nations around the world because of an array of political and economic challenges, which would cause governments to search for ways to exercise greater control over their populations without resorting to overt violent repression. In particular democratic governments would prefer covert psychological manipulation over visible violent repression.
Unfortunately, there has been a revival of great power conflict and major conventional war since 2022. The likelihood for a direct war between NATO and Russia or between the U.S. and China has gone up significantly over the last couple of years. From what can be seen in the Russia-Ukraine War is that conventional military power still matters more than psychological warfare and cyber warfare. It is essentially a drone and missile war and a war of attrition. The world is now also dealing with another major kinetic war between the U.S./ Israel and Iran, which revolves around airpower and seapower.
I don’t think that I was completely wrong in highlighting non-lethal and covert modes of conflict and political repression. It is just that those modes of conflict, which one can describe as fifth generation warfare, hybrid warfare, or gray zone conflict, are far less visible to the general public and even national security experts. The fundamental constraints for escalation still remain in place: neither side in the major wars of our time can afford to escalate to the point that the national survival of a major would be put in jeopardy since this would provoke a nuclear response.
As brutal as the wars are in Ukraine and the Middle East, the real fight is taking place somewhere else, namely in the economic and cognitive domains. Where an outright military victory is not an option because of escalation risks, a meaningful victory can only be achieved by internally changing or collapsing the adversary. That is where neurowarfare or psychological warfare come in. The idea is to manipulate the perceptions, emotions, and mental capacity of an adversary to cause them to make poor decisions. That is nothing new in warfare – what is new is the sophistication with which these manipulations can be carried out. A better understanding as to how the brain works and how information is processed by the brain allows for the targeted exploitation of cognitive errors, which are false mental shortcuts that we are all prone to take. Environmental conditions can also be manipulated to degrade human cognitive performance. This matters because so much in life depends on making good decisions, which is as true for nations as it is true for individuals.
DIFF: You open your book, Fifth Generation Warfare: Dominating the Human Domain (2024) by stating that the Western understanding of war has been “greatly shaped” by Carl von Clausewitz, whose definition requires violence, political instrumentality, and a strict “dichotomy of war and peace.” Yet you argue that Western governments and militaries “cling” to this view even as they face “unconventional challenges.” For someone picking up your book for the first time, can you explain why the Clausewitzian framework, which has served Western strategic thought for two centuries, is now a liability? What is the fundamental blind spot it creates?
AK: Carl von Clausewitz was a Prussian military theorist, who is famous for his book On War, which was posthumously published in 1832 by his wife. The book contains a systematic philosophical investigation as to what is the nature of war and it discusses the principles of strategy and tactics. Even though Clausewitz’ book strongly reflects the reality of war in the 19th century, it is hard to overstate the influence the book has had – and continues to have – on Western military thought. Clausewitz defined war as a contest of will in which violence is used instrumentally to break the enemy’s will to resist. A key assumption is that war serves a political purpose, which limits the violence that can be used in war. The objective of war would always be to secure peace on one’s own terms, which is less likely if war was unlimited. Hence, in the Clausewitzian paradigm peace and war must be clearly distinguishable, war must have a limited political objective, and violence in war must be merely instrumental. Furthermore, war is only an instrument of states and therefore only takes place between states. It is a fairly clean conception as to how war should look like.
Of course, even in Clausewitz own time war was never as conceptionally clean as indicated in On War. Colonial wars against “savages” were fought with few political constraints and they also lacked clear beginnings and endings. Clausewitz does not account for internal wars such as civil wars and revolutionary wars, which have come to define warfare in the second half of the 20th century. The Cold War has demonstrated that major powers can aggressively compete across a variety of domains without fighting a hot war with each other. The Cold War was fought in the economic, intelligence, psychological, scientific-technological, and cultural domains. Even though the superpowers did not go to war with each other, they were still fighting for their survival. In short, the Cold War already broke the Clausewitzian paradigm, but for some reason Western military thinkers have clung on to it. The consequence of this is the tendency of Western militaries to do poorly when they have to fight insurgents and terrorists or state actors that simply do not play by the rules. Western militaries are very good at using violence instrumentally. The U.S. military can bomb over ten thousand targets and obliterate the Iranian military, but it still does not allow them to win decisively as the real war is fought elsewhere, namely in the cognitive, economic, and political domains. The war does not end with a ceasefire that suspends the resort to military force. The failure of Western militaries to understand this complex reality of war is the reason why they can’t win modern wars.
DIFF: 4GW is focused on “political warfare and evolved insurgencies,” while 5GW shifts the emphasis to “influence and psychological warfare, with a much diminished role of violence.” Could you explain in concrete terms what that distinction means? If 4GW is the insurgent who uses guerrilla tactics and political networks to wear down a state’s will to fight, what does a 5GW campaign look like on the ground, and how does it “skip the battlefield” to target the “human terrain” directly?
AK: The theory of generational warfare argues that the first generation was characterized by mass, the second by attrition, the third by maneuver, and the fourth by insurgency. It implies some sequential evolution of war, which does not really make much sense from a military history perspective. In 4GW the violence is still quite visible but it only has a supportive function: it keeps the idea of the struggle alive and that is used to persuade the population that the government is unjust and does not deserve popular support. In 4GW there is no military solution – there is only a political solution, which usually means that a government must make concessions when the insurgents are militarily weak but are politically strong.
5GW is a response to the challenge of 4GW. While 4GW insurgents must advertise the existence of a political struggle in order to win the support of a potentially sympathetic public, in 5GW the objective is to hide the existence of hostilities. In 5GW the vast majority of people within a society is unaware that they are in the middle of a war and if they were aware that there is some sort of state of conflict, they have no clue as to who the real enemy is. This requires that violence is minimized and highly dispersed so that it cannot be easily connected to the existence of state of conflict. 5GW belligerents rely on ambiguous and covert means to affect the perceptions, narratives, emotions, and culture within a target society. 5GW is conflict at the societal level, which may involve the state, but which ultimately a conflict between societal groups or between elites and a society. 5GW belligerents may want to reshape society according to their own religious or ideological beliefs, which may necessitate the destruction of the state. What is important here is that the state may be manipulated by 5GW belligerents, such as super-empowered individuals, religious, ethnic, or criminal groups, but the state is not the main belligerent in 5GW.
Since 5GW is so secretive it is difficult to prove that any historical examples meet the definition of 5GW. I think that the Stalinist purges represent an early example of 5GW as this was de facto a war that Stalin declared on certain segments of Soviet society, namely on specific religious and ethnic groups. He relied on the manipulation of perceptions and narratives to accomplish his goal of remaking Soviet society and the Soviet state by changing the culture through targeted elimination of individuals. Stalin played the secret police against the party and then used the party to reassert control over the secret police after the purges. Another example that I find quite instructive is the Cultural Revolution in China during the 1960s. Mao’s power in China was slipping at the time so he radicalized the youth to revolt against their teachers and other authority figures with the supposed goal to eliminate “rightists” or secret capitalists in Chinese society. Millions were purged and persecuted and many perished in the process. A whole society was driven insane by the political radicalization of the youths, who were weaponized to break the political structure and traditions in Chinese society. The battlefield in 5GW is the mind and the method is to play different societal groups against each other to break and remake society.
DIFF: You reference John Boyd’s OODA loop and the idea that each generation of warfare targets a deeper step in the decision cycle. With the advent of AI-curated social media feeds and personalized disinformation at scale (the “Spamouflage Dragon” network you mention), are we now in an era of “preemptive perception management” where an adversary can alter your orientation and observation before you even know a decision needs to be made? Has the “human terrain” become so digitally mapped that it can be farmed and harvested at will?
AK: Daniel Abbott’s book on 5GW contains the argument that each subsequent gradient of war targets an earlier phase in Boyd’s OODA loop. 1GW targets the act phase, 2GW targets the decide phase, 3GW targets the orient phase, 4GW is situated between the observe and orient phase, and 5GW targets the observe phase, meaning perceptions. If your perception is wrong, it impacts every subsequent phase in the loop. This means that the center of gravity in 5GW is perception or the manipulation of perception. In the digital age the focus of perception management is on digital media, especially social media, as it allows information to spread faster and wider than is the case with traditional print and broadcast media. AI is a game changer in this arena as it can generate and spread information and narratives much faster and also in a much more targeted way.
The main trick behind successful deception is to feed people information that they already believe is true or likely true. It is very hard to convince anybody that a belief they hold is false, especially when this is belief that they have held and expressed for a long time. Hence, the deceiver provides people with information that is roughly in line with their beliefs but that is also slightly changing their perception in line with the objectives of the deceiver. Here it becomes key to know what a person believes to target messages accordingly. Again, social media is key as pretty much everything important about a person can be gleaned from it. AI can automate the process of creating psychological profiles on millions or even billions of people to then send out messages that they tend to agree with but also alters their perceptions in some significant way.
DIFF: Meanwhile, the IDF was exposed for running a “covert psychological operations campaign” using fake English-language WhatsApp groups to shape global discourse. Has the war in Gaza been to a degree the first fully realized 5GW conflict where the battle for the “human terrain” is being fought on TikTok, Telegram, and WhatsApp with equal intensity as on the ground? Does this blurring of media and military operations represent the new normal for all future conflict? You conclude by stating that “kinetic action… is far less important than the ability to resist and counter nonmilitary and nonviolent modes of attack.” Do you believe Western democratic societies possess the cognitive resilience, the institutional cohesion, and the sheer will to survive in a world that is constantly waging 5GW against them? Or have we already lost the war for the “human domain” without ever realizing we were in a fight?
AK: I don’t think that the Gaza War is a good example for 5GW as the IDF has been using blunt military force to push the Palestinians out of Gaza. Yes, they are somewhat concerned about international perceptions of the war since this affects Israel’s diplomatic and trade relations with other states. Israel has been criticized by the UN multiple times over concerns of war crimes, such as ethnic cleansing, unlawful killing, and the use of starvation as a weapon of war. It is true that Israel has also conducted extensive social media campaigns to affect public opinion in the West by countering some of the accusations. What is important here is that the social media campaign doesn’t primarily target the Palestinians. In 5GW one would expect the spread of narratives designed to undermine the cohesion of a society to cause different subgroups to fight each other rather than an external enemy. I do not have information as to whether Israel is trying to psychologically manipulate the Palestinians in order to fragment them and undermine their political cohesion.
Yes, Western societies are quite vulnerable to psychological warfare conducted on social media. A key tactic in 5GW is the infiltration of institutions such as government agencies and the media. Foreign governments have managed to capture institutions or at least coopt key individuals in institutions to advance their objectives. US media can be manipulated by way of advertising dollars. For example, China and some Middle Eastern governments regularly pay for political advertising or op-eds and supplements in major Western publications. This also shapes non-paid reporting as political advertising is an important source of income. Foreign governments and nonstate actors use online influencers to promote certain narratives.
Of course, schools and universities are also a major battleground since it is more effective to influence people when they are young and their critical faculties are not yet developed. There has been an ideological infiltration of education that has led to young people getting politically indoctrinated in a way that is opposed to the established political and social order of society. As it concerns China, the CCP has been quite successful in promoting the idea in the West that its rise is benign and that China has no ambition to dominate the world. What may be happening is simply subversion: Western perceptions are altered in a way that it discourages resistance to any overt aggression that may occur at a later point.
Countering subversion is difficult in a democratic society because of the right to free speech and the right to political activism. What can be done is to restrict opportunities for foreign powers to exercise influence on Western societies. Social media platforms can remove bots and trolls if they are associated with foreign influence operations. Foreign funding of institutions and organizations can be more heavily scrutinized and restricted. The public can be educated about misinformation and disinformation. Ultimately, it comes down to morals in a society: a society where most people understand ethical principles and behave ethically is hard to subvert and corrupt. Unfortunately, a lot of people in the West have a confused morality and are hence easily manipulated by nefarious actors.
DIFF: You acknowledge the criticism leveled at 4GW theory – that it is based on a “poor understanding of history” and is an “empty theory.” In response, you introduce the idea of replacing “generations” with “gradients,” where “higher-gradient warfare is more complex” and “kinetic force has greater utility at lower gradients.” Why is this shift in terminology important? What does the “gradient” framework allow us to understand about the future of conflict that the “generational” model obscures or neglects?
AK: The more sophisticated interpretation of 5GW was put forward by Daniel Abbott. Abbott suggests that the term generation of warfare is problematic because it implies a sequential evolution of warfare, where one generation ends and is succeeded by the next generation. This is historically wrong as the different generations of warfare have always overlapped. Insurgencies that characterize the fourth generation of warfare have existed since Ancient times and even the evolved form proclaimed by 4GW theorists goes back to the 1930s (the Chinese civil war), which overlaps with the third generation of warfare, which is maneuver warfare or blitzkrieg.
Gradient suggests that warfare can move up or down on a scale with gradient indicating the level of complexity and the centrality of violence. Lowest gradient warfare (zero gradient) is least complex but has the most violence. These are wars of extermination. As one moves up the gradients the complexity increases and the violence decreases. Gradient means that there is no clear direction in which warfare may move, even though higher gradient warfare was not possible in earlier historical periods because the enabling technology and more complex societal structures did not exist. Hence, 5GW didn’t exist before the 20th century and 4GW didn’t exist before the 19th century (because it relies on the ideology of nationalism). However, even in the 21st century we have wars that fit the characteristics of 2GW and 3GW, such as the Ukraine and Iran Wars. At the same time there are also wars that fit the characteristics of 4GW and 5GW. Sometimes, wars can devolve into lower gradient warfare or evolve to higher gradient warfare. Gradients means that we can more easily shift our analysis and we avoid blind spots by proclaiming that now all warfare must be 5GW or 6GW because that is the latest generation.
DIFF: You frame the “Havana Syndrome” as a “policymaker’s nightmare” where the attack is designed to create “uncertainty and fear” without clear attribution. In a stunning March 2026 report, “60 Minutes” revealed that the U.S. government had acquired a directed energy weapon from a Russian criminal network and was testing it on animals, confirming a capability to induce the exact constellation of symptoms seen in victims. You cite Russian literature on “psychotronic weapons” that induce “abnormal psychic states.” With this new evidence, should the decade of institutional denial and interagency paralysis surrounding Havana Syndrome be considered not a failure of investigation, but the adversary’s primary objective achieved? Did the 5GW attack succeed because we spent a decade arguing about whether it was real?
AK: Yes, Havana Syndrome fits quite well into the 5GW paradigm as it involves the manipulation of perception as a means for weakening an adversary. Assuming that Russian intelligence operatives have used a secret type of directed energy weapon against a few hundred U.S. and Canadian personnel from 2016, Russia has likely achieved some important objectives. They have disabled individuals with unique experience and expertise such as intelligence officers with decades of operational experience. This has possibly affected the ability of the U.S. intelligence to collect or operate in certain countries. The anomalous health incidents (AHIs) have affected U.S. diplomatic relations with Cuba and perhaps some other countries, as diplomats had to be sent home and embassies had to be run with much smaller staff. At least for some time, there was reportedly low morale in the Foreign Service as FSOs and their family members were afraid to be posted to countries in which AHIs did occur.
The U.S. government has not been able to demonstrate its ability to get to the bottom of the phenomenon or to protect its own personnel. Most concerningly, AHIs have even occurred inside the U.S. with some cases that have occurred in relative proximity to the White House. I guess, many people in the U.S. government believed that the problem was simply mass hysteria and that the problem would therefore go away after some time. Now there seems to be more evidence pointing in the direction that some people did get covertly attacked with directed energy weapons. Of course, we are still quite far from getting any official confirmation that these secret directed energy weapons exist and are being used covertly.
There has been speculation about the use of directed energy for affecting the well-being, behavior, and mental capacity of individuals going back to the 1960s and the mysterious Moscow Signal. Yes, there is some limited literature on Soviet psychotronic weapons that were rumored to exist since the 1970s. They were called psychotronic because they supposedly used psychic energy as a means to influence and harm other people. The KGB allegedly built psychotronic generators that collected and stored psychic energy to be then unleashed by a medium on a target. This supposedly happened in the 1970s when the superpowers were more open-minded as it concerned paranormal research. I suspect that this was merely a cover for directed energy weapons and mind control research, but there is really no good documentary record to prove it either way.
My suspicion is that anti-personnel directed energy weapons have been researched by the Soviet Union/ Russia and the U.S. for at least 60 years and that they had operational weapons for at least several decades. It is possible that the technology is just so highly classified in the U.S. and elsewhere that relatively few people know about it. Some parts of the U.S. government were very likely aware of the technology when the first AHIs happened. Hence, there have been claims that the Intelligence Community (or at least certain parts of it) were engaged in a cover up designed to protect a highly classified weapons technology.
DIFF:Given this arc, what is the next question that is keeping you up at night? Where is your research taking you now? Are you looking deeper into the technical realities of 6GW, the ethical and existential implications of a “post-human” future, or perhaps the defensive question of how societies can build cognitive and institutional resilience against the forms of warfare you have so meticulously documented?
AK: We are living in very interesting times as the international and societal orders are breaking down, which creates enormous uncertainty about what might happen next. My current research is on the decline of the American empire and the emergence of a new multipolar order. It seems that the U.S. has been defeated by Iran and its allies, which means that there will be further challenges to U.S. power by its main adversaries. The biggest concern is that the disruption of global energy production and delivery because of the closure of the Strait of Hormuz will continue for several months, which could be the beginning of a new global depression and global food shortages. Luckily, the U.S. is not in as much of a precarious situation as Europe and large parts of Asia as it concerns energy and food production, but there is no way that a global depression would not lead to a lot of hardship in the U.S. When lots of people are hungry, social order breaks down and governments turn to repressive policies. The U.S. has been for some time on a trajectory towards increasing authoritarianism, which I suspect could get much worse. We will know by July or August 2026 as to how bad the economic situation will get in the aftermath of the Iran War.
In terms of longer term of threats, I am concerned about cognitive freedom or the right to cognitive self-determination and free will. It will be getting much easier for governments and corporations to manipulate people thanks to AI and cognitive technology, some of which will be marketed as a form of human enhancement but could also be used for monitoring mental processes. Within a few years a lot of people will be able to technologically upgrade their body to improve performance and longevity, which can be positive. At the same time, the merger of biological bodies with technology creates more risk of surveillance and external control. It will become increasingly difficult for ordinary people to exercise free will as the brain is getting deciphered, which obviously allows for more sophisticated forms of influence.
Society may indeed come to resemble Aldous Huxley’s “scientific dictatorship” where people have learned to love their servitude and to be happy to live in conditions they really ought not to enjoy. That is the true nightmare for me.
Society would need to achieve resilience across many domains. We need economic resilience, psychological resilience, resilience to major disruptions such long-lasting power outages, and resilience to societal chaos. I don’t think that there is much that a government can do in our current situation. Resilience must start at the level of individuals, small groups, and communities, and must be built bottom up and not top down. People need to get accustomed to the idea that they are responsible for themselves. Most importantly, they need to become resilient psychologically and morally to resist pressures and hardship, so that they can preserve their autonomy and perhaps thrive.
REFERENCES
Abbott, D. H. (Ed.). (2010). The handbook of fifth-generation warfare (5GW). Nimble Books.
Krishnan, A. (2016). Military neuroscience and the coming age of neurowarfare. Routledge.
Krishnan, A. (2024). Fifth generation warfare: Dominating the human domain. Routledge.
Krishnan, A. (2025). Havana syndrome: A threat to national security. Bloomsbury Academic.
National Security Archive. (2022, September 13). The Moscow Signals declassified: Microwave mysteries: Projects PANDORA and BIZARRE.
https://nsarchive.gwu.edu/briefing-book/intelligence-russia-programs/2022-09-13/moscow-signals-declassified-microwave
Pelley, S. (Correspondent). (2026, March 8). U.S. military tested device that may be tied to Havana Syndrome on rats, sheep, confidential sources say [Television broadcast transcript]. In 60 Minutes. CBS News.
https://www.cbsnews.com/news/us-military-tested-device-that-may-be-tied-to-havana-syndrome-60-minutes-transcript/