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The Sixth and Fifth Domains: How Cognitive Warfare and Space Are Converging into a Single Battle-space
Muhammad Waqas Haider
Analysis Series
Analysis//0027/May/2026/London-Dialogue. 28 May 2026
Introduction: Two Domains, One Battlespace
In the early hours of 24 February 2022, two events unfolded in parallel that have shaped how the world thinks about modern warfare. Russian forces crossed into Ukraine, and a Russian cyberattack against the Viasat KA-SAT satellite network disabled much of Ukraine’s military command and control communications. Within forty-eight hours, the first SpaceX Starlink terminals had arrived in Kyiv, and the war became, for the first time in human history, a conflict in which one side’s ability to fight, communicate, and tell its story to the world depended on a low Earth orbit constellation operated by a private American company. What unfolded over the months that followed was not simply a demonstration of space-enabled military capability. It was the first sustained example of how the space domain and the cognitive domain have fused into a single contested battlespace, in which the satellites overhead now shape what populations believe, what decision-makers conclude, and how strategic narratives propagate across the globe.
NATO’s Allied Command Transformation has formally designated cognitive warfare as the sixth operational domain, alongside land, sea, air, cyber, and space. Space itself was recognised as NATO’s fifth operational domain in 2019. The doctrinal communities that work on each have, until very recently, treated them as parallel concerns. They are not. As my doctoral research at Lancaster University on space security and diplomacy has explored, the space domain has become the principal infrastructure through which contemporary cognitive operations are conducted, and cognitive warfare has become the principal mechanism through which space capabilities are translated into strategic effect. This article examines how that convergence has unfolded across recent conflicts, what it means for the future of strategic competition, and what middle-power militaries must now do to operate within a battlespace whose boundaries no longer respect domain distinctions.
Cognitive Warfare: From Concept to Operational Reality
Cognitive warfare, as defined in the most widely cited NATO ACT exploratory concept and analysed in the peer-reviewed literature, refers to the deliberate employment of information, psychological operations, and technological means to shape the perceptions, beliefs, and decision-making of adversary populations and leaderships. It is not new in its underlying logic; what Russian doctrine has long called reflexive control and what Chinese strategists describe through the three-warfare concept share family resemblance with the NATO formulation. What is new is the scale, speed, and infrastructural reach that contemporary cognitive operations can achieve through digital, satellite, and AI-enabled delivery mechanisms.
The NATO Chief Scientist’s 2025 cognitive warfare report and the January 2026 NATO Cognitive Warfare Newsletter, combined with the NATO Cooperative Cyber Defence Centre of Excellence 2026 paper, reflect a doctrinal consensus that cognitive operations now target not merely opinion but the underlying cognitive processes by which populations form judgements. The Russian campaign in Ukraine has provided the most extensively documented case, with Kremlin operations combining the manufacture of justificatory narratives, targeting of European public opinion through energy and refugee disinformation, and the systematic exploitation of social media platforms to shape global perception of the conflict. What is striking about all of these operations is the degree to which they have depended on, and been countered through, capabilities that originate in the space domain.
The Starlink Moment: Space as the Delivery Layer of Cognitive Warfare
The Ukrainian use of Starlink during the Russo-Ukrainian war has become the paradigmatic case of how space-based infrastructure now functions as the delivery layer for both kinetic and cognitive operations. Between February and December 2022 alone, more than twenty-two thousand Starlink terminals were delivered to Ukraine. The terminals enabled drone strikes, artillery fire control, and battlefield reconnaissance, but their cognitive significance went well beyond their military utility. They allowed the Ukrainian government to maintain continuous communication with its population, document Russian atrocities in real time, and shape the global narrative of the war in ways that no previous conflict had permitted.
The point is made explicit in a CSIS-translated Chinese strategic analysis, which observes directly that Ukraine successfully used Starlink to launch cognitive and psychological warfare against Russia, influencing public opinion, boosting military morale, and garnering support from international media. This is not Western framing. It is the Chinese strategic community itself recognising that the Ukrainian war demonstrated how a low Earth orbit constellation can serve simultaneously as military communications infrastructure, cognitive warfare instrument, and narrative-projection platform. The Belfer Center at Harvard has noted the parallel risk dimension: when strategic infrastructure depends on privately owned networks, domestic competence, governance, and accountability become matters of national security. The same constellation that enabled Ukrainian cognitive resilience also created a single point of dependency on the personal decisions of one commercial actor.
Commercial satellite imagery providers have completed the picture. Companies including Maxar, Planet Labs, BlackSky, Capella, and HawkEye 360 have made high-resolution imagery of battlefield events available to the global public within hours, transforming the temporal cycle of strategic narrative formation. Where in earlier conflicts strategic narratives were shaped by what governments chose to release weeks or months after events, today they are shaped in real time by satellite imagery whose interpretation is increasingly contested. The space domain has become the principal infrastructure of contemporary perception management, and the cognitive domain has become the principal arena in which space-derived information generates strategic effect.
Counterspace as Cognitive Operation: The Reverse Logic
The convergence runs in both directions. If space enables cognitive operations, then attacks on space assets have become, in effect, cognitive operations themselves. The CSIS Aerospace Security Programme has documented daily occurrences of GPS jamming and spoofing in regions including the Baltic Sea, the Middle East, and parts of South Asia, with effects that extend well beyond their immediate military targets. When Russian electronic warfare units jam Ukrainian Starlink terminals or when Chinese vessels conduct GPS spoofing operations in the South China Sea, they are not merely degrading military capability. They are imposing cognitive effects on commercial aviation, civilian shipping, and the populations dependent on accurate positioning, navigation, and timing services. The cognitive dimension is no longer collateral; it is increasingly intentional.
The October 2023 Hamas attacks against Israeli border surveillance cameras and communications towers, designed to disable command and control before the kinetic phase, illustrate how counterspace and counter-information operations have merged into a single concept of operations. The Israeli Operation Rising Lion strikes against Iranian command and control nodes in June 2025 shows the same logic from the opposing direction. In each case, the kinetic action was inseparable from the cognitive effect, and the space-cognitive linkage was central to the operational design. The doctrinal community has historically treated counterspace operations as a branch of space warfare and information operations as a branch of psychological warfare. Contemporary practice recognises no such distinction.
The May 2025 South Asia Case: Cognitive Warfare in a Nuclear Dyad
The four-day India-Pakistan air conflict of May 2025 added a further empirical datapoint to the space-cognitive convergence story, in a context made more dangerous by the nuclear character of the dyad. In the hours and days following the opening engagements of 7 May, both sides conducted cognitive operations through space-enabled platforms that materially shaped global understanding of the conflict before the kinetic facts had been independently established. Pakistani official communications released through space-relayed channels presented imagery of downed Indian aircraft, Indian official communications contested those claims, and a global audience formed judgements about the conflict in real time on the basis of information whose attribution and verification were profoundly uncertain.
What made the South Asian case distinctive was the speed at which the cognitive and space dimensions interacted with the nuclear escalation logic underlying the conflict. Decisions about restraint, escalation, and ceasefire timing were taken in an information environment substantially shaped by satellite imagery, social media amplification of contested footage, and the cognitive operations of both governments and external actors. For middle powers operating in nuclear-adjacent strategic environments, the South Asian case offers a clear lesson: in any future high-intensity conflict, the space-cognitive dimension will be active from the opening moments, shape the political latitude available to decision-makers, and operate at speeds that compress traditional crisis-management timelines. This is not a hypothetical concern. It is the operational environment that already exists.
Strategic Competition in the Converged Domain
The principal great-power competitors have all recognised the convergence and are organising for it. The United States created Starshield as a separate Starlink service for government and military entities, with a contract awarded in September 2023 covering operations across the Army, Navy, Air Force, and Coast Guard. China has launched two competing low Earth orbit broadband constellations, with the US intelligence community assessing that China has achieved global coverage in some of its intelligence, surveillance, and reconnaissance constellations and is building toward real-time global target detection and tracking. Russia, having lost much of its conventional capability through attrition in Ukraine, has invested correspondingly more heavily in cognitive operations targeting Western populations and decision-making elites, recognising that the cognitive battlespace is one in which it can still impose meaningful strategic costs.
For middle powers, the implications are operationally consequential. An integrated air defence architecture without an integrated information defence is incomplete. A space-enabled command and control system without resilience to cognitive operations against the population it serves is fragile in ways that conventional military analysis does not capture. The next decade will require serious militaries to build doctrine, training, and force structure that treat the space-cognitive convergence as a single operational reality, not as two parallel concerns to be managed by separate staff sections.
Conclusion: A Domain That Has Already Arrived
NATO’s designation of cognitive warfare as the sixth operational domain and its earlier designation of space as the fifth were intended as analytical conveniences. The empirical record of the past four years suggests they have become an analytical liability. Treating space and cognition as separate domains, each with its own doctrine, training pathway, and procurement programme, obscures the operational reality that they have already converged. The Ukrainian war demonstrated the convergence at an industrial scale. The South Asian conflict of May 2025 demonstrated it under nuclear shadow. The October 2023 Hamas attacks and the June 2025 Israeli strikes against Iranian command nodes have demonstrated it across multiple Middle Eastern theatres. The pattern is consistent, and the implications are clear.
The doctrinal task of the next decade is to develop integrated frameworks that treat the space-cognitive battlespace as a single operational reality. This requires investment in resilient space communications architectures less dependent on the commercial decisions of any single actor, the integration of cognitive defence into training programmes for military commanders at every level, and the development of doctrine that explicitly addresses how kinetic, space, and cognitive effects can be planned and executed as coordinated wholes. For middle powers in particular, the choice is not whether to engage with this converged domain but how to ensure they are not strategically defenceless within it. The sixth and the fifth domains have already become one. Doctrine must catch up with the battlespace it claims to describe.
Muhammad Waqas Haider is a Research Fellow at London Dialogue and a doctoral candidate in International Relations at Lancaster University, where his research focuses on space security and diplomacy. A Chevening Scholar, he served for over seventeen years as an officer in the Pakistan Air Force, including operational appointments in air defence and a contributing role in the 2019 air engagements with India. His broader research interests include the technology-driven transformation of warfare and strategic competition in South Asia and the Middle East.
Muhammad Waqas Haider
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