Former Defense Secretary and retired General James Mattis is said to have told Marines in Iraq that the most important six inches on the battlefield were between their ears. He was referring to the need for calm under fire. Today, his warning is appropriate for everyone, everywhere, because the United States is in an information war—and it is losing.

This is not a metaphor. It’s not science fiction. Few national security thinkers and hardly anyone in the wider public have recognized its scope, but the information war’s cognitive battlefront is ingrained in the very fabric of modern society. It is an amorphous digital skin stretched across the entire planet, running over, under, and through individuals, political parties, and nation-states. Its battles may be virtual, but their consequences are very real.

Don’t worry—this isn’t yet another story about Russian election interference. Russia is responsible for neither the swiftly-changing character of war nor the changing character of the United States. They were simply the first to grasp war’s new weapons, because the future happened there first.

This article is instead about how the Pentagon’s enthusiastic embrace of the National Defense Strategy’s emphasis on lethality in preparation for a future shooting war risks losing the plot in the narrative war we are already in. Defense planners assiduously designing more resilient operating concepts and longer-range strike platforms risk underestimating or ignoring altogether what has become the center of gravity: the information space itself.

Today, actors both malign and mundane are wielding information weapons in pursuit of their political aims. These weapons are persistent, pervasive, and persuasive. The United States can no longer afford to treat information operations as a supporting effort or mere annex to a larger plan. Where national security used to begin at the water’s edge, it now begins in your head, and the United States’ national security architecture must adapt.

In short, America needs a theory of victory for the information age.

War Never Changes (Except When it Does)

War has a consistent logic. It is and has always been about changing human behavior by imposing will. But its character is inherently mutable, because security communities continuously seek competitive advantage over one another through changing circumstances.

Historically, the most efficient way for a state to impose its will on another has been through physical coercion. But insightful theorists such as Carl von Clausewitz realized this was but a reflection of war’s true nature. Clausewitz believed war was “a trial of moral and physical forces by means of the latter.” He compared those means to the wooden hilt of a sword, that is, merely the apparatus by which we control the real weapon—the moral (or cognitive) force.

The character of war has changed dramatically since Clausewitz’s day, and an opponent may now be targeted more effectively with Tweets instead of Tomahawk missiles.

Deterrence, after all, exists only in the mind of the deterred, and so does the will to fight when deterrence fails. In the past, a state needed to threaten or even invade its neighbor to impose on them the political changes it desired. But what if that neighbor’s leaders—or worse, its population—could be convinced to make those changes on their own without a shot being fired? Now, that is possible for the first time ever, thanks to the competitive connectivity of the information age. Belligerents can direct Clausewtiz’s metaphorical blade itself.