AI for Digital Warfare

Niklas Hageback, a risk and behavioural-finance specialist who has spent two decades working at the intersection of technology and security for institutions including Deutsche Bank and KPMG, turns in this 2022 CRC Press volume to the question of how artificial intelligence is reshaping conflict below the threshold of conventional war. The book is aimed at readers who want to understand the mechanics of digital warfare without a computer-science background — practitioners, analysts, and policy-minded generalists.

Hageback’s central argument is that AI has already shifted the centre of gravity in modern conflict from kinetic operations to the manipulation of information, perception, and trust. Conventional militaries, he contends, are still organised for the wrong fight. Cognitive warfare — the contest over what populations believe, fear, and choose to do — has become the decisive battlespace, and the tools that wage it are largely generative models, recommender systems, and automated influence networks rather than missiles or tanks.

The chapters work through the components of this new arsenal. Hageback examines deepfakes and synthetic media, walking through the generative-adversarial-network architectures that produce them and the forensic techniques being developed to detect them. He surveys AI-driven social-media manipulation, including bot networks, astroturfing operations, and the use of machine learning to identify and exploit psychological vulnerabilities in target populations. A long section treats automated cyber operations: AI-augmented penetration, adaptive malware, and the prospect of self-directed offensive agents. He places these capabilities against the doctrine and practice of state actors, with particular attention to Russian reflexive-control theory and the Chinese concept of unrestricted warfare, and traces operations attributed to both. Western responses — from NATO’s StratCom Centre of Excellence to national cyber commands — receive a more sceptical treatment, framed as institutionally cautious and slow to industrialise the same techniques. Hageback also draws on his background in behavioural finance to discuss how AI exploits cognitive biases at scale, and closes with chapters on governance, attribution, and the legal grey zones in which most of this activity sits.

Against the broader literature, the book reads as a primer rather than an academic monograph: closer in spirit to Singer and Brooking’s LikeWar than to Buchanan’s The Hacker and the State, but with more technical detail on the AI side than either. Readers looking for original archival research or named case studies of specific intelligence operations will find it thin; readers looking for an accessible map of how the pieces — generative models, influence operations, cyber tooling, doctrine — fit together will find it useful. It is most valuable as a structured introduction for executives, defence officials, and journalists entering the field, and as a reference for the vocabulary the field has settled on.