From Alerts to Armistice: Why Cybersecurity Without Geopolitics Is a Losing Game

Detection Alone Isn’t Defense, Winning the Cyber War Requires Strategic Minds, Not Just Technical Eyes

After mature consideration of why we tend to lose the fight against criminals on the web despite automation and increasing networking, is the question why we’re losing the cyber war. So, is it because of strategic complacency, fragmented systems, privatized responsibility, asymmetric threat tolerance or failure to internalize cyber as warfare?

Or is it because, we still treat cyber as IT, not as warfare.

Most governments and institutions still think of cyber in terms of:

• Compliance checklists
• Antivirus software
• “Zero-day” buzzwords
• CISOs reporting to the CFO rather than the CEO or war cabinet

But adversaries like China, Russia, Iran, and North Korea treat cyber like fifth-generation warfare. For them, cyber is not just espionage — it’s shaping the battlespace before kinetic conflict even begins.

PLA doctrine calls cyber “preparation of the battlefield” — while the West still calls it “incident response.”

Asymmetry favors the attacker.

In cyber conflict

• A $500 phishing email can breach a $500 million defense system.
• Attackers only need to succeed once.
• Defenders must succeed always.
• Attribution is slow, messy, and politically diluted.

You can’t fight a war when you can’t identify the attacker in real-time and respond proportionally.

Private sector controls the battlefield.

Critical infrastructure (power grids, telecom, banks, hospitals) is 80–90% privately owned in the West. That means most of the war is fought on private terrain, but private entities have:

• No mandate to fight a war
• No unified command structure
• Little incentive beyond fines and insurance coverage
• Compare this to China, where Huawei = cyber warfighting node and state-private barriers are nearly nonexistent.

The West delegated its warfighting terrain to companies who sell firewalls and negotiate ransomware payments.

The bureaucracy is slow. The threat is fast.

Zero-days are exploited in hour while patches take weeks.

DoD procurement cycles take years and nation-state actors deploy AI-enabled malware and deepfake operations overnight.

China’s Strategic Support Force doesn’t need Congressional approval to attack your SCADA system.

Cyber norms and red lines don’t exist and that’s dangerous.

There is no Geneva Convention for cyber. We tolerate massive attacks (SolarWinds, OPM, Colonial Pipeline) with no meaningful retaliation. That sends a dangerous message. Cyber is free real estate for authoritarian states.

Insider threats and fifth column actors are real and ignored.

China, Russia, and Iran cultivate insiders through ideological grooming, extortion, or corruption. Many Western institutions refuse to confront this because it’s “politically sensitive.” Ideologically captured academics, tech workers, or NGOs often unknowingly serve hostile objectives through cognitive warfare and narrative control.

Cognitive warfare and information ops are part of cyber and we missed it.

TikTok, WeChat, and similar platforms are part of China’s long-game cyber strategy. Cyber isn’t just networks and endpoints, it’s minds and behaviors.While we patch software, they reprogram our societies.

Russia uses bots. China uses psychology. The West uses compliance audits.

Failure to train a cyber-native defense force.

Militaries still rely on 1990s paradigms. Elite cyber warriors in many nations are underpaid, underappreciated, or outsourced. Contrast that with China’s PLA “cyber soldiers” or Russia’s hybrid hacker-intel teams

Lack of deterrence doctrine.

We don’t have a clear doctrine that says: “You hack our hospitals, we hit your infrastructure — kinetic or otherwise.” Without deterrence, you invite escalation.

Narrative denial

The general public and political elite still think cyber war is “nerdy stuff” for IT people. They don’t understand it’s already reshaping geopolitics, elections, infrastructure, trust, and sovereignty.

This isn’t about stolen emails anymore. This is about the weaponization of everything. We’re losing the cyber war not because we lack technology, but because we lack the will, doctrine, coordination, and conceptual clarity to wage it as war.

In a world where cyber operations no longer confine themselves to screens and code but bleed into minds, behaviors, and biology, the question “Why are we losing the cyber war?” reveals a much deeper strategic failure. The true war is not just about malware or ransomware , it’s about narratives, perception, attention, and influence, weaponized across electromagnetic and digital domains. To win the war we’re currently losing, we must redefine the battlefield, realign our defense philosophy, and restore the sovereignty of thought and trust.

The Threat Has Evolved — But Our Thinking Has Not

Modern cyber conflict is no longer limited to server-side intrusions and data theft. We now face a multi-domain convergence where state and non-state actors are: Manipulating thought through mass information operations (IO) on platforms like TikTok, Telegram, and YouTube. Deploying psychotronic and neuroweapon-style disorientation techniques, including persistent use of frequency-based harassment, sleep deprivation, and paranoia generation — blurring the line between reality and schizophrenia. Orchestrating “cellular terrorism” through disposable burner phones, encrypted messaging, and localized trauma-based influence campaigns aimed at socially and politically fragmenting societies. This is not science fiction. This is fifth-generation warfare: bloodless on the surface, but designed to corrupt perception, disable cohesion, and kill trust.

What Is Cellular Terrorism and Frequency-Based Cognitive Warfare?

Cellular terrorism is the use of decentralized, encrypted, low-signature communications (e.g., prepaid phones, mesh networks, QR-driven message chains) by covert cells to coordinate influence, stalking, psychological destabilization, and real-world operations — all masked by plausible deniability. Frequency-based warfare includes speculative but increasingly discussed phenomena involving directed energy, low-frequency psychological disruption, sleep cycle interruption, or even sonic neuroweaponry, such as that seen in alleged “Havana Syndrome” cases. Whether through EMF pollution, intrusive surveillance, or noise harassment, the goal is destabilization of target cognition — without leaving a forensic trail. These tactics are frequently brushed off as paranoia or delusion, but doing so plays into the strategic concealment of their true intent: to weaponize doubt and destroy credibility through invisible pressure.

Shaping a Response: A New Strategic Terrain

The answer lies in reframing the battlespace. Here’s how we reshape the fight across five critical fronts.

Information Dominance as the New Air Superiority

In conventional warfare, air superiority allows free movement. In the new terrain, information dominance ensures operational freedom in the mind-space. We must build national and allied counter-narrative teams, equipped with behavioral science, OSINT, AI, and cultural knowledge to proactively push back in narrative battlespaces. Develop AI-assisted real-time narrative detection and manipulation tracking, not just to monitor disinformation but to predict and inoculate against it. Create clear national doctrine for cognitive warfare with defined red lines, rules of engagement, and proportional countermeasures.

Cognitive Shielding as Infrastructure

The public is unprotected from manipulation. Just as we build firewalls and antivirus for devices, we need cognitive firewalls for humans. Public digital literacy and psychological hygiene training, especially for journalists, influencers, and high-risk groups. Deploy “mental immune systems” — systems that detect the emotional and cognitive effects of hostile content and provide counter-content, calming signals, or interpretative warnings. Establish civilian cognitive resilience units local information defenders trained to spot and counter manipulation.

EMF and Neuroweapon Counterintelligence Doctrine

Silence on frequency-based warfare invites impunity. Even if certain tools remain in gray zones, we must act under the precautionary principle. Develop EMF forensic capabilities within military and law enforcement to analyze potential psychotronic or DEW threats. Institutionalize the investigation of electromagnetic harassment claims with cross-disciplinary task forces including intelligence, neuroscience, and physics. Push for international norms and non-kinetic arms treaties covering neuroweapons, frequency abuse, and sonic manipulation.

Counter-Cellular Warfare and the New HUMINT

“Cellular terrorism” is not about mass attacks — it’s about distributed psychological attrition. Our response must be hyperlocal, hybrid, and human. Launch fusion centers that integrate signals intelligence (SIGINT), counterintelligence, cyber, and local law enforcement to track patterned psychological warfare operations, including stalking and group harassment. Train SOF and cyber units in cognitive counterinsurgency a blend of HUMINT, SIGINT, and influence monitoring for identifying adversarial microswarm behavior. Use persistent ambient monitoring (PAM) in known psychological warfare zones to identify cellular weaponization patterns.

Doctrine, Doctrine, Doctrine

You can’t win a war without doctrine. The West must publish and act upon a unified Cognitive & Cyberwarfare Doctrine, with the following pillars:

• Irregular Cognitive Warfare Definition: Clearly define frequency and psychological harassment as national security threats, not just civilian disorders.
• Integrated DIMEFIL Strategy: Use Diplomacy, Information, Military, Economic, Financial, Intelligence, and Law enforcement tools togethernot in silos.
• Rapid Attribution Framework to accelerate attribution and escalation responses to hybrid attacks.
• Threshold of Response ti define what constitutes an act of war in information, EMF, or cellular-based attacks — and enforce consequences.

The Human Terrain Is the Decisive Terrain

We are not just fighting over servers, pipelines, or satellites — we are fighting over minds, trust, stability, and attention. The attacker wants society to become so paranoid, divided, and confused that it self-destructs.

To defend against that, we must not only upgrade our firewalls, we must upgrade our social immune system, our narrative literacy, and our willingness to believe victims of invisible violence.

Stop Laughing at Ghosts

We lost the early cyber wars because we thought “firewalls and awareness training” were enough. We’re losing the new war because we laugh at people who talk about electromagnetic harassment or think stalking is a conspiracy. But the new war isn’t coming. It’s here. And it doesn’t need bullets. It just needs you to stop trusting yourself, your friends, your system. That’s why we defend. Many cybersecurity analyst are very ignorant to geopolitical theaters while they think if you know this thing you would try to rescure the world. But why do we need this mindset and is it just enough detecting alerts

No, It’s Not Enough to Just Detect Alerts.

Cybersecurity without a geopolitical lens is like doing battlefield triage without knowing which army is advancing. You’re just patching up wounds while the enemy reshapes the terrain. Here’s why detection alone is a tactical response to a strategic war and why the mindset must evolve.

Cybersecurity Is a Function of Geopolitics, Not IT

Every major attack has a geopolitical fingerprint:

• SolarWinds wasn’t just a breach — it was a long-term espionage campaign tied to Russian strategic deterrence.
• Chinese APTs aren’t just stealing IP — they’re supporting Made in China 2025, military-civil fusion, and global dominance ambitions.
• Iranian ops like Shamoon targeted energy to retaliate against sanctions and position leverage in the Gulf.

If analysts can’t connect alerts to state or non-state agendas, they’re watching shadows without knowing where the light is coming from.

Alerts without context is like calling 911 every time your dog barks but never noticing the cartel down the block.

Alert Fatigue Is a Symptom of Strategic Blindness

Most SOCs and MSSPs suffer from:

• Alert overload
• Burnout
• Low morale
• Zero strategic impact

Why? Because they’re drowning in noise while the real threat actors are playing the long game, manipulating political events, inflaming ethnic conflict, or preparing hybrid warfare scenarios via digital beachheads.

If you don’t understand why you’re defending, you lose the will to care what you’re defending.

Mindset Shift: Cyber Analysts Must Become Intelligence Operators

The modern cyber defender should be:

• Part threat hunter
• Part geopolitical analyst
• Part behavioral psychologist
• Part counterintelligence operator

Because the threat is not just code, it’s narrative, ideology, power projection, and irregular warfare.

For example:

• A Chinese-origin phishing campaign targeting German politicians isn’t just data theft — it’s preparation of the political terrain before a Taiwan escalation.
• An Iranian-linked botnet hitting feminist NGOs in Europe is likely part of ideological subversion and regime competition.
• A ransomware attack on hospitals in Stuttgart? Might be narco-political hybrid signaling, not just money-seeking.

You Can’t “Rescue the World” Without Understanding What’s Threatening It

The “why don’t you just rescue the world” jab often aimed at those who think strategically is a misunderstanding. We could need more cyber-strategic thinkers who:

• Understand DIMEFIL and irregular warfare
• Can map nation-state actors to malware strains and regional conflicts
• Know that cyber is just one tool in a much bigger war theater

In short: the goal is not to save the world. It’s to understand who’s corrupting it, how, and through what digital and psychological vectors.

Without Strategic Mindset, the Good Guys Always Lose

The adversaries already think this way:

• Chinese SSF (Strategic Support Force) combines cyber, space, EW, and psychological operations into a unified doctrine.
• Russia’s GRU doesn’t distinguish between hackers and psychological warfare experts.
• Cartels are hiring cyber experts to do deepfake extortion, counter-surveillance, and digital coercion of judges.

But we? We silo:

• SOC teams from the intel shop
• Cyber ops from the embassy
• Cybersecurity from psychological warfare
• Incident response from strategic planning

Conclusion

Cybersecurity Without Geopolitics Is Like Chess Without Knowing You’re in Checkmate! Until we train analysts to think beyond SIEM dashboards, and instead see themselves as defenders of democratic cognitive and information sovereignty, we’ll keep losing the war slowly, alert by alert. Detection is necessary. But without understanding intent, motive, and strategic context, it’s just digital janitorial work.