A good body of research tells us that the threat from foreign propaganda is overstated – and the panic that ensues may do more good than harm.
That being granted, I believe the studies are measuring the wrong thing, and NATO should still be acting against the Russian propaganda machine. I’ll tell you what the studies are not measuring, and how NATO can act against it – all for the price of a single F-35 or less.
A caveat on scope, before we get into the nitty-gritty – this article focuses on Russia. The Chinese information apparatus is a longer-horizon effort with different objectives and a different theory of victory, and deserves separate treatment.
What the studies are not measuring
Right now the studies try to measure what kind of impact a campaign has had on a population.
From a confrontation angle – something that is more difficult to measure - three aspects determine the outcome: tempo, endurance, and cohesion. Russia is ahead on all three counts.
Tempo
The contest to decide which version of any incident “wins” is decided in the first few hours. Russian information services are always at full readiness, the content ready to go, and the authority to release the material sits low on the hierarchy. In contrast, any message on behalf of NATO goes through multiple national and supranational committees before it is approved. At that point, the narrative that came first, even an absurd one, still wins the frame.
Endurance
The current research measures impact per campaign and per exposure – but we are talking about an intense, full-time campaign of continuous (mis)information, run for over a century. This kind of sustained exposure is difficult to measure by any standard, and if the aggregate effect is unknown, it suggests a gap in our knowledge rather than a small effect.
Cohesion
Unfortunately for the target of these campaigns, it is not necessary to move an entire population to change what you need. All you need to do is manufacture enough hesitation – easy enough to do, difficult to overcome – and the NATO system, that moves by consensus, does the rest. Every delegation has a veto, and the most cautious capital sets the pace.
How far behind are we, exactly?
Russia is spending record amounts on foreign propaganda; by the estimate of Ukraine’s foreign intelligence, it spent half as much again in 2026 – 1.85bn USD – of what it spent the previous year. Even by conservative estimates – even if you halve it – it is still more than what NATO spends combined.
On the other hand, the U.S. is dismantling the organisations that counter this disinformation. In December 2024, the United States closed the Global Engagement Center, the State Department body established to counter foreign disinformation, after Congress declined to renew its authorisation. The successor office was shut in April 2025.
Speaking at the Munich Security Conference in 2025, JD Vance, vice president of the United States, chastised European leaders on “Soviet-era” concepts like disinformation and spoke of “the threat from within”. In principle, I can agree with the idea that a society that cannot survive an argument has a problem deeper than the argument. On the other hand, as a public statement of policy from an international stage, it was Western division handed to Russia on a plate.
What can NATO do about it?
The two problems that feed into each other – impact is difficult to measure, and nobody owns information.
Adding to the fact that the impact of this kind of information campaign is difficult to measure in the first place, live social media feeds are even more elusive – by its own admission, NATO cannot tell whether anything it does in this space actually works.
It has conceded that no validated method exists for measuring whether activities designed to shift attitudes and behaviour actually shift them. There is no agreed standard of effect, no baseline, and no serious programme of field trials anywhere in the Alliance. Thirty-two nations fund “influence” activity – assessed based on measures of performance: rebuttals published, impressions served, engagements logged, products delivered on time. Those records show that “something was done” – they do not show how effective it was, or if it even was effective at all.
This is the true failure of NATO’s information strategy. Whether a programme is “good” is based solely on whether it produces numbers you can put in front of a commander.
The second problem is that “Information” is not a recognised NATO domain. A domain, in NATO terms, is a recognised area of warfare with its own command arrangements, budget line, and career paths. Space became one in 2019. Cyberspace became one in 2016. Information, that crucial medium through which all other work is done, is still classified as cross-functional. In practice, what belongs to everybody belongs to nobody.
But three changes would begin to fix this.
One: Name the fight.
NATO ACT (Allied Command Transformation) has run a research programme on cognitive warfare since 2020.
Unfortunately, they still have not reached a consensus on the definition of the term. Right now, it remains in limbo between being “an interesting research project” and “the fight itself”.
NATO must decide which one it is. If it truly is a decisive area of competition, it then requires an approved doctrine, a supported commander, and a budget line. If it is not, we should just stop describing it as “the fight”.
The distinction matters more than it sounds. In a consensus alliance, ratified doctrine is the instrument that converts an idea into a claim on money and attention. It is also the first letter of the capability development framework the Alliance uses, and the rest of that framework will not move without it: organisation, training, materiel, leadership, personnel, facilities, and interoperability all wait on this document. Until it exists, information operations remain what it is across most member forces today: work done by people with no route to promotion, filled by augmentees, and treated as a supporting effort.
Two: Name the attacker, fast.
Naming and shaming, so to speak, can be a formidable weapon, especially if it happens left of launch – a lesson that NATO should have learnt with its successes immediately preceding the full-scale invasion of Ukraine in February 2022. Allied intelligence services put Russian plans for staged attacks into the public domain, downgraded for release, before those attacks happened. These staged attacks, which were meant to manufacture a pretext for invasion, were pre-empted.
Let me be clear, these releases did not pre-empt the invasion itself. The invasion still happened. What it did, however, was to render the pretext false, and therefore, produced an unexpected level of allied unity against Russia.
NATO treated this as a fortunate one-off, instead of a counterintelligence strategy going forward.
With U.S. capability diminished in this regard, Europe must find its own capability – and the Eastern flank states – Estonia, Latvia, Lithuania, Poland, Romania, Finland, and Sweden, have risen to the occasion, with the most serious national defences in Europe. They now need release authority to attribute their findings publicly to NATO.
With speed comes a certain level of inaccuracy, something that could undermine confidence in NATO intelligence. The standard should follow those of the intelligence community at large: publish confidence levels alongside claims, and accept that there will be a certain proportion of errors. This is the way to longstanding institutional confidence.
Three: Don’t correct, inoculate.
This one is the hardest to change, yet with the most compelling evidence to do so. NATO’s SOP is to try and correct a hostile story after it lands, despite wide evidence that corrections barely work at all on political content, effectively the only kind of content that NATO concerns itself with.
Inoculation works better. A direct parallel to the medical kind: when you expose a population to a weakened form of a manipulation technique, it learns to recognise it in the wild. It is a technique that has been tested across several European population and produces measurable resistance to manipulation.
It also solves JD Vance’s problem: inoculation does not require an institution adjudicating whether each claim is true – the point where counter-disinformation meets state control of speech, and where it generates backlash.
The countries that understand this integrates it into the system. Finland embeds resistance to manipulation in the school curriculum and leads Europe on media literacy year after year. Sweden established a Psychological Defence Agency in 2022. These are whole-of-society programmes.
As the Alliance already sets Baseline Requirements for National Resilience covering fuel stocks, resilient communications, and continuity of government, cognitive resilience should be a part of this species of baseline resilience.
What’s stopping us?
The main resistance comes from the first problem I named above: that correction is easier to justify than inoculation. That NATO has the money, has the experts, but does not have the political courage.
An open call to anyone working on this problem: this is just the summary argument of a full document that includes the route to doctrinal ratification, evidence thresholds and release timelines for public attribution, curriculum design for an inoculation programme including what to teach and to whom, and a measures of effectiveness framework that survives risk reviews with Supreme Headquarters Allied Powers Europe.
Reach out from your official address and I will send it across. No conditions, and nothing to sign.
Ruh Hussain is a former Director at the United Kingdom Ministry of Defence, where he worked across the Special Projects portfolio. He is now an investor and Operating Partner at Ante-Bellum Angels, backing start-ups that materially degrade NATO's adversaries. The views expressed here are his own.
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