The same information can produce two different decisions. Svitlana Pavlovska says the difference is orientation, and orientation is what cognitive warfare targets.
Svitlana spent her career in the security forces of Ukraine and led public affairs departments. She finished her last NATO posting at Joint Force Command Naples in 2024. In July she published a 48-page analytical review, Cognitive Warfare. Opinion. It traces John Boyd from Energy-Maneuverability Theory through Destruction and Creation into Decision Advantage, Cognitive Advantage, Narrative Intelligence and Cognitive Security.
She went back to Boyd’s primary sources, which few writers on cognitive warfare do. She also notes that Patterns of Conflict is a series of briefings. In the episode, Svitlana walks through a case study of an AI-generated historical image, and how to teach people to spot fake content early. AI has damaged ordinary verification, and she shows what that looks like.
Upstream of the argument
Her central claim is that orientation is where incoming information meets prior experience, knowledge, values and culture. Cognitive operations are built to work on orientation, more than to send or deny information. An influence campaign never has to win the argument, because it works one layer upstream of the argument. Orientation sits at the center of Boyd’s real OODA loop, so I read her paper as a direct line from Boyd to the cognitive warfare field.
From material to cognitive advantage
We follow the progression her paper lays out, from material advantage to information advantage to decision advantage to cognitive advantage. We bring in Dr. James Giordano’s argument that cognitive security means protecting the biological, psychological and social foundations of cognition. Those three levels sit close to the inputs Boyd put inside orientation. Giordano returns to the show in Episode 185. We also cover why so much European writing on the OODA loop reads like copies of one secondary source. Svitlana explains why nobody can build doctrine while five different terms mean the same thing.
What would someone have to change in your orientation to change your decisions?
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Written by Ponch Rivera with AI assistance in production. The full conversation is in the player below.