For thousands of years, combatants have spread falsehoods to help achieve victory. Many of their efforts failed or backfired. However, with the rise of social media and sophisticated technologies to exploit it, attackers have potent new means of conducting information operations (IOs) to shape their victims’ per-ceptions and coerce them to yield in future crises.

The IO  campaigns that Beijing and Moscow are conducting today against the United States provide a starting point for assessing potential US vulnerabilities to coercion. Deepfake technologies, techniques for manipulating social media algorithms, and other tools used to influence our elections can all be repurposed to shape American perceptions in regional crises. Ongoing Chinese and Russian efforts to weaken public confidence in the integrity of US leaders and institutions (including IOs to exploit the COVID-19 pan-demic) also help prepare the cognitive battlefield for future coercive campaigns.

But today’s IOs differ from the coercive pressures that the United States could face in an edge-of-war con-frontation in the South China Sea, the Baltics, or other potential conflict zones. Coercion relies on threats of punishment to convince an adversary to yield in a crisis. In particular, by threatening to inflict suffer-ing on an opponent, coercive campaigns seek to convince opposing leaders that the costs of continuing to resist outweigh the benefits of doing so. If IOs alone fail to achieve capitulation, attackers can make good on their punitive threats and pair destructive attacks with warnings that further suffering will follow unless the opponent capitulates.