Frag Out! Magazine

STRATCOM across the entire Polish Armed Forces is scandalously low and wholly inadequate to the scale of the threat. Effective action will also require a complete change in the way in which the role of various press teams and press departments or public affairs units within institutions is understood, as these are the entities most often targeted during cognitive warfare, such as state authorities, uniformed services, or the military. n practice, every potential target in cognitive warfare should have a unit responsible for rapid action to correct false information, while allowing for excessive fragmentation of preventive activity to be avoided; such actions should be conducted primarily by central headquarters rather than by field branches or subordinate organizational units. The above-mentioned units must be equipped with the appropriate tools for this purpose, especially social media accounts with adequate reach. Usually, paid promotion on Facebook, X, or other platforms can increase the reach of even small "official" accounts by several hundred percent, but budgetary resources must be allocated for such ad hoc campaigns and the personnel must know how to use them. Essential to effective defense against cognitive warfare are also high-quality photo and video equipment, as well as software and workstations for editing materials. At present, in many cases this work is done on private equipment because - with a few exceptions - the official equipment is not of sufficiently high quality, or does not exist at all. The quality of produced materials depends not only on skill, but also on the equipment and software available. The people tasked with implementing the information policy of individual institutions should not merely be formally assigned to posts; they should genuinely understand the specificity of the job and navigate with ease the cultural tropes currently functioning on the Internet and social media. This distinction is already very visible in the functioning of press teams within different institutions. Unfortunately, one can also see from them who was simply assigned to a post or a convenient salary grade, who is a craftsman who has learned how the system works and performs his or her tasks properly, and who genuinely "feels" social media and 21st-century communication. Proactive action must begin, not merely reactive action. The image of individual institutions should be shaped dynamically and boldly, and evident blunders or problems - about which it is known that they will become loud in the media and social media - should be covered informationally. Media events that are likely to become the focus of disinformation campaigns aimed at state institutions must be anticipated. The communication being organized should be based on research showing what different generations of Poles consider valuable and under what conditions they would decide to defend the country. It must take into account the fact that the perspective of "Generation Z" and "Alpha" differs from that of "Millennials" and "Generation X" - and currently it is members of the last of these generations who shape the online communication of individual institutions, which unfortunately results in a disconnect from the message most relevant to the two youngest generations of Poles, who constitute a prospective personnel pool available to the Armed Forces and other state institutions essential to the functioning of the country and subject to attacks as part of cognitive warfare. On the other hand, it cannot be denied or forgotten that most of the currently trained reservists are from Generation X and Millennials - let us recall only that the youngest reservist after mandatory military service is currently 35 years old, meaning that he or she was born… at the moment of systemic transformation. They too should be addressed with targeted, research-based messaging. Accordingly, communication should be differentiated depending on the target group - fortunately, given the generally different communication channels and sources of information used ANALYSIS

• Cover