As promised in my article on Active Measures, I am writing you an article about Reflexive Control. This is a very important topic that revolves around security and cognitive behavior manipulation. This combination makes it exceptionally difficult to get great information because the overlap is sometimes hard to navigate. Hence, this is why I think it is so important that I provide this piece.

As stated in the Active Measures article, modern geopolitical competition increasingly revolves around influence rather than force. Russia, in particular, has long pursued psychological and informational strategies to shape the behavior of adversaries while preserving plausible deniability. Among its most sophisticated (and least understood) tools is a concept known as Reflexive Control. Developed in Soviet military theory and refined in the Russian Federation, Reflexive Control is not merely propaganda or manipulation. Instead, it is a method of directing an opponent’s decision-making process by altering the informational environment in which those decisions are made. Today, I want to examine the theory, the threat it poses, its relationship with other strategic tools like Active Measures and Ideological Subversion, and the overt threat it presents to both you and our country.

What is Reflexive Control?

Simply stated, Reflexive Control is a form of strategic deception in which an adversary is provided with carefully crafted information that leads them to make decisions advantageous to the originator. It operates by manipulating the target’s perception of reality in such a way that they voluntarily adopt a course of action aligned with the manipulator’s goals, believing it to be their own idea.

Allow me to provide you with an analogy. Let’s say you’re at work, and a colleague doesn’t want to do the hardest part of the project, but thinks you can pull it off. So, instead of asking you to take ownership, they declare that “Only someone with real expertise could handle that section.” You know it’s a difficult task, and you probably don’t want to do it, either. However, you also know its importance, and you know you can do it. So, you volunteer, thinking that you’re helping out the team and that you might be something special for doing so. In this case, you believe that volunteering was your idea, and you feel pretty good about rising to the challenge. In reality, you were just manipulated into volunteering because the other person didn’t want to do it. That’s a really simple example of Reflexive Control. You weren’t really forced. You were nudged to choose what benefited them, believing it was your own decision.

A more complex example might be how, during the Cold War, Soviet strategists used Reflexive Control by leaking fabricated intelligence suggesting that NATO’s planned military exercises in Europe would escalate into a first strike against the Warsaw Pact. This manipulated NATO leaders into scaling back their drills and issuing public reassurances of peaceful intent, believing they were preemptively diffusing tensions when, in fact, they were behaving exactly as Soviet planners intended—reducing their own strategic posture and revealing vulnerabilities, all while maintaining the illusion that these decisions were autonomous and prudent.

Understand that this is not a tactic of brute force or direct persuasion. Instead, Reflexive Control introduces stimuli—disinformation, selective truths, emotional triggers, or staged events—intended to exploit pre-existing cognitive patterns, ideological leanings, or institutional blind spots. The aim is to shape how a target thinks rather than what they think. It’s pretty devious and highly effective.

Integration into Active Measures and Ideological Subversion

Reflexive Control is not an isolated strategy. Instead, it functions as a precision mechanism within the broader framework of Active Measures, the Soviet and Russian doctrine encompassing covert actions meant to influence foreign nations without open conflict. While Active Measures may include disinformation, support for radical groups, election interference, and media manipulation, Reflexive Control acts as a targeting system within that arsenal. It ensures that the information or influence deployed is not merely present but effective in guiding the decision-making of key individuals or institutions.

Within Ideological Subversion, Reflexive Control finds a long-term application. Ideological Subversion aims to erode societal cohesion and democratic values by slowly reshaping the population’s worldview. Reflexive Control inserts itself at strategic points within this process, guiding which narratives are introduced, when they are amplified, and how they are framed to reinforce ideological drift. It often works through “soft” actors—media personalities, academics, activists—who may be entirely unaware that their platform is being leveraged to serve foreign objectives.

Deployment and Use of Complicit Individuals

One of the defining features of Reflexive Control is its reliance on complicit or unwitting intermediaries. These individuals, such as politicians, professors, influencers, or journalists, are not always recruited in the traditional sense. In many cases, their role is made possible by ideological alignment, ego investment, or economic incentives. They amplify or normalize specific narratives because doing so serves their personal or professional goals, not realizing (or not caring) that the origin of those narratives may be adversarial.

Of course, this introduces a secondary danger: plausible deniability. Because many of the narratives pushed under Reflexive Control are not overtly false but strategically framed, it is difficult to distinguish genuine opinion from externally shaped influence. The line between bad judgment and psychological warfare becomes intentionally blurred. Since few are familiar with critical thinking and contrastive inquiry, they may have no idea about the importance of trying to stress-test their beliefs before acting on them.

The Role of Epistemic Rigidity

Epistemic Rigidity, the cognitive tendency to cling to established beliefs despite contradictory evidence, is a key enabler of Reflexive Control. Once a population or subgroup has been anchored to a certain narrative—especially one that flatters their identity, justifies their cynicism, or offers a simple explanation for complex issues—Reflexive Control can guide their decisions with minimal resistance. This leaves the individual to blindly follow while feeling that they are taking charge.

This is because Reflexive Control does not need to introduce radically new beliefs; it only needs to exploit what already exists. It works best when individuals or groups are emotionally invested in particular interpretations of reality. Over time, the repetition of distorted but emotionally resonant messages forms a cognitive lattice that filters information, hardens bias, and locks people into a cycle of confirmation, validation, and polarization. At that point, even well-intentioned corrections or alternative viewpoints are rejected reflexively, which fulfills the very goals of Reflexive Control.

Why It’s So Hard to Counter

Reflexive Control is exceptionally difficult to combat for several reasons:

1. Subtlety – It’s usually very difficult to see before the damage is done. The technique does not rely on obvious lies or threats. Instead, it uses ambiguity, timing, and selective framing to shape perceptions.
2. Decentralization – It often spreads through decentralized channels—media, academia, entertainment—making it hard to identify a singular source or motive.
3. Ideological Alignment – People affected by Reflexive Control often believe they are acting independently or heroically. They do not see themselves as manipulated; they see themselves as enlightened. Confirmation bias becomes a big problem here.
4. Institutional Vulnerability – Our Republic, by design, is an open society. However, this also means that the free flow of information, which is usually a strength, also provides the perfect terrain for adversarial manipulation.
5. Reinforcement Loops – Once entrenched, narratives shaped through Reflexive Control are reinforced through social proof, echo chambers, and partisan media ecosystems. Even worse, they are passed on to the impressionable, like children, students, clients, employees, constituents, etc.

I can provide you with a great example of how this plays out. You’ve already lived it.

Case Example: U.S. Political Polarization

Through selective leaks, orchestrated social media campaigns, and biased news amplification, foreign actors during the 2016 U.S. election cycle promoted divisive narratives, such as framing both protest movements and counter-protests as existential threats to national identity. By strategically feeding different sides carefully tailored information, they led various segments of the American public to radicalize their views and self-select into polarized groups. Believing they were independently defending democracy or justice, the public unknowingly fractured their own societal cohesion exactly as the originators of the influence intended. This set the stage for what was to come (long game).

In the lead-up to the 2020 U.S. presidential election, we had the pandemic, economic strain, and deepening cultural division. That was tinder for the fire. Then, there was nationwide unrest following the death of George Floyd, despite the facts. While Americans grappled with protests and eroding trust, foreign actors, especially Russia, exploited these divisions through Reflexive Control tactics. Rather than creating conflict, Russian-linked troll farms and bots amplified existing extremes, flooding social media with emotionally charged and misleading content tailored to both left- and right-leaning audiences. This barrage deepened polarization, primed confirmation bias, and bypassed rational debate entirely.

Institutions and public figures, pressured by the charged atmosphere, often responded with swift statements and policies (usually without full context, facts, or understanding), further fueling the cycle of division. Social media began to eliminate contrasting voices (such as mine). Disinformation campaigns weaponized identity and moral language, framing political disagreement as moral failure and hardening toxic tribalism. Most strategically, foreign operatives sowed doubt about the legitimacy of the election process itself, encouraging Americans to distrust their government and each other.

The ultimate aim was not to convert Americans to a foreign ideology but to make them reflexively distrustful and divided. Division itself was the objective. By 2021, trust in elections, media, and public institutions had become highly fractured, not simply from internal failures, but as the result of sustained, targeted manipulation that leveraged existing fault lines and cognitive biases to destabilize American society from within.

What Can Be Done? Individual Countermeasures

While large-scale counterintelligence efforts are required at the national level, individuals are not powerless. The most effective counter to Reflexive Control on a personal level is cognitive discipline, and one of the most powerful tools for cultivating it is the Contrastive Inquiry Method.

Contrastive Inquiry involves deliberately questioning a given narrative by identifying its logical opposite and asking: What if the opposite were true? This method disrupts automatic thinking and forces the mind to re-evaluate its assumptions. In doing so, it creates a pause in the cognitive process—enough to weaken the influence of anchoring and confirmation bias.

By actively practicing contrastive reasoning, individuals can begin to detect manipulation tactics embedded in language, framing, and emotional appeal. Of course, this doesn’t make someone immune to Reflexive Control, but it definitely raises the threshold for influence. When done at scale, across education, media literacy programs, and leadership development, it may very well be one of the best forms of psychological inoculation.

Final Thoughts

I believe that Reflexive Control is one of the most dangerous forms of modern warfare we have ever seen, but largely because it does not seek to overpower the adversary through force. Instead, it aims to make the adversary choose the wrong path willingly. In many ways, it is likely being duped into inviting the vampire into your home. By manipulating perceptions, exploiting cognitive biases, and embedding narratives through complicit or unwitting intermediaries, Russia has developed a tool that is difficult to trace, harder to expose, and nearly impossible to eliminate.

Its effectiveness is only amplified by Epistemic Rigidity and widespread Mass Epistemic Rigidity. The result is that the public is highly vulnerable to narrative manipulation and a system that rewards emotional over rational responses. Combating Reflexive Control requires more than policy; it demands a shift in how individuals engage with information. It also requires that Americans revisit the idea of cohesion and constitutionalism. Critical thinking, contrastive reasoning, and emotional detachment from ideological identity are not academic luxuries. In my opinion, they are personal and national security imperatives.

Learn More

• Propaganda through ‘reflexive control’ and the mediated construction of reality by Dr. Christopher Till
• Russian Military Thought: Concepts and Elements by Timothy L. Thomas
• Disinformation and Reflexive Control: The New Cold War by Annie Kowalewski at The Official Publication of the Georgetown University Center for Security Studies
• From Consensus to Conflict by the RAND Corporation