Cognitive Warfare, Hybrid Pressure, and Sovereign Resilience: An Operations Research Framework Applied to the Iranian Case (2017--2026)

Abstract

A defending state facing sustained economic, media, and psychological pressure from an adversary that continuously re-optimises its campaign poses a problem that existing attacker-defender models in operations research do not directly resolve, because they treat the defender's state as a discrete allocation rather than a continuous, slow-moving institutional process. We formulate a coupled dynamical system in which grievance and institutional resilience evolve continuously while pressure intensity is chosen by an optimising Markov decision process, prove existence and local stability of the resulting equilibrium, and prove a formal result distinguishing it from standard feedback-stability analysis and from a stationary Markov chain treated in isolation. We validate the framework computationally using thirty randomised network instances, full value iteration, and a documented case study of cognitive warfare directed at Iran (2017--2026). The historically calibrated case sits approximately twenty-five times above the computed operational collapse boundary, and a greedy seeding policy reaches eighty-seven percent average network penetration across the randomised instances, significantly above a degree-centrality baseline. A practitioner can use the equilibrium and boundary computation to assess where a specific case sits relative to collapse, rather than relying on an unverified comparison between opposing pressure intensities.