Water and Cognitive Warfare

On 7 March 2026, Iran’s Foreign Minister Abbas Araghchi began the enabling information operation to set conditions for future offensive action against what should be an inviolable target – water desalination – posting on X that the US had struck a desalination plant on Qeshm Island, followed by the key framing narrative for events to follow: ‘The US set this precedent, not Iran.’

Both the US and Israel denied any strike on Qeshm. No satellite imagery, photographs or independent corroboration of the alleged attack has been published. The Qeshm claim remains, two months later, a single-source Iranian government assertion.

The following day, an Iranian drone struck a desalination plant in Bahrain, in what was a clear Strategic Communications (STRATCOM) signal. There were no fatalities, and backup capacity held, but the demonstration of force was clear. This tactical action was the force multiplier that Iran’s information operation needed to amplify the strategic message. In the space of 48 hours, Iran brought into scope for kinetic targeting a strategic vulnerability of the Gulf states, signalling its intent, opportunity and capability to do so. It established a narrative framework in which attacking Gulf desalination infrastructure was recast from a prohibited act under Additional Protocol I, Article 54 to a justified, proportionate, retaliatory response to an American first strike.

Cognitive Shaping

The Bahrain strike did not arrive in a vacuum. It is part of a growing and problematic trend of water infrastructure being deliberately targeted. The normative prohibition on targeting civilian water infrastructure has been systematically dismantled through information operations running in parallel with kinetic campaigns. Below are three recent examples conducted by a state actor (ISIS’ campaign has been discounted due to their non pretence of operating within international norms).

Russia: the false-flag template. In October 2022, the Institute for the Study of War reported that Russia was likely ‘setting information conditions’ for a false-flag attack on the Kakhovka Dam, with the Russian military publicly warning that Ukraine intended to strike the facility. President Zelenskyy called for an international observation mission precisely to forestall this. Eight months later, Russia destroyed the dam from inside its own machine room. A German Marshall Fund study found that in the week following the destruction, Russian diplomatic and media accounts posted on the social media site Twitter about the dam over 1,300 times, earning nearly 200,000 retweets. The volume exceeded Russian information output on both Bucha and Nord Stream. Ukraine’s foreign minister criticised international media for initially presenting Russian and Ukrainian claims as equally credible, arguing this ‘put facts and propaganda on equal footing.’

The Kakhovka template was textbook: pre-position the counter-narrative before the strike, execute the strike, then flood the information environment with blame-deflection at a volume that overwhelms forensic analysis timelines. This created the space within the cognitive domain to enable the effects within the physical domain to take hold: namely the destruction of Ukrainian sovereign critical national infrastructure and the creation of a physical barrier to hinder manoeuvre ahead of Ukraine’s counterattack towards Crimea.

Israel/Palestine: normalisation through volume. By February 2026, roughly 90% of Gaza’s desalination and water-treatment infrastructure had been damaged or destroyed. Human Rights Watch’s December 2024 report described the destruction as deliberate. In Lebanon, Oxfam documented damage to more than 45 water networks. The ICC issued arrest warrants citing water deprivation. South Africa’s ICJ application explicitly referenced water-infrastructure destruction. Yet media coverage of successive incidents diminished rather than grew. A study of CNN and MSNBC coverage found that during the first 100 days of each conflict, each Ukrainian child death generated 16.1 mentions on air; each Gazan child death, 0.36. The information effect is not deception but saturation: when water infrastructure destruction becomes a daily occurrence, it ceases to be news. Normalisation of what is by morality and law a clear war crime sits very much within the cognitive domain of modern warfare.

Iran: the manufactured precedent. Araghchi’s Qeshm narrative sought to both deflect blame and normalise destruction, manufacturing a precedent for retaliation. The claim that the US struck first reframes Iranian targeting of Gulf desalination as reciprocal, proportionate and legitimate under the laws of armed conflict. Whether or not the Qeshm strike occurred, the narrative exists. It has been reported by major international outlets. It has been quoted by the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists, Foreign Policy and CSIS. But critically, it has shaped the cognitive framing of the Gulf State’s security considerations: water infrastructure has always been a known vulnerability to a water distressed region, but now an adversary with the intent, opportunity and capability to strike at that critical vulnerability has launched a clear strategic communications campaign signalling exactly that, giving pause to thought for how the Gulf partners with the US.

The Mechanisms of Cognitive Warfare

These three campaigns share a common information architecture. Each follows a four-stage sequence.

Pre-positioning: the actor establishes a narrative framework for its intended audience before the kinetic action occurs. Russia warned of Ukrainian intent to strike Kakhovka months before destroying it. Iran’s Qeshm claim preceded the Bahrain strike by less than 24 hours.

Action: the kinetic strike is calibrated to achieve the required physical damage and maximum precedent value.

Narrative saturation: the information environment is flooded with the adversary’s framing faster than forensic analysis can produce an authoritative counter-narrative.

Normalisation: the absence of a commensurate punitive response establishes the new baseline. Each unenforced prohibition lowers the threshold for the next violation. The International Review of the Red Cross has warned of precisely this dynamic: a ‘corrosive tendency’ diminishing international humanitarian law’s protective force.

The intent of such actions is clear: use cognitive warfare to make water CNI a ‘semi-legitimate’ target, despite clear international law expressly forbidding it. It aims to enable belligerents the opportunity to threaten or even render whole regions uninhabitable to the human population, radically altering the asymmetric threat and strategic leverage that a cornered adversary like Russia, Iran or a post 7 October Israel can impose.

The Counter Information Operation

If this is understood as an information operation, the response must be shaped as one. Three elements are necessary.

First, attribution speed must outpace narrative cycles. The Kakhovka precedent shows that the forensic window is days rather than months. The UK’s Northwood Maritime Centre already conducts rapid attribution for subsea infrastructure threats. Extending that capability to desalination & CNI strikes, including pre-positioned commercial imagery contracts for Gulf facilities, would close the gap between adversary narrative and allied fact.

Second, the counter-narrative must be established before the next strike, informed by intelligence assessments of threat. NATO’s 2022 Strategic Concept does not mention water. The Hague Summit Declaration earmarks resilience spending but names no water-specific commitment. An explicit, public, pre-committed UK, NATO or GCC declaratory position on the targeting of water infrastructure would deny adversaries the ambiguity they require to operate beneath the response threshold.

Third, the manufactured-precedent narrative must be directly contested. Araghchi’s Qeshm claim has been repeated by quality international outlets without the caveat that it remains uncorroborated by any independent source. This is poor reporting in an era of widespread cognitive shaping. Allowing manufactured precedents to stand unchallenged is how cognitive warfare prevails.

The physical protection of desalination infrastructure is a military problem. But the erosion of the norm that prohibits targeting it is an information problem. If this is not contested with urgent vigour, water targeting will continue to be normalised, to the detriment of non-combatants.

© Nick Loxton, 2026, published by RUSI with permission of the author.

The views expressed in this Commentary are the author's, and do not represent those of RUSI or any other institution.

For terms of use, see Website Terms and Conditions of Use.

Have an idea for a Commentary you'd like to write for us? Send a short pitch to commentaries@rusi.org and we'll get back to you if it fits into our research interests. View full guidelines for contributors.