Communication readiness as a core capability for societal resilience to cognitive warfare

Cognitive warfare exploits not only hostile narratives and disinformation, but the communicative vulnerabilities of targeted societies, including low institutional trust, fragmented sensemaking, and co-ordination failures. Although communication is increasingly seen as central to resilience and preparedness, how communication environments contribute to societal resilience remains underexplored. This paper addresses this gap by conceptualising communication readiness as a socio-cognitive capability of individuals, institutions, and societies to manage uncertainty, sustain trust, and enable co-ordinated sensemaking across cognitive, community, institutional, and societal levels under informational disruption. Drawing on an integrative review of cognitive warfare, risk communication, and societal resilience scholarship, the paper proposes a mechanism-based framework explaining how communication environments shape preparedness outcomes through exposure, interpretation, affective activation, social amplification, and behavioural and organisational response. The framework identifies communication readiness as a core dimension of civil preparedness and societal resilience, with implications for defence policy, preparedness planning, and resilience assessment in cognitively contested environments.