Professor Armin Krishnan Characterizes Non-Kinetic Threats. Tell Me if It Sounds Familiar.

In the article “Novel Non-Kinetic Threats to Homeland Security: A New Security Paradigm” (Journal of Homeland Security and Emergency Management, October 2025), Armin Krishnan provides the following definition of Non-Kinetic Threats:

NKTs result from a convergence of emerging technologies that have enabled the merger of the physical, biological, and digital realms, which is the foundation of the so-called Fourth Industrial Revolution.

Further in the article he provides characteristics of NKTs that many Targeted Individuals might find eerily familiar.

1. NON-VIOLENCE

In relation to NKTs non-violence means not that the overall consequence would not be destructive, but rather that the non-kinetic actions taken to achieve the destructive effects are not overtly violent. Bernal e.a. have suggested that non-kinetic warfare would include psychological warfare, electronic warfare, cyber warfare, information warfare, and cognitive warfare, which affect a target indirectly and non-violently. This means they do not involve overt military force or the use of violence in a way that can be attributed to the true aggressor. A related concept is non-lethality (more recently referred to in U.S. military doctrine as “intermediate force”), which suggests that modes of attack are less lethal or are not intended to produce lethal effects. NKTs could be theoretically designed to be lethal, but they may have delayed lethal effects that make it much more difficult to associate them with specific non-kinetic actions taken by the aggressor.

2. NON-OBVIOUS

Non-kinetic actions are often designed from the start with deniability in mind (McCreight 2023). This means that an aggressor takes care to disguise harmful effects as incidental, unintended, accidents, natural causes, or caused by proxies or innocent third parties that can be blamed. Since NKTs are nonviolent or nonlethal in their visible effects, they are often not taken as seriously as violent threats. This means that an adversary cannot take any drastic action that would alert the target about the fact that they are under attack, which would cause them to take effective countermeasures. By making aggressions non-obvious it becomes more difficult for the victim to determine intent and respond appropriately (Libicki 2012). If it was difficult to determine whether a detected nonkinetic action was harmful, it can foster complacency in the target.

3. MULTI-DOMAIN

The general idea of multi-domain operations (MDO) goes back to the AirLand Battle concept of the 1980s and it enjoyed a revival since around 2016 when the U.S. Army Training and Doctrine Command (TRADOC) introduced the concept of Multi-Domain Battle. According to TRADOC, Russia and China “attempt to create stand-off through the integration of diplomatic and economic actions, unconventional and information warfare (social media, false narratives, cyber attacks), and the actual or threatened employment of conventional forces” (U.S. Army 2018, VI). NKTs may involve non-kinetic actions that are taken across multiple domains to amplify effects and potentially to overwhelm the analytic capacity of a target to understand the origin and causes of the observed effects. For example, adversaries may use a combination of economic warfare, cyber warfare, information operations, lawfare, and biological warfare to destabilize a targeted nation. Non-kinetic actions across multiple domains would be closely coordinated. Relevant domains are the human domain (social networks, culture), the cyber domain (computer networks, computers, and devices), the information domain (narratives, memes, media), the political domain (political decision-making, policies), the biological domain (biological systems and organisms), the physical domain (electromagnetic spectrum, material), and the economic domain (economic relations, economic statecraft).

4. CONTINUING

NKTs would not be effective if they were single actions or sporadic. They must be employed over a longer period to produce the desired overall destructive effect on a targeted society (McCreight 2023). This requires threat actors that have strategic patience and that can wait years or decades for a series of continuing non-kinetic actions to incrementally cause societal decline and internal collapse. Since non-kinetic actions are continuing over a long time horizon, they tend to be detectable in principle. However, since they tend to be non-violent, nonobvious, and span multiple domains, they are often not adequately understood by a nation’s national security community.

Furthermore, Krishnan states:

It is argued that NKTs are the center of a new mode of global conflict that plays out between societies as much as it plays out within societies. Everybody can be both a participant or target in non-kinetic warfare.

This is something civilian targets have known first-hand for a long time.

The close alignment between what Targeted Individuals experience and recognized academic model of emerging non-kinetic threats, made independently of each other, merits serious empirical study as potential real-world instances of NKT operations, and not mere coincidence or misattribution.

Unfortunately, the agencies that are supposed to protect us (FBI/DHS/IC) don’t even consider this a problem, and ignore directed energy mediated non-kinetic threats entirely.