A Conceptual Framework for a Morphological Scenario Library and Playbook Mapping in Cognitive Warfare Defense

Cognitive warfare is a hybrid threat that combines information manipulation with psychological influence, often amplified by digital platforms and synthetic media. Conventional cybersecurity tooling is optimized for technical intrusion and offers limited support for anticipating and responding to influence operations. This paper presents a conceptual framework that structures cognitive warfare threats with General Morphological Analysis (GMA) and links plausible configurations to indicator profiles and response playbooks. We first conduct a PRISMA-informed literature review (2018–2025) to derive a five-dimensional taxonomy (actor, tactic, medium, target, objective). We then apply cross-consistency assessment to remove implausible state-pair combinations and obtain a reduced library of internally consistent scenarios. To support analyst-guided triage, we outline an AI-enabled workflow that maps observable signals to taxonomy states, matches events to scenarios, and prioritizes responses via an auditable, policy-set risk score. Finally, we illustrate the framework on three publicly documented cases and show how each case maps to scenario vectors, indicators, and playbooks. No end-to-end system implementation or performance metrics are reported; the contribution is the structured scenario library and the traceable mapping from observations to response guidance.