Rekpene Bassey
In every war, truth is the first casualty. But in the current Gulf conflict involving the United States, Israel, and Iran, truth is not merely dying; it is being manufactured, manipulated, and tainted through AI and the media with algorithmic precision.
What is unfolding across the Gulf crisis is not just a contest of missiles, drones and military posturing, it is a more insidious struggle over perception itself. It turned out that artificial intelligence has opened a modern front in the warfare; one where images lie, voices deceive and reality itself is contested in real time.
Security professionals have long warned that perception shapes the battlefield. Today, that maxim is no longer theoretical. It is an operational doctrine.
Across digital platforms, AI-generated videos and images have flooded the information space, blurring the distinction between authentic reporting and synthetic fabrication.
In one widely circulated clip, swarms of Iranian “kamikaze boats” appeared to close in on a U.S. naval vessel. The footage was false, entirely machine-generated, but it traveled faster than official denials, feeding into an already volatile narrative echoed in part by figures such as Donald Trump.
Elsewhere, hyper-realistic images of devastation in Tel Aviv and Tehran ricocheted across social media, some indistinguishable from genuine wartime footage.
In crisis conditions, where verification lags behind virality, such imagery does more than misinform. It shapes emotional and political responses before facts can intervene.
Perhaps most alarming was a fabricated broadcast announcing the death of Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu. The deepfake bore all the hallmarks of credibility: authoritative tone, familiar visual framing, and urgent cadence.
For a brief but consequential moment, it injected confusion into public discourse and raised the specter of reactionary escalation.
In war, speed kills. But in information warfare, speed deceives.What distinguishes this era is not simply the presence of propaganda, but its industrialization.
Artificial intelligence has made deception scalable, cheap and frighteningly effective. A single operator can now generate dozens of convincing narratives, tailored to different audiences, languages and political biases, and release them simultaneously into the global bloodstream.
The implications for security are profound. First, there is the risk of miscalculation. Military decisions are often made under conditions of uncertainty, where fragmented intelligence must be interpreted quickly.
Into that environment, a well-timed AI fabrication, for instance a fake missile strike, a simulated troop movement, a counterfeit statement, can distort judgment at the highest levels. False signals, when believed, produce real consequences.
Second, there is the erosion of trust. As fabricated content proliferates, the public begins to doubt everything: real footage, official statements, even eyewitness accounts. This collapse of informational credibility weakens institutions and creates fertile ground for manipulation. In such an environment, truth must compete for attention like any other narrative, and often loses.
Third, there is the psychological dimension. War has always relied on morale, fear and perception. AI-generated images of destruction, whether real or not, can induce panic, influence markets and shape civilian behavior. A city does not need to be bombed to feel under siege; sometimes, it only needs to believe it has been.
The most effective weapon is not the one that destroys infrastructure, but the one that distorts understanding.
The convergence of AI and cyber capabilities further complicates the landscape. Imagine a coordinated operation in which a government communication channel is hacked while AI-generated videos are simultaneously released to validate the intrusion. The result is a layered deception, technical and psychological, designed to overwhelm both systems and senses.
This is the new battlespace: not defined by geography, but by cognition. From encrypted messaging apps to global broadcast networks, the war over narrative is constant and borderless. It reaches policymakers in secure briefing rooms and civilians scrolling through their phones in equal measure. In this domain, everyone is both a consumer and a potential amplifier of strategic deception.
The response, however, remains uneven. Technological solutions, AI detection tools, digital watermarking and forensic analysis are advancing, but not fast enough to match the pace of generation.
Social media platforms continue to struggle with the balance between free expression and the containment of harmful falsehoods. And governments, often bound by bureaucratic caution, are outpaced by the speed of synthetic virality.
Unfortunately delay is the ally of deception. What is required is a shift in posture. Detection must become proactive, not reactive. Strategic communication must be rapid, transparent and credible.
And perhaps most importantly, societies must cultivate a new form of resilience: the ability to question, verify and withhold judgment in the face of compelling but unverified information.
Media literacy, once considered a civic skill, is now a security imperative.
The crisis involving the United States, Israel and Iran is, in many ways, a preview of conflicts to come. Future wars will not wait for facts to emerge; they will be fought in parallel realities, where AI-generated narratives compete with actual events for dominance.
In such a world, the traditional markers of truth such as visual evidence, recorded speech, and live broadcasts can no longer be taken at face value.
Seeing is no longer believing; it is merely the beginning of inquiry. Trust, once broken, becomes a vulnerability.
There is a final, sobering lesson in this moment. The danger of AI in warfare is not only that it can deceive adversaries, it can also deceive everyone: leaders, institutions, and entire populations simultaneously. And when that happens, the line between perception and reality does not just blur, it disappears.
Bassey is the President of the African Council on Narcotics, Drug Prevention, and Security Specialist.
