Disinformation operations have become a persistent feature of the Western Balkan security environment and are increasingly treated, in both NATO doctrine and regional strategic documents, as an asymmetric instrument of pressure targeting the cognitive rather than the material layer of the defence system. This article examines the empirical link between the intensity and coherence of disinformation operations and the evolution of public confidence in the armed forces across five Western Balkan states — Bosnia and Herzegovina, Serbia, Montenegro, North Macedonia and Kosovo — over the period 2016–2023. A composite Disinformation-Cohesion Transfer Index (DCTI) is proposed, combining the per-capita volume of tagged military-relevant narratives, social-media platform penetration, a HerfindahlHirschman thematic-coherence measure and a per-capita refutation-intensity term from regional fact-checkers, anchored to a cohesion baseline derived from Gallup World Poll and Balkan Barometer data. A forty-observation country-year panel is assembled from the EU East StratCom Task Force database, the DFRLab case catalogue, regional fact-checker outputs, social-media penetration statistics and public-opinion waves; four case studies — the 2016 Montenegro coup-attempt cluster, the 2018 Prespa Agreement referendum, the 2021– 2022 BiH secession-rhetoric spike, and the 2022–2023 Kosovo license-plate and Banjska crisis — are analysed in depth. Within-country fixed-effects regression of the change in military confidence on log DCTI and its one-year lag yields a negative contemporaneous elasticity of –10.9 pp per log unit, a weaker positive first-lag coefficient of +4.7 pp per log unit consistent with a recovery pathway, and an adjusted R² of 0.66 across thirty-five country-year transitions. Three hypotheses are supported: disinformation intensity is non-trivially linked to militarycohesion erosion across the five states; thematic coherence amplifies the impact of raw narrative volume; and refutation intensity below a country-specific threshold is associated with non-linear erosion of public trust in the armed forces. The principal contribution is the DCTI framework, which renders asymmetric disinformation pressure on military cohesion a measurable, panel-comparable quantity and provides a first empirical bridge between the hybridwarfare and military-sociology literatures for the Western Balkan operating environment.