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Few theoretical doctrines in the law governing war have captured imaginations across the globe as much as Carl von Clausewitz’s ‘fog of war’. Though Clausewitz himself never employed the phrase ‘fog of war’, the ideas which constitute the modern-day understanding of it emanate primarily from his body of work. In Book One of On War, Clausewitz writes, “War is the realm of uncertainty; three quarters of the factors on which action in war is based are wrapped in a fog of greater or lesser uncertainty. A sensitive and discriminating judgement is called for; a skilled intelligence to scent out the truth”, words which have been referenced as providing ingress into the cornucopia of interlinked ideas about the ‘fog of war’. The ‘fog of war’, conceptually, signifies that the battlefield is a site of uncertainty; a state which is mimicked by the minds of all those who are embroiled in war. To Clausewitz, the ‘fog’ of war is indicative of the friction produced by intangible factors such as fear and informational ambiguities which impede decision-making in the battlefield. The training of commanders and soldiers to be adept at taking sound decisions which display a balance of cognitive responses with temperament on the battlefield, through treatment of military theory as a means of transforming knowledge into capability rather than as a battlefield checklist, is thus at the heart of Clausewitz’s work.
In recent times, however, several scholars and commentators have argued that Clausewitz’s ‘fog of war’ is a relic, which is better relegated to the past. Several of these arguments have hinged on the promises presented by the advancements in military technology, which are claimed to render the ‘fog’ redundant due to their precision, informational accuracy, facilitation of operational and organizational efficacy, and constant recalibration. While it must (cautiously) be admitted that the advancements in technology do present some measure of this promise, excessive reliance on the promise of such advancements to claim the erasure or reduction of the ‘fog’ of war without recognizing the simultaneity of the emergence of novel problems as well as their perpetuation of the old within the new can be detrimental. In this article, I shall first outline some of the ways in which the ‘fog’ persists, and is perhaps even thickened, during contemporary times. I shall then proceed to discuss the detriments of overreliance on the promise of technology and information as well as some preliminary ideas about aligning lessons from this historical doctrine with the present.
The Perennial ‘Fog’
A. Immobilized Decision-Making due to Informational Overload:
Military commanders of today, in some senses, find themselves at the other end of the spectrum from the military commanders of erstwhile wars. While earlier, informational scarcity and ambiguity made it difficult for commanders to see through the ‘fog’, advancements in technology have resulted in commanders being able to see too much in contemporary times. This has resulted in a sensory or informational overload wherein commanders find themselves immobilized during decision-making due to the vast amounts of data they need to process and direct action on the basis of, data which can “crowd out the refined actionable intelligence that is the basis for not just reasonable decisions but right decisions.”
This ubiquity of information is accompanied by constraints of time which necessitate trade-offs between certainty and agility, adversary adaptation due to easier access to sophisticated technology and know-how as a consequence of which the playing field is increasingly levelled, phenomena such as ‘Kill TV’ wherein decision-makers may overlook the ‘fog’ on the field due to the remote locations from which they are making decisions, and the ‘CNN factor’ pursuant to which the stakes for each strike are heightened due to the world watching. Each of these factors contributes further to the immobilization of decision-making which is produced by the informational overload in contemporary times. Thus, even as the advancements in technology place the military personnel of today at the other end of the spectrum in some respects, they reproduce the ‘fog’ of war as well as the need for these personnel to be trained via military theory and policy which renders them capable of discerning on an increasingly complex battlefield moving at machine-speeds.
B. The New Frontier of Cyberwarfare:
Cyberwarfare, an emerging frontier of warfare as yet in flux, has been defined as a form of warfare which is grounded in certain uses of ICTs and which is waged within the informational environment by agents against targets both of whom may be located in the physical as well as non-physical domains with the aim of disrupting or controlling an adversary’s resources. Interestingly, it has been characterized as a “portmanteau of two concepts, cyberspace and war, which are themselves undefined and equivocal; it takes one complex non-linear system and layers it on another complex non-linear system. [A]s a result, it does not clarify understanding of the state of war today; it muddies waters that were not very transparent to start with”.
Despite offering greater opportunities for organizational efficacy, the space of cyberwarfare is one fraught with a multiplicity of uncertainties which, at the very least, sustain the ‘fog’ of war. These uncertainties stem from the transversal and informational nature of cyberwarfare, as a consequence of which attacks are difficult to foresee and attribute responsibility for, and their level of violence as well as possibility for escalation are difficult to predict with accuracy. Moreover, in cyberwarfare, the nature of the agents as well as their objectives are distinguishable from traditional warfare and at times ambiguous, and, the conventional calculative framework is inadequate as well as only relatively accepted. While it is imperative that this ‘fog’ of war not be overstated, recognition of its persistence is a step towards ensuring a more reasoned understanding of the ways in which the law should apply to the cyberspace as well as to discourse surrounding the legality of specific means and methods of cyberwarfare.
C. Re-tethering ‘fog’ to ‘friction’:
As mentioned by me at the start of this article, fog is indicative of the friction which is produced by intangible factors impeding decision-making in the battlefield. A departure from this understanding, however, and a separation of ‘fog’ from ‘friction’ has resulted in the argument that ‘fog’ is characterized by uncertainty and ambiguity which are susceptible to technological solution in the information age we are situated in. Such discourse presents technological advancements as ‘silver-bullet solutions’ which can render wars less bloody, less expensive, and, less destructive. Not only does such discourse run the risk of justifying the perpetuation of wars, it also opens the door for deviations from the unrealistic and unattainable promise of a costless war to be exceptionalized. Moreover, it subsumes the reality that war is a human endeavour, which is a result of contextual, political, economic, personal choices, into the narrative of automation. Re-tethering ‘fog’ to ‘friction’ allows us to anchor our understanding of modern-day narratives in the context of the continued meanings of being human.
D. Challenging the ‘Fog’ of Rationality:
Western scholarship has repeatedly rewarded ‘objectivity’ and ‘rationality’, often failing to acknowledge the presence of a ‘fog’ in the process of knowledge-production. Clausewitz’s idea of a ‘fog’ of war can be extended, particularly in the face of the technological advancements we’ve been discussing, to the technical experts as well as the scholars and commentators who take decisions about the questions which shall be pursued by the technical community and the legal fraternity. Each of these processes is imbued with some degree of uncertainty – over unsettled interpretations, ethical dilemmas, competing political considerations, or contingency of choices – a degree of uncertainty which is quite often read-out or written-out from the knowledge produced. Though relatively scarcely brought up in discourse, it is imperative for scholars today to engage with this multifaceted understanding of the ‘fog’ of war which challenges the valorization of rationality to recognize the role knowledge-production plays in the understanding of the laws of war as well as the ways in which wars unfold.
Peering into the ‘Fog’
My endeavour, in this article, has been to tease out the paradox we are witnessing in conversations about modern-day warfare – the persistent and perennial ‘fog’ of war in contemporary battlefields, their expanding frontiers, and their hubs of knowledge-production amidst the celebration of technological advancements as capable of rendering the ‘fog’ redundant. Admitting to the existence of this paradox, as well as viewing modern-day developments in warfare through this lens, alerts us to the fallacies of linear narratives of progress as per which the past and the present can be severed from each-other as can the past and the future. In these narratives, modern-day innovations and developments are akin to talismans, which urge humanity forward, and in the case of warfare, towards a costless battlefield. In the process, the contingencies of investing in, employing, and acting on the basis of technology and information as human decisions informed and influenced by a host of contextual considerations are negated, and garbed by rationality and technocratic solution-ism.
Identification of the paradox also reminds us to neither overstate nor understate the effects of the ‘fog’ on decision-makers. The negation of the presence of the ‘fog’ as a result of technological innovations or the understatement of it can result in the exceptionalization of incidents in which such arguments are put forth post-hoc, while overstatement can condone breaches of principles of International Humanitarian Law due to the inability on the part of military personnel to weigh and balance the likelihood of military advantage and incidental harm in accordance with the core principles of distinction and proportionality.
Lastly, but (quite) importantly, given that the past continues into the present through the immutability in the nature of war while taking on novel forms in its conduct, it is imperative for stakeholders who shape International Humanitarian Law to be cognizant of the need for military personnel to be trained in the conceptual, technical, operational, and organizational facets of new-age technology, its extents and limitations, and its interaction with the legal regime governing warfare. It is also pertinent for stakeholders to establish processes for the evaluation of technology in which a review of operational use is conducted on an ongoing basis, and which is open to scrutiny as well as the sharing of experiences. Further, the role of professors in the legal Academy, who are nurturing individuals who may go on to have a significant voice in policy-making and norm development in the laws governing war, entails acquainting students with theory as an “activity or process which participates in the life of its object”, as this article has communicated is true of the ‘fog of war’ doctrine. Each of these preliminary suggestions is aligned with Clausewitz’s endeavour to view military theory and policy as providing “the intellectual methods by which to unveil the answers to war’s perplexing questions rather than provide the answers themselves”.
Sanskriti Sanghi is presently a Lecturer in Law at the Jindal Global Law School, O.P. Jindal Global University, India. She is also a Research Assistant for the Columbia ‘Freedom of Expression without Frontiers’ Teaching Portal, a Case Analyst for the Columbia Global Freedom of Expression, and a Co-Lead for the Research Program on Digital Constitutionalism at the Institute for Internet & the Just Society. She graduated with an LL.M. in International Law from the University of Cambridge in 2020, and with a B.A. LL.B. (H) from Gujarat National Law University in 2019.