The alerts arrive before anyone understands what they mean.
A radar return that does not match any known flight path.
A report from a forward position.
Fragmentary cut off mid sentence.
A social media post from a city that may or may not be under
attack shared 40,000 times before a single analyst has had
the chance to verify it. A communication from an allied
command that contradicts information received 12 minutes
earlier from the same source. A satellite image that could be
a missile launcher or could be a civilian vehicle depending on
who is interpreting it and what they already believe.
This is Epic fury, the US Iran war podcast.
In those early hours, certainty is the first casualty before any
soldier is killed, before any building falls.
The clean picture of events the commanders need and governments
demand is already fractured into competing versions of what is
happening, each one partial, each one urgent, each one
insisting on its own authority. This is the fog of war, not a
metaphor, a condition. The phrase was given its
definitive articulation by the Prussian military theorist Carl
von Clausewitz in the 19th century.
He wrote that war is the realm of uncertainty, that 3/4 of the
factors on which action in war is based or wrapped in a fog of
greater or lesser uncertainty. What Clausewitz was describing
was not a failure of intelligence or a failure of
technology. He was describing something
structural, something that belongs to the nature of
conflict itself. The moment 2 opposing forces are
in contact, information becomes unreliable, orders are
misunderstood, positions shift, the map stops matching the
ground. Two centuries later, with
satellites in orbit, drones feeding live video to command
centers, and AI systems processing thousands of data
points per second, the fog is not lifted.
It has changed shape, and in some ways it has thickened.
Consider what happens in the opening hours of a major
military operation. The volume of incoming
information is not a trickle. It is a flood.
Radar operators tracking contacts that maybe aircraft,
maybe electronic spoofing, maybe debris.
Analysts in dim rooms trying to cross reference reports that
arrive faster than they can be processed.
Commanders who must make decisions now, not later, on the
basis of information they know is incomplete.
Knowing that waiting for certainty is itself a decision
with consequences. The cognitive pressure inside
those rooms is unlike anything most people will encounter in a
lifetime. The friendly fire incident
stands as one of the most painful expressions of this fog.
It recurs throughout military history with a regularity that
should by now be more shocking than it is.
In the Gulf War, 28 American soldiers were killed by a
Patriot missile battery that misidentified a friendly
aircraft. In Afghanistan, American
aircraft repeatedly struck positions held by allied forces
due to communication failures and targeting errors.
The opening days of Operation Epic Fury produced their own
friendly fire. Tragedy. 3 American fighter jets
down over Kuwait. Not from enemy action, from the
fog. Friendly fire does not happen
because soldiers are careless or commanders are incompetent.
It happens because war moves faster than the information
systems designed to manage it, because identification protocols
breakdown under pressure, because exhausted operators make
split second judgments on ambiguous data, and the
consequences are irreversible. The Cold War left behind a
series of incidents that examine now carry the weight of near
catastrophe. In September 1983, a Soviet
early warning satellite detected what its systems interpreted as
five incoming American intercontinental ballistic
missiles. Stanislav Petrov, the duty
officer who received the alert, had minutes to decide whether to
report it up the chain of command, a report that, given
the doctrine of the time, would almost certainly have triggered
A retaliatory launch. He judged it a false alarm.
He was right. The satellite had mistaken
sunlight reflecting off clouds for missile launches.
One man's decision, made in minutes under maximum pressure
on the basis of contradictory information, may have prevented
a nuclear exchange. The fog had reached to the edge
of civilization. Intelligence failures do not
only emerge from equipment malfunctions or sensor errors.
They emerge from the human architecture that surrounds the
data. The Iraq war and the weapons of
mass destruction assessment represent perhaps the most
consequential intelligence failure of the modern era, not
because the analysts were incompetent, but because the
process of intelligence analysis have been corrupted by the
pressures of what people in positions of power needed to be
true. Information that confirmed the
desired conclusion was elevated. Information that contradicted it
was marginalized. The result was a picture of
Iraqi capabilities that had the appearance of certainty and the
substance of assumption. This phenomenon has a name in
psychology, confirmation bias, the tendency under conditions of
uncertainty and stress to weight information that confirms
existing beliefs more heavily than information that challenges
them. In ordinary life, this is a
manageable cognitive quirk. In a command center during a
crisis, it can determine whether missiles are launched.
The pressure on decision makers during active conflict is
difficult to overstate. A commander who hesitates and is
wrong will be judged for the casualties that hesitation cost.
A commander who acts and is wrong will be judged for the
consequences of that action. There is no option that
eliminates accountability, and the clock does not stop.
In Modern Warfare, the window between a thread appearing and
the window for responding to it can be measured in minutes,
sometimes seconds. The human nervous system, under
that pressure, does not default to deliberation.
It defaults to pattern recognition, reaching for the
most familiar framework, the most recent precedent, the
interpretation that resolves uncertainty fastest.
This is how accidental escalation happens.
Not through malice, not through recklessness, through the
collision of incomplete information, cognitive
shortcuts, and the irreversible physics of military hardware
already in motion. Vietnam demonstrated what
happens when the fog is transmitted live into living
rooms. Journalists reported what they
could see, which was always a fragment.
Editors back home assemble those fragments into narratives that
often bore little relationship to the operational reality.
The official account and the televised account diverged so
completely over so many years that the credibility of both
eventually collapsed. The public learned to distrust
the briefing. The military learned to manage
access. Neither solution addressed the
underlying problem, which was that the fog does not clear
simply because someone is watching.
In the current information environment, the speed of false
information during conflict is unprecedented.
In the opening hours of a major escalation, social media
platforms carry thousands of posts claiming with apparent
certainty to know what is happening.
Images circulate that are real, fabricated or taken from
entirely different conflicts. Numbers, casualty figures,
strike counts, aircraft losses are invented, exaggerated and
repeated until they acquire the authority of established fact.
By the time official corrections arrive, the false numbers have
already been embedded in a public understanding of events.
This is not simply a media problem.
It is an intelligence problem. Analysts monitoring open source
information during a crisis must now sort through an ocean of
deliberately planted disinformation, accidental
misreporting, genuine eyewitness accounts and coordinated
amplification campaigns, all arriving simultaneously, all
presenting themselves as authoritative.
The fog has acquired a social media layer.
Drone warfare was expected to cut through this fog.
Persistent surveillance. Real time video feeds the
ability to observe a target for hours before any decision to
strike. And drones have changed the
intelligence picture in significant ways, but they have
not eliminated uncertainty. Video interpretation remains a
human process, subject to all the cognitive pressures of human
judgement. Targets are misidentified.
Context is missing. A gathering of people that looks
from altitude like a military meeting may be a family
occasion. The consequences of errors at
drone altitude are measured in the same way they have always
been measured in the bodies on the ground.
Cyber operations have added another dimension to the fog.
The ability to spoof radar returns, to inject false data
into an adversary's command systems to make a pilot believe
an aircraft is friendly when it is not.
These capabilities mean that even the raw sensor data feeding
into a decision cannot be assumed to be real.
The fog now extends into the instruments designed to dispel
it. There is a particular kind of
exhaustion that builds inside a command center during an
extended operation. The analysts have been awake for
20 hours. The maps are covered in markers
that have been updated and contradicted and updated again.
The communications are carrying too many conversations
simultaneously. The pressure from above for a
clear picture has not diminished, but the picture has
not clarified. In that state, the temptation to
impose certainty on ambiguity, to decide that the unclear
contact is hostile, that the fragmentary report is accurate,
that the decision cannot wait, is not a failure of character.
It is the predictable output of a human nervous system at its
limits. Klausowitz understood this.
He wrote not only about the fog but about friction.
The accumulated weight of small errors, delays,
miscommunications and unexpected events that caused even well
designed plans to diverge from reality.
Friction and fog together are not aberrations of war, they are
its nature. Every satellite in orbit, every
drone in the sky, every AI system processing battlefield
data in real time represents A genuine reduction in some
specific category of uncertainty.
Certain things that were once invisible can now be seen.
Certain decisions that once required hours can now be made
in minutes. The technology is real, and its
effects are real. And yet, in the command centers
of every military on Earth, in the early hours of every
escalation, in the mind of every analyst staring at data that
refuses to resolve cleanly into a single conclusion, the fog
persists. It is older than any weapon
system. It will outlast any technology
designed to eliminate it because war is not only a contest of
hardware, it is a contest of perception, judgement, and
decision making under conditions that are specifically designed
by an adversary to make all three as difficult as possible.
The fog is not a malfunction, it is the battlefield itself.
This has been epic. Fury, the US Iran war podcast.