Mark Askew and Antonio Salinas
Among Carl von Clausewitz’s many timeless observations, one in particular stands out as a perpetual impediment to commanders and strategists. “War is the realm of uncertainty,” the Prussian strategist wrote. “Three quarters of the factors on which action is based are wrapped in a fog of greater or lesser uncertainty.” Throughout military history, commanders have attempted to pierce this fog of war with snippets of information, leveraging human runners, pigeons, and cavalry, and later, telegraphs, radio, and full-motion video. However, for the last thirty years, US forces have employed advanced technology in intelligence, surveillance, and reconnaissance platforms that have provided unprecedented visibility and awareness of battlefield developments. Now, with increasingly lower barriers to entry for use of commercial space-based capabilities and drones, this long-held asymmetric US advantage is eroding. Now that other militaries can use these technologies to approximate US sensing and strike capabilities, achieving operational and tactical surprise will be increasingly difficult.
However, all is not lost. The US military has dealt with symmetries in transparency before. Equally important, increased transparency does not always lead to improved understanding.
While sensor-rich environments make operational concealment harder, they also create opportunities to exploit adversaries’ cognitive biases. Commanders can combine advanced technology with human ingenuity to turn battlefield transparency into an advantage. Planners can do this by understanding adversaries’ information needs, shaping the data they rely on to inform those needs, and manipulating the enemy’s decision-making. This approach requires cross-domain planning and a deep understanding of how opponents process information.
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