By Dee Smith
On October 12, 2000, when a group of Al Qaida suicide bombers pulled a small boat up to the USS Cole, a U.S. Navy destroyer refueling in the port of Aden in Yemen, I was still working with the Defense Intelligence Agency (DIA) as a contractor. I happened to be sitting in the office of its recently retired director, General Patrick Hughes, the day the first reports of the attack came in. There was a huge amount of confusion about what had actually happened and what the casualties were, and speculation about what would happen next. He had hardly got off the phone before 3 other calls came in.
At one point, Pat turned to me and said, “Have I ever told you my ‘rule of 11’ for crises?” When I indicated he had not, he explained: “In any crisis, assume that the first 10 things you hear are completely inaccurate, and that the 11th may be partially true. And then that cycle generally repeats, not necessarily in sequence. If you go by that rule, you will find your understanding and your reactions and decisions are greatly improved.”
It was good advice. I have used it ever since, and not just to understand military/geopolitical issues.
This is closely related to the concept of the “fog of war.” The origin of the exact term is unclear, but the concept is believed to have been first described by Carl von Clausewitz in his classic study On War (not published in German until 1823, after his death, and only 50 years later in English). He described the concept as follows:
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 judgment is called for; a skilled intelligence to scent out the truth.
There is no better demonstration of the fog of war than what is going on right now in Iran and its geopolitical neighborhood. No one, including the combatants, has a firm grasp on what is actually happening, and how it is likely to develop is utterly opaque.
However, as is widely acknowledged at this point, there either was no actual strategic plan, or whatever plan there was had been based on assumptions that quickly proved to be wildly inaccurate, particularly that:
1) the initial strikes could decapitate the regime but leave a few people in positions of power who could be worked with, in the way that the vice-president of Venezuela was appointed to run the country,
2) the regime would crack after its leadership was eliminated,
3) the people of Iran would rise up against the regime, and
4) whatever Iranian government was left would refrain from attacking its neighboring states or closing the Strait of Hormuz (despite the fact that Iran had long threatened to do both).
This has all proved to be extremely wishful thinking, to put it charitably. The regime has consolidated, with the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC) — the primary military arm of the Iranian government, which is also heavily integrated into the Iranian economic and political structures — assuming more control. Iran’s leadership has become even more intransigent. Most of the candidates for people who (it was assumed) could be “worked with” were killed in the first days. And, particularly after the brutal repression of protestors just weeks ago, with tens of thousands of deaths, the general populace is so frightened that most are not even venturing out of their houses. With good reason: Iranian police and military forces have orders to shoot protestors on sight.
This is not to mention the intention and capability of Iran to spread the war to its entire neighborhood and beyond and to close the Strait of Hormuz, through which not only about 20 percent of the world’s oil supply passes, but also through which critical dry goods like fertilizer and ammonia also travel — and the 2nd-, 3rd- and 4th-order effects of these actions on global economics and food supply.
There are many lessons to be learned from this situation. They are the kind of lessons that powerful countries often refuse to learn, as with Russia in Afghanistan, for example, or the U.S. in Vietnam, Afghanistan and Iraq. A brief list would have to range from the transformative asymmetric power of technology (which means that smaller, weaker powers can take on and even defeat much larger ones), to the difficulty of fighting a war that has the potential of long-term irregular or guerrilla-type action. Other lessons would include the realization that autocratic leaders very often actually tell you what they are going to do (so you need to take what they say seriously), and the key point that all leaders today must rid themselves of what is now called the “recency bias” — the erroneous belief that the recent past is a reliable predictor of the near future. That was never really the case, but in a time of relentless, massive, and accelerating change, it is a ludicrous point of view. The U.S. was very probably influenced by the success of its operation in January kidnapping the president of Venezuela.
Military forces look at 3 levels: tactical, operational and strategic. Tactical operations — at which the U.S. military is superb — do not necessarily lead anywhere good without a strategic direction. Lacking that, the fog of war might merely conceal the road to Hell, which is just as bad even when one heads down it with the best of intentions.