The 'Fog of War' Is No Excuse [View all]

Mistakes are one thing; failures of moral judgment are another.

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Clausewitz is often credited with inventing the concept of the “fog of war,” but he never actually used that phrase (or its German equivalent). War, he said, is the “realm of uncertainty,” where most of what a commander relies upon is obscured by “fog of greater or lesser uncertainty.” He was not referring to literal smoke or blast effects. He meant the limits of human perception: incomplete intelligence, contradictory reports, fear, haste, poor communication, friction, and the tendency of people under pressure to mistake assumptions for facts. Fog was a metaphor for confusion and uncertainty, not an atmospheric condition.

That matters, because the secretary used the term as if it were a purely physical explanation for what he didn’t see, and why the second strike might have occurred when he left the room. But even if smoke existed—and the wounded men clinging to the ship were likely visible after the initial strike—Clausewitz reminds us that the real issue is not what could or could not be seen with a camera feed. The issue is what leaders thought they were seeing, what information they were relying on, and whether they would exercise the disciplined judgment required before ordering another missile to be fired.

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And that is why Secretary Hegseth’s explanation is so troubling. If the systems governing the targeting of a small boat—confirmation of targets, visual identification, proportionality, and discrimination—broke down, then the failure was not caused by fog. It was caused by the inability to penetrate “fog” through disciplined process and the rule of law. Modern militaries are designed precisely to prevent rapid-fire decisions based on guesswork or emotion. If operators identified survivors and those observations were either missed, dismissed, or overridden, that is not fog. That is a breakdown in leadership and moral judgment.

Here is where the danger grows. By invoking “fog” as a catch-all excuse, the secretary risks creating the conditions for blame to be pushed downward onto the very service members who executed an order under pressure. If he was the senior person in the room during the initial strike, he was in charge and responsible. Instead of clarifying what happened, he may have inadvertently—or intentionally—shaped a narrative that protects senior civilian decision-makers while placing the military leaders in a perilous position. The early indicators point to that possibility, and seasoned observers of civil-military relations know how quickly such patterns develop when accountability begins to drift.

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