The Fog (Machine) Of War

Authored by Charles Hugh Smith via OfTwoMinds blog,

Meta-Thoughts On The War

Decades of ‘The Fog Machine of War’ have jaded the public’s appetite for ‘Narrative Control’.

The Fog of War is perhaps better described as The Fog Machine of War, for everything presented to the public is some version of Narrative Control, the purpose of which is to establish a context and story that’s beneficial to whomever is presenting “facts,” “news,” “information” and “commentary.”

The other motivation for flooding global media with “news,” “information” and “commentary” is to maximize profits via serving the insatiable appetite for “what’s really going on.” What’s really going on is of course a closely held state secret, the very last thing that would ever be released to the public.

Since everything is Narrative Control and exploiting crisis for profit, there’s little value in any of what’s presented to the public other than what it suggests on a meta-level, that is, what isn’t being revealed and promoted as “what’s really going on.”

It seems to me there is only one way to assemble a jigsaw that approaches the goal of discovering “what’s really going on.” The first step would be to obtain fly on the wall unfiltered intelligence summaries (unfiltered meaning not yet massaged for the political leadership) from the intelligence agencies of the three combatants: Iran, Israel and the United States. This is of course impossible.

The second step would be to obtain the unfiltered intelligence summaries from regional players, for example, Turkey, Saudi Arabia, etc., who have their own sources.

The third step would be to obtain the unfiltered intelligence summaries from Major Power players with a keen interest in figuring out “what’s really going on,” for example, China, Russia and the European Union intel agencies.

The fourth step would be to survey mid-level officers conducting actual operations. It would also be helpful to have access to those actually conducting post-operation damage assessments.

You discern the meta-thinking here: valuable information tends to get filtered out (or lost) between each level of information gathering, summary and presentation to the next level of the hierarchy.

At the highest level, the military leadership tends to be under pressure to control the narrative of what’s presented to the political leadership. This can play out in any number of ways: the military leadership might exaggerate the direness of the situation to obtain permission for a risky operation, or it may gloss over the situation to avoid being sacked.

What strikes me as interesting is how long this situation has been brewing. Iran’s nuclear ambitions have been front and center for a great many years, and so intelligence and operational planning have been going on for many years.

In other words, this isn’t a flash-bang crisis that suddenly erupted from conditions that were unstable beneath the surface but superficially stable, for example, a coup d’etat in a resource-rich nation few people can locate on a map.

What’s unknown for obvious reasons is the capabilities in play. In the aftermath of the intelligence agencies scandals of the 1970s, various tell-all books were published, revealing technical abilities long kept secret.

For example, it was revealed that the U.S. intercepted communications between doomed cosmonauts drifting in a failed Soviet space mission and the tearful Soviet political leadership.

We have no way of knowing if this “tell-all” is true or just another subtle form of Narrative Control. But given that the U.S. spends more on signal intelligence, space-based assets, and other information gathering than other nations spend on their entire militaries, it’s plausible.

As for what capabilities are in play today: the public has no idea. We can have fun guessing, but it’s all guessing.

Decades of The Fog Machine of War have jaded the public’s appetite for Narrative Control. Few believe the “official version” of anything, for good reasons. Public trust has eroded, and so the meta-thought here is the Narrative Control has shifted to insiders’ “tell-all” accounts and leaked accounts of “what’s really going on.”

So the dirt revealed by opponents of the conflict–well, perhaps all that should be taken with a hefty grain of salt, too. The truth–if we dare even using that word–is we collectively know next to nothing about “what’s really going on”, and so profitably chasing speculation is all that’s left.

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