Doctrine and the Fog-of-War

Abstract

Human conflict occurs on Clausewitz landscapes whose distinctive topology includes fog-of-war, friction, uncertainty, and misperception. Actively constraining an adversary using such features is a standard tactic of confrontation across courts of law, commerce, political campaigns, and, of course, the battlefield itself. Time-limited optimization models of cognitive effectiveness, extending standard “anytime algorithm” methods, show how doctrinal groupthink may amplify fog-of-war and friction to fatally limit the ability of a challenged institution to respond to shadow price demands imposed by an unfriendly agent or environment.