Introduction

Abstract

Military literature often not just suggests a picture of war characterized by asymmetric information, thereby evoking what Clausewitz called the “fog of war”, but quite often implicitly assumes that the force that is able to command more information than its enemy should be more likely to carry the victory. Until recently, it has dominated—and effectively still does—all military doctrinal teaching at least in the Western sphere. The most recent example is the Network-Centric Warfare concept which has become something like a departure point for, if not the Holy Grail of, almost every doctrine of every branch of the US military since the beginning of the 1990s. By putting the emphasis almost exclusively on (the compatibility of) communication networks and using catchwords such as, e.g., “red-force tracking” or “blue-force tracking” it suggests that warfighting is about little else than acquiring information. Translated into game theory, it says that whenever war resembles a sequential game, there would be a second-mover advantage, implying that it should be every force’s primary objective to turn a simultaneous-decision-making military encounter into a sequential one by, e.g., trying to find out about the enemy’s objectives, his positions or his battle plan. Or, to put it in other words, in war, information should always pay.