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.
Hellbound and Down 