Media, Communications and the Fog of War

I’ve just finished reading Conquering Tide: War in the Pacific 1942-44 by Ian Toll. It’s a magisterial overview of the strategy, plans and the ultimate outcomes of the conflict in that theatre of operations—the kind of book that could only be written after the war.

According to the overview, the book is a “masterful history” that “encompasses the heart of the great Pacific war, when a ‘conquering tide’ of Allied air and sea power supported the U.S. Marines in reclaiming the thousands of Japanese-held islands on the road to Tokyo.” 

Sitting where we do today, we know how those battles, and the war itself, turned out. During the war, however, things were never that clear.

For participants, it was often about what is called the fog of war.

The phrase the “fog of war” was coined by Prussian military leader and theorist German Carl von Clausewitz who said: "War is the realm of uncertainty; three quarters of the factors on which action in war is based are wrapped in a fog of greater or lesser uncertainty.” 

This was one of the points of The Face of Battle, by eminent British historian John Keegan.

In the book, Keegan notes that for the average soldier a battle takes place in a space of not more than 50 meters wide—and for much of history, that 50 meters of battlefield was shrouded in impenetrable smoke.

Only later could historians impose order on what was, at the time, a chaotic and confusing scene made up of thousands or hundreds of thousands of individuals making individual decisions and blindly, hopefully, doggedly pressing forward towards some far away and hoped-for goal.

Rick Atkinson, the author of The Guns at Last Light: The War in Western Europe 1944-45, another magisterial overview of World War II, expanded on this theme.

In the book, he notes that people today look back at the war and see, from the time of the D-Day landings until the surrender of the Nazis, an inexorable march to a successful conclusion.

It was, in fact, not like that at all. For much of the time, victory was anything but assured or foregone.

“War is never linear," he wrote, "but rather a chaotic, desultory enterprise of reversal and advance, blunder and élan, despair and elation."

Why write about war in a blog about non-profit communications?

As communicators, we are not in a war. But we are on the “front lines” of a communications revolution.

Today it feels like we are lost in smoke and fog, taking one step forward then two steps back, maybe making progress, trying this, giving up on that, sometimes gaining or losing ground.

Sometimes we are even unsure what the grand plan is, or if there even is one.

For Internet guru Clay Shirky, this is “what real revolutions are like. The old stuff gets broken faster than the new stuff is put in its place. The importance of any given experiment isn’t apparent at the moment it appears; big changes stall, small changes spread. Even the revolutionaries can’t predict what will happen.”

Fifty or a hundred years from now, someone will write a book and make sense of all the things we are going through in communications and media today—just as has been done about the Gutenberg revolution.

In the meantime, it’s all foggy. And that’s perfectly normal.