Experience
The practical experience of the fog of war is most easily demonstrated in the tactical battlespace. It may include military commanders' incomplete or inaccurate intelligence about the enemy's numbers, disposition, capabilities, and intent, regarding features of the battlefield, and incomplete knowledge of the state of their own forces. Fog of war is caused by the limits of reconnaissance, by the enemy's feints and disinformation, by delays in receiving intelligence and difficulties passing orders, and by the difficult task of forming a cogent picture from a very large (or very small) amount of diverse data.
When a force engages in battle and the urgency for good intelligence increases, so does the fog of war and chaos of the battlefield, while military units become preoccupied with fighting or are lost (either destroyed by enemy fire or literally lose their way), reconnaissance and liaison elements become unavailable, and sometimes real fog and smoke obscure vision. Much of the modern military's technological efforts, under the rubric of command and control seek to reduce the fog of war. Although even the most advanced technology cannot eliminate it, military theorists continue to develop ways to reduce it.
Read more about this topic: Fog Of War
Famous quotes containing the word experience:
“Not the fruit of experience, but experience itself, is the end.”
—Walter Pater (1839–1894)
“Every poem of value must have a residue [of language].... It cannot be exhausted because our lives are not long enough to do so. Indeed, in the greatest poetry, the residue may seem to increase as our experience increases—that is, as we become more sensitive to the particular ignitions in its language. We return to a poem not because of its symbolic [or sociological] value, but because of the waste, or subversion, or difficulty, or consolation of its provision.”
—William Logan, U.S. educator. “Condition of the Individual Talent,” The Sewanee Review, p. 93, Winter 1994.
“... no other railroad station in the world manages so mysteriously to cloak with compassion the anguish of departure and the dubious ecstasies of return and arrival. Any waiting room in the world is filled with all this, and I have sat in many of them and accepted it, and I know from deliberate acquaintance that the whole human experience is more bearable at the Gare de Lyon in Paris than anywhere else.”
—M.F.K. Fisher (1908–1992)