Abstract:
This thesis consists of a genealogy of the emergence and entrenchment of the “fog of war” (FOW)
within the spaces of martial and strategic thought. Though the term is most commonly attributed
to Carl von Clausewitz’s On War (1832), and often employed in tandem with his general theory of
friction, it is argued that the FOW itself never quite attains the status of concept, and instead
functions as an empty signifier that mirrors war’s own indeterminate nature. Nonetheless, by using
the FOW as a point of departure, a more general inquiry into attendant efforts to conceptualise
uncertainty in war is pursued via a transdisciplinary approach grounded in media studies and
martial empiricism. In doing so, a general progression in the martial conception of uncertainty is
traced, spanning the epistemic view of probability held by the Ancients; the emergence of an
aleatory conception of probability in the 18th century; the pursuit of negentropic control during
the Cold War; and concluding with a contemporary understanding informed by the science of
complex systems. In conducting this survey, a prevailing tendency in the Western martial and
strategic traditions to view uncertainty as a problem to be alleviated is found to have its origins in
the Aristotelian schema of theory and practice. However, it is also argued that the emergence of a
rival methodology, rooted in the Greek notion of mêtis—cunning intelligence—and the Chinese
approach to war as deception, necessitates an expanded view of the FOW, as it seeks to exploit, and
even engineer war’s ‘atmosphere of uncertainty’ to its own ends.