Political Theatrics in the 'Fog of War'

According to evidence given to the Senate Select Committee on A Certain Maritime Incident,1 the 'fog of war' critically disrupted military and government reporting systems during the 'children overboard' affair of October 2001, a key feature of the federal election campaign. The second of fifty-six witnesses before the committee, the Chief of the Navy, Vice Admiral David Shackleton, described the 'fog of war' as being related to the reality that everything is real but it is not real. You are trying to pull threads and strands from many miscellaneous and sometimes disconnected information flows. You are trying to build a puzzle from many disconnected pieces. Sometimes the pieces fit accurately, sometimes they do not . you are dealing with millions of shades of grey and it is only as events start to get to a point of culmination that they start to form up into a real pattern, and then sometimes it disintegrates again as the events change. This is constantly moving and going up and down all the time. The commanding officer has to make hypotheses, judgments and calls based on what he sees at the time. It is never absolutely right; it is never absolutely wrong.2 Given the Admiral's appearance early in the committee's investigation, his testimony provided an influential frame through which much of the subsequent testimony was interpreted. In this statement Admiral Shackleton breaks from the flow of his detailed description of his direct and indirect role in the events surrounding the 'children overboard' affair, and begins citing himself from testimony delivered to a Senate Estimates Committee a month earlier3 - a hearing at which almost all of the senators who comprised the later Select Committee were in attendance. While his intention seemed to be to illustrate effectively the often confused and contradictory nature of information dissemination in military theatres of operation, this was not the only use to which this statement was put over the duration of the Select Committee's proceedings, with his definition being re-quoted repeatedly, at least once in its entirety. Each repetition of this text was usually followed by a claim for its 'eloquence' or poetry. The rich descriptive language of Admiral Shackleton's speech, and its sheer length, are markedly different to the economy and dry precision of most of his other event-related testimony. This linguistic shift passed its original Senate audience unreferenced. The first time Admiral Shackleton used this description, in Senate Estimates on 20 February 2002, there were no claims made for its 'eloquence' or 'poetry'. Queensland Liberal Senator Brandis provoked the Admiral's 'fog of war' description with questions about what he described as 'an operational context with a lot of confusion'. 4 After the Admiral's statement, Senator Brandis matter-of-factly moves onto his next question, his task to introduce the notion of systemic confusion pervading every aspect of the 'children overboard' incident without needing to analyse the Admiral's reply as resembling poetry. Only later, on 26 March 2002, on the first of several repetitions, did Admiral Shackleton's description acquire its eloquent or poetical dimension. Several questions emerge from this section of the Admiral's testimony. What is this 'fog' of which he speaks, simultaneously 'real' and 'not real'? How might political performance effectively grapple with its targets in such a fog? Does such a 'fog of war' actually exist, or is there simply a fog machine? How would such a fog machine protect the interests of the state? And finally, how might a fog machine and the similarly foggy language it produces be retooled and used for opposite ends? This article explores the public re-speaking of this 'foggy' testimony in version 1.0's CMI (A Certain Maritime Incident)5 in an attempt to begin addressing these questions. Before this is possible, however, context needs to be established, both of the 'certain maritime incident' itself and the Senate Select Committee whose duty it was to investigate it. …