Movies - The Fog of War

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:This article is about the documentary. For the military and gaming concept, see Fog of war.

The Fog of War: Eleven Lessons from the Life of Robert S. McNamara, is a documentary film directed by Errol Morris and released in December 2003. The film includes an original score by Philip Glass and won an Academy Award for Best Documentary Feature. The term "fog of war", made popular by Carl von Clausewitz in his book On War in 1832, refers to the cloud of uncertainty that descends over a battlefield once fighting begins.
Concept
The film traces the life of Robert Strange McNamara, United States Secretary of Defense from 1961 to 1968. While the Vietnam War is clearly the focus of the debate about McNamara's legacy, the film begins during perhaps an even more crucial event in world history: the Cuban Missile Crisis of 1962. From this event comes one of the 11 lessons McNamara recounts of his life and service: "You have to empathize with your enemy." McNamara was interviewed for over 20 hours for the film.

In a 2004 appearance at UC Berkeley, Morris said that he was inspired to create the movie after reading McNamara's 2001 book (with James G. Blight), Wilson's Ghost: Reducing the Risk of Conflict, Killing, and Catastrophe in the 21st Century. The entire webcast can be found at . When pushed to apply his "lessons" to the US invasion of Iraq, McNamara refused, arguing that former Secretaries of Defense should not comment on the policy of the current Secretary of Defense. McNamara suggested that other people were welcome to apply his lessons to Iraq if they wanted to, but that he would not explicitly do it, and noted that his lessons were more general than any particular military conflict (he had indeed written them some time before the Iraq war).

The eleven lessons that lend structure to The Fog of War'' were created by Errol Morris are not explicitly McNamara's (at the aforementioned UC Berkeley event, McNamara contended that he did not agree with Morris's interpretations in all respects). McNamara eventually went public with his own list of lessons

Eleven lessons

#Empathize with your enemy. #Rationality will not save us. #There's something beyond one's self. #Maximize efficiency. #Proportionality should be a guideline in war. #Get the data. #Belief and seeing are both often wrong. #Be prepared to reexamine your reasoning. #In order to do good, you may have to engage in evil. #Never say never. #You can't change human nature.

Ten lessons

The eleven lessons in the movie are in fact from McNamara, but they were chosen by Morris picking quotations he saw fit and forming them into rules. The DVD includes NcNamara's original ten lessons. They are:

# The human race will not eliminate war in this century but we can reduce war, the level of killing, by adhering to the principles of a just war, in particular of proportionality. # The indefinite combinations of human fallibility and nuclear weapons will lead to the destruction of nations. # We are the most powerful nation in the world -- economically, politically, and militarily -- and we are likely to remain so for decades ahead. But we are not omniscient. If we cannot persuade other nations with similar interests and similar values of the merits of the proposed use of that power, we should not proceed unilaterally except in the unlikely requirement to defend the continental US, Alaska and Hawaii. # Fill in the rest ..

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Movies - The Fog of War

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Eleven lessons

Ten lessons

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