Formal analysis suggests that surprisingly modest levels of Clausewitzian fog-and-frictionFog and friction can, in a highly punctuated manner, poison even the most astute manifestation of Sun Tzu praxis aimed at indirectly ‘implicating an effect’. Cultures constitute the riverbanks between/along which embedded institutional cognition, like individual consciousness, flows and is constrained. Research has explored culture and inattentional blindness at the individual level. The work done here suggests exploiting similar institutional lacunae during organized conflict, implying as well the possibility of constructing a new class of robust statistical tools for its study and, in some measure, its management.