  Strategic decision-making in uncertain and adversarial environments is
crucial for the security of modern systems and infrastructures. A salient
feature of many optimal decision-making policies is a level of
unpredictability, or randomness, which helps to keep an adversary uncertain
about the system's behavior. This paper seeks to explore decision-making
policies on the other end of the spectrum -- namely, whether there are benefits
in revealing one's strategic intentions to an opponent before engaging in
competition. We study these scenarios in a well-studied model of competitive
resource allocation problem known as General Lotto games. In the classic
formulation, two competing players simultaneously allocate their assets to a
set of battlefields, and the resulting payoffs are derived in a zero-sum
fashion. Here, we consider a multi-step extension where one of the players has
the option to publicly pre-commit assets in a binding fashion to battlefields
before play begins. In response, the opponent decides which of these
battlefields to secure (or abandon) by matching the pre-commitment with its own
assets. They then engage in a General Lotto game over the remaining set of
battlefields. Interestingly, this paper highlights many scenarios where
strategically revealing intentions can actually significantly improve one's
payoff. This runs contrary to the conventional wisdom that randomness should be
a central component of decision-making in adversarial environments.
