  In competitive adversarial environments, it is often advantageous to
obfuscate one's strategies or capabilities. However, revealing one's strategic
intentions may shift the dynamics of the competition in complex ways. Can it
ever be advantageous to reveal strategic intentions to an opponent? In this
paper, we consider three-stage Colonel Blotto games in which one player can
choose whether or not to pre-commit resources to a single battlefield before
play begins. This pre-commitment is public knowledge. In response, the opponent
can either secure the battlefield by matching the pre-commitment with its own
forces, or withdraw. In a two-player setting, we show that a weaker player
never has an incentive to pre-commit any amount of resources to a battlefield
regardless of how valuable it is. We then consider a three-player setting in
which two players fight against a common adversary on separate fronts. Only one
of the two players facing the adversary has the option of pre-committing. We
find there are instances where this player benefits from pre-committing. The
analysis indicates that under non-cooperative team settings and no possibility
of forming alliances, there can be incentives to publicly announce one's
strategic intentions to an adversary.
