War and Media Operations

The US Military and the Press from Vietnam to Iraq

Thomas Rid

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2007
• Print ISBN:
  9780415472098
• eBook ISBN:
  9781134116867
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: Military & Maritime History
• Index: History

This is the first academic analysis of the role of embedded media in the 2003 Iraq War, providing a concise history of US military public affairs management since Vietnam.In late summer 2002, the Pentagon considered giving the press an inside view of the upcoming invasion of Iraq. The decision was surprising, and the innovative "embedded media prog

1 Introduction

Why did the Pentagon decide to “embed” reporters in the 2003 Iraq War? Reporters lived, traveled, ate, slept, and went to battle with military men and women. Journalists in key units attended classified meetings of their division and brigade commanders in the midst of the ongoing invasion and learned about future operations as the war plan unfolded. There was no censorship as the media covered the war and no limitation of access as the reporters broadcast live from the battlefield in one of the most ambitious military operations since World War II. Given the strained and wrangled history of military–media relations in the United States, the decision to grant journalists unfettered access by accommodating them in military units was surprising and counter-intuitive. But it paid off. In retrospect, the media coverage of the invasion phase of the Iraq War is seen as exceedingly successful, from the media’s view as well as from the military’s perspective. From an analyst’s standpoint, the Pentagon’s innovative decision in favor of the “embedded media program” is a fascinating case of organizational change in an exceptionally large, hierarchical, and presumably change-averse bureaucracy operating in a fast-paced and instable environment. How, then, was such a radical innovation possible?

Open press coverage of armed conflict used to be considered a missioncritical security risk by the American military. It undermines the support at the home front and ultimately can lose the war. This was the lesson the US military distilled from its traumatic experience in Vietnam. “Today’s officer corps carries as part of its cultural baggage a loathing for the press,” wrote Bernard Trainor, a former Marine Corps general and New York Times correspondent. “The credo of the military seems to have become ‘duty, honor, country, and hate the media.’”¹ The US military came to perceive the domestic media coverage of Vietnam, particularly on TV, as a stab-in-the-back. General William C. Westmoreland, commander in Vietnam, openly blamed the “sensational media coverage” that was “piped for the first time into the homes of America” for the army’s rout.² Military planners and political decision makers concluded after the American defeat in Vietnam to fully exclude the press from the battlefield in the next operations. The rationale was to control media coverage at the home front by limiting media access to the war front. The American electorate’s support of the military effort was considered essential, and allowing reporters to roam around freely on the battlefield was considered an effective means to undermine that support. Denial of access and control of the information flow was the policy in Grenada in 1983, in Panama in 1989, and in the Persian Gulf War in 1991. In these operations reporters were either shut out completely, or they were corralled by a restrictive pool system that set narrow limits to journalists’ physical mobility. The idea behind the pool was that a small group of reporters on the ground would produce news stories, which would be subject to a “security review,” and then “pooled” and distributed to all the news organizations. The military’s philosophy was not to control what the press could print – security reviews were hardly used to vet articles in the Persian Gulf War – but to control what the press could see, a method officially called “security at the source.”³

Twelve years later in the 2003 Operation Iraqi Freedom, the situation on the battlefield was entirely different. As allied troops began the invasion of Iraq and crossed the border from Kuwait, approximately 775 correspondents were “embedded” with American and British troops. The predominantly American media representatives were allowed to attend classified command briefs and had access to an amount of mission-critical information that was unimaginable in earlier conflicts. But the journalists also shared the hardships of deployment and combat with the troops more than in any war in most living people’s memory, and four of those embedded died between 20 March and 1 May 2003.⁴ Using state-of-the-art technology such as satellite link-ups and digital videophones, the press portrayed the conflict in Iraq at an unprecedented level of transparency. Sensational pictures were again “piped” into the homes of America. This time, though, the images were piped through several hundred “soda straws,” as the program’s designers in the Pentagon referred to the isolated reports of single embedded journalists, who gave “a very narrow view, but rich and deep,” as one of the program’s managers said.⁵ A quarter of a century after Vietnam, the war coverage surpassed all previous limits in scope and speed. The footage of fighting American GIs was funneled into the living rooms, offices, train stations, coffee shops, and command headquarters of neutral, allied, and adversarial countries all over the globe. And the world was getting its view without a delay of three days but in real-time and in local languages, delivered by a number of new satellite TV channels. In previous military conflicts, global live coverage would have been regarded as a dangerous source of information to the enemy and as an operational security risk by any military force. Seemingly not in Iraq.

Much had changed in the interim. Three cascading and near simultaneous developments had irreversibly altered the nature of war: the advent of modern information technology on the battlefield, the commercial media’s use of that technology, and the adversaries’ use of the news media. Since the late 1990s, the US Army, Navy, Air Force, and Marine Corps are undergoing a far-reaching process of modernization “from an industrial age to an information age military,” internally referred to as “transformation.”⁶ The overhaul’s objective was to harness modern information and communication technology for the purposes of military operations and to create a lean force that, as one entity on the battlefield, can act with more mobility, speed, efficiency, and precision – “interoperability” in military jargon. The new way of war would cause fewer casualties on both sides. In a transformed military, for instance, an Army Special Forces infantryman on horseback in a remote mountain range in Afghanistan could laser-pinpoint a target for an Air Force high altitude bomber to destroy it precisely and instantaneously. Information technology is the glue which connects previously disconnected units. A major ingredient of this reform was to optimize the military’s “C4ISR” capabilities, the organization’s ability to gather information, process it, decide, and then act promptly. The concept that formula alludes to, “Command, Control, Communications, Computers, Intelligence, Surveillance, and Reconnaissance,”⁷ attempted to turn the military into a giant lethal computer network. Wars of the twenty-first century would be fought as “network-centric operations.”⁸

But not only American and allied military forces were equipped with state-of-the-art weapons and networked communication technology. Both American and foreign media outlets also brought modern communication technology to the battlefield. In the Persian Gulf War 12 years earlier, the only live reporting from the war zone came from a hotel rooftop in Baghdad, and the only channel which carried the live reports was CNN. The journalists who covered the troops in 1991 were carrying typewriters, scribbled their notes on paper, then had them flown to the rear and faxed to the United States. In 2003 reporters carried laptops and mobile phones which connected them instantaneously to the internet or to their editors in Los Angeles, Berlin, Beirut, or Beijing. The media outlets carrying those vast quantities of information had equally diversified. The global media landscape was densely populated by competing satellite channels and news magazines, quoting and using each other’s coverage and correspondents as sources. And the internet made the information available to consumers regardless of boundaries. An Associated Press reporter in Iraq could pinpoint a motive with a digital camera, email the picture to his agency in the United States, and find the image reproduced on the front page of the Süddeutsche Zeitung in Munich the same evening. Wars of the twenty-first century would not only be fought but also reported in a network-centric fashion.

The viewers and readers of this new media coverage had changed as well. Adversaries of the United States were watching and reading, too. And they were not only observing US-led military operations during the 1990s on TV. They observed keenly how America was dealing with the political challenges created by the twenty-first-century media environment in times of armed conflict. And they concluded that the decision making of a democratically elected government is vulnerable to gruesome images of accidental civilian casualties and graphic pictures of its own soldiers suffering, dying, or being tortured. As a result, Saddam Hussein in the Persian Gulf War, Mohamed Aideed in Somalia, Slobodan Milosevic during the Kosovo War, and the Taliban Regime in Afghanistan did not only watch; these regimes attempted to shape the international media coverage according to their strategic interests. New adversaries, as the strategic scholar Herfried Münkler put it, orchestrated an “offensive of pictures” against the “political and moral logistics” of democracies in an asymmetric constellation of war.⁹ By exploiting the sensational reflexes of the free and competing western media outlets to break a story, they tried to break America’s will. The farreaching changes in the global information environment were playing into the hands of the west’s non-democratic enemies, who were getting better at drawing media attention away from their own wrongdoings and successfully focused reports on allied mistakes and civilian casualties caused by bombs that went astray, it was argued in the Department of Defense (DoD) in Washington prior to the Iraq War. A new generation of witty and technology-savvy enemies even started to stage events for the sole purpose of exploiting their information impact upon publication: executions of US soldiers, civilian contractors, or foreign hostages in Iraq, digitally videotaped and distributed online, are cruel reminders of this development. Adversaries had become highly skilled at using “propaganda” against the United States.¹⁰ Network-centric wars of the twenty-first century would be fought not only on the physical battlefield but also in the virtual battlespace.

The embedded media program was a reaction to this chain of changes in the information environment, and it fundamentally altered the way the military dealt with the press. But as a precondition to the reform of the Pentagon’s media management, the mindset of uniformed planners and civilian decision makers had to undergo a fundamental transformation. In the period of only two decades, from 1983 to 2003, the Department of Defense turned from a confrontational and aggressive “denial of access” approach in media management on the battlefield to a cooperative but no less aggressive “embedded media program”. The following pages depict and explain the shift of thinking that senior leaders and middle managers in the Department of Defense have performed. Some conceptual tools offered by the discipline of organizational learning and knowledge management help to unravel this mental revolution.

Scholars of organizational change have suggested different concepts to grasp the frames of reference that determine how organizations perceive and act on their environments: perception filters,¹¹ paradigms,¹² theories-of-action,¹³ mental maps¹⁴ or mental models,¹⁵ interpretations,¹⁶ and tacit knowledge.¹⁷ All these terms describe an organization’s frames of reference that predetermine the way its managers and employees interpret external challenges and react to them. A vital function of routines and perception filters is the reduction of the environment’s complexity. An organization’s perceptional frameworks condense the complexity of an often chaotic, fast-paced, and unstructured environment, and thus enable its members to deal with structured situations. The military needed such routines and perception filters to deal with the extremely complex advent of modern information technology on the battlefield, with the news media’s use of that technology, and with the adversaries’ use of the press. The embedded media program was such an innovative routine and a way of grasping the media’s novel role on the battlefield. Routines are shaped by an organization’s traditions and past experiences. This moves organizational memory – or, to use a more flexible term, knowledge assets¹⁸ – into the crosshairs of research. How was the radical decision to embed reporters shaped by previous experiences with media access to the battlefield?

Three observations make the Pentagon’s decision to embed reporters in the 2003 Iraq War an insightful case study of military innovation in particular, and of organizational learning in general. First, the organization embraced a new strategy with a high risk potential. Reporters would have access to missioncritical information, such as details about weapon systems, or future unit movements. In military jargon, embedding was an OPSEC risk – the “operational security” of the mission and the life of American servicemen could have been endangered. A journalist’s disclosure of a unit’s exact location, or signal footprints from the press’s mobile phones, could have enabled the enemy to locate and engage the Americans. Information regarding future plans was particularly sensitive. The concern for mission security is a military reflex deeply rooted in the organization’s tradition and culture. That tactical security risk was just as problematic as the strategic one. Gruesome and bloody details of combat scenes reported by the embedded journalists could have turned the American public or allied publics against the war, an intricate scenario in a prolonged conflict.¹⁹ The OPSEC fear was that an embedded reporter’s outbound email might tactically result in an inbound Scud missile or strategically in an incoming telephone call from the White House. But the increased security risk the Pentagon decided to take was not the only component which made the decision counterintuitive.

Second, embedding was a departure from previous successful strategies. In every major military operation since Vietnam, the US military and the Pentagon were reluctant to give journalists access to the battlefield. In 1983, during Operation Urgent Fury, Admiral Joseph Metcalf even threatened to sink a boat hired by journalists trying to approach the shores of Grenada. Intense criticism of this rough media management triggered the creation of the DoD National Media-Pool, a suggestion of the so-called Sidle Commission to institutionalize better press access.²⁰ In contradiction to that stated goal, the pool was not used in subsequent operations to facilitate media coverage but to control where the journalists could go and what they could see. The military used the pool as an instrument to restrict access during Operation Just Cause in Panama in 1989 and Operation Desert Storm in the Persian Gulf War in 1991. Despite fierce criticism by media representatives, neither a public uproar nor a court ruling against the restrictive press policy ensued. As a result, the method of restriction was considered successful not only by the military but in fact by the public: opinion polls had found that Americans were entirely satisfied with the coverage, and even tolerated a ban on information while the nation was at war. More than eight in ten Americans rated news coverage of the war as “good” or “excellent” just after the war in March 1991, with 45 percent rating it excellent. More than 80 percent of respondents agreed with military restrictions on war coverage.²¹ After the Persian Gulf War, Pete Williams, Assistant Secretary of Defense for Public Affairs, confidently declared in the Washington Post that “the press gave the American people the best war coverage they ever had.”²² In a situation where past practices proved to be successful but the environment had changed markedly, organizational theory would predict a success trap, or competency trap. Such a snare occurs “when favorable performance with an inferior procedure leads an organization to accumulate more experience with it,” instead of coming up with an alternative superior procedure, thus creating “maladaptive specialization.”²³ The Pentagon, however, seemingly did not step into a success trap in Iraq, as organizational theory would have predicted.

Third, the new strategy of embedding conflicted with a hostile military culture. The “experiment in openness,” as the Washington Post put it, ran “against the grain of three decades of mutual suspicion that often left journalists on the sidelines during US military operations.”²⁴ Vietnam created a whole generation of “embittered officers” who “despised” the press, in the words of Henry Gole, an instructor at the Army War College in the 1980s. He wrote about the attitude toward the press of the young commanders after they returned home from Vietnam. “They reserved a special venomous attitude for ‘the media,’ a term more sneered than spoken.”²⁵ Many of those embittered officers were in senior positions in Operation Iraqi Freedom. The implementation of the embedded media program, however, required broad support within the military and the willingness to trust journalists on operational-security-relevant information. It could not have been forced upon senior and mid-level military leaders against their will. The Assistant Secretary of Defense for Public Affairs, the ASD/PA, traditionally a civilian official with a background in journalism rather than a career in the armed services, has no authority to pass orders down the formal chain-of-command. Sitting in a Washingtonian office, the spokesperson tends to be perceived by soldiers as detached from the realities of war. If a civilian assistant secretary recommends a risky and innovative public affairs policy, this by no means implies that the generals and colonels on the battlefield will follow – even if the policy had the explicit support of the Secretary of Defense. Military culture and the commanding officers, the majors, captains, and lieutenant colonels who actually implement policy, must be supportive of such an innovation if it is to work. Cultural support is particularly essential when an innovation is not based primarily on new technological equipment, like a new tank or targeting system, but exclusively on new mental equipment, like a new type of informal After Action Review or a new approach toward dealing with the press. One of the most critical components of the embedded media program was a change of the military mindset, which meant that a generally accepted and culturally robust bias against the media needed to be overcome. Those three reasons – the high risk the military was taking, the deviation from the successful policies of past, and the seemingly hostile but all-important military culture – make it appear puzzling that the Pentagon would and could successfully embed reporters in the Iraq War.

To narrow the shutter and to increase the sharpness of the emerging picture, it needs to be clear what this study is not about: it is not about journalism, and it is not about politics. Much has been said about the journalistic quality of the Iraq War’s coverage. Several media outlets, most prominently the New York Times, after re-examining and reflecting on their reportage during the conflict’s controversial prelude, regretted their lack of criticism during the build-up to war as well as during the invasion phase. Did journalists come too close to their official sources, both in Washington and in the desert of Iraq? Has the quality of the war coverage increased or decreased as a result of embedding? Were the reporters co-opted? Those are much debate...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Preface
• 1 Introduction
• Part I: The military as a learning organization
• Part II: The history of media operations
• Part III: A case study of strategic innovation
• Part IV: Discussion and outlook
• Appendix
• Notes
• Select bibliography