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More recently, 1991’s Operation Desert
Storm demonstrated a successful
operational application of Napoleonic
tactics by way of continuous senior
leader engagement with the mass media.
During that short conflict, Gen. Norman
Schwarzkopf successfully executed
a feint against the Iraqi Republican
Guard by inviting the media to cover and
publicise amphibious assault rehearsals.
The result was a massive multinational
cross-border flanking manoeuvre that
achieved surprise and encountered
only nominal resistance as the enemy’s
attention was focused on the Kuwaiti
shoreline. 8 However, in the same vein
as the American Revolution, this effort
by senior military leaders was clearly
a military deception operation; the role
of Public Affairs in its execution served
merely as a conduit.
These more favourable examples
notwithstanding, they are overshadowed
by a lengthy history of military leaders
approaching the mass media with,
at best, a lackadaisical attitude to, at
worst, downright hostility. To be sure,
Union Gen. William Tecumseh Sherman,
infamous for his scorched earth
tactics during the American Civil War,
considered journalists as little more than
spies and went so far as to symbolically
court-martial one following the Battle
of Vicksburg. 9 So deep-seated was
Sherman’s hatred for the mass media
that he supposedly remarked following
an erroneous report of several journalists
being killed by Confederate artillery fire,
“Good! Now we’ll have dispatches from
Hell before breakfast.” 10 To Sherman’s
defence, though, his issues with the
mass media primarily stemmed from
what today’s military leaders would
rightly consider violations of operational
security. 11 Nevertheless, his antagonistic
interactions with journalists garnered him
rebukes and slights from nearly every
quarter, to include an admonishment by
his own wife as well as his decisive 1864
sacking of Atlanta and subsequent ‘March
to the Sea’ going largely unreported in
Northern papers. 12 13
September 11, 2001 terror attacks,
multinational combat operations led by
the US and her allies in Afghanistan and
Iraq provided senior military leaders and
their Public Affairs staffs the opportunity
to
implement
necessary
course
corrections in the wake of the Persian
Gulf War. Most notable was the military’s
expansion of, and loosening grip on, the
media embed programme. Not since
the Second World War had the military
granted the mass media such ease of
access to frontline troops and combat
operations. Media agendas, slants
and story framing notwithstanding, the
media embed programme in these two
theatres of operations was a resounding
success. 17 18
Gen. William Tecumseh Sherman, infamous for his
brutal slash-and-burn tactics during the American
Civil War, loathed the media and paid for it off the
battlefield.
Sherman’s approach to the mass media
represents a misunderstanding of the
nature of news to the extreme, but his
serves as a salient example of leader
cognition that has managed to perpetuate
itself, to a lesser degree of course, and
plague generations of military leaders
since. This is not simply conjecture or
a statement tied solely to anecdotal
experience of the author. Rather, it is
a verifiable institutional problem that
affects not only the US Department of
Defense, but our allies as well. 14
From a US perspective there was cause
for hope in the immediate years prior to
the post-9/11 era that military leaders
were beginning to grasp the importance
of considering the mass media in their
operational plans. 15 This was due in large
part to bitter complaints and legal action
by the press following the Persian Gulf
War, which led senior military leaders
to reconsider the use of heavy-handed
tactics in accommodating the media
during operations. 16 As a result of the
By most accounts the media embed programme
conducted during post-9/11 combat operations in
Afghanistan and Iraq were successful in repairing
damage done to military-media relations during
Operation Desert Shield/Storm.
But along the way the progress made
during the first half of the post-9/11
conflicts seemingly began to slow.
Perhaps the way the mass media covered
the Global War on Terror contributed,
such as the nightly broadcast reminders
of the American death toll (which
seemingly ceased once George W
Bush relinquished the presidency) and
favourable coverage of anti-war protests
led by Cindy Sheehan. Whatever the
reason, the historic misunderstanding
of the nature of news by military leaders
and how they approached media
relations began to surface yet again
and it played out in the news. 19 20 Not
8 Wyatt Olson, “’Left Hook’ Deception Hastened War’s End,” Stars and Stripes, 2016, https://www.stripes.com/news/special-reports/the-gulf-war-25-year-anniversary/deception.
9 James Barron, “Sherman Letters Show Civil War General Regarded Reporters as ‘Spies’,” The New York Times, June 21, 1987, https://www.nytimes.com/1987/06/21/us/sherman-letters-
show-civil-war-general-regarded-reporters-as-spies.html.
10 Mark Kelton, “Dispatches from Hell Before Breakfast,” The Cipher Brief, August 10, 2017, https://www.nytimes.com/1987/06/21/us/sherman-letters-show-civil-war-general-regarded-reporters-
as-spies.html.
11 Peter Andrews, “The Media and the Military,” American Heritage 42, no. 4 (July/August 1991): https://www.americanheritage.com/content/media-and-military.
12 Brooks Simpson and Jean Berlin, ed., Sherman’s Civil War: Selected Correspondence of William T. Sherman, 1860-1865 (Chapel Hill, NC: University of North Carolina Press, 1999), 394.
13 Johanna Neuman, Lights, Camera, War (New York: St Martin’s Press, 1996), 34.
14 Stephen Badsey, “In the Public’s Eye: The British Army and Military-Media Relations,” The Royal United Services Institute, September 21, 2009, https://rusi.org/commentary/publics-eye-
british-army-and-military-media-relations.
15 Dennis Reimer, “Army-Media Relations: An Update,” in Soldiers are our Credentials: The Collected Works of the Thirty-Third Chief of Staff United States Army, ed. James Carafano
(Washington: US Army Center of Military History, 2000), 243-244.
16 Stefanie Le, “The Relationship between the Media and the Military: Does Media Access to International Conflicts Affect Public Opinion and Foreign Policy?” (MLA thesis, Harvard University,
2016), 35-58.
17 Thom Shanker and Mark Hertling, “The Military-Media Relationship: A Dysfunctional Marriage?,” Military Review 89, no. 5 (September-October 2009): 4.
18 Deborah Haynes, “Reporting from the Front: A Foreign Correspondent’s Perspective,” The RUSI Journal 157, no. 3 (June 2012): 40-44.
19 Snyder, “Seeing through the Conflict,” 18.
20 Stars and Stripes, “Army bars Stars and Stripes reporter from covering 1st Cav unit in Mosul,” Stars and Stripes, June 24, 2009, https://www.stripes.com/news/army-bars-stars-and-stripes-
reporter-from-covering-1st-cav-unit-in-mosul-1.92692.
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