The Media and GI Joe

How the press gets the military wrong -- and why it matters.

Chris Bray from the February 2002 issue

(Page 5 of 5)

I bring a prop to the conversations. A story in the September 15 New York Times advances what seems to me like a very dubious premise, and I read a few sentences over the phone to the first cadet. I'm reading sentences about what these future military officers purportedly expected from the world, pre-September 11, and I'm reading them so the cadets can say out loud how silly this all is. Most cadets here, the story says, were aware only of the likelihood that they were "preparing for careers as peacemakers or peacekeepers." And then "all of that changed on Tuesday morning," with the attacks on New York and Washington. My first question is meant to be a big hanging softball, in the style of reporters who've already decided what the story is: You didn't really believe that there could never be another war in your lifetime, now, did you?

But I never get a chance to ask. As I'm reading these sentences asserting that the Army's next generation of officers were unprepared for war, unprepared for terrorism, and expecting only a gentle world of light-policing duties in the Balkan hill country, the cadet begins to agree. "Yes, sir," he says. "That is my perspective, correct."

But he was aware that war was still possible, he adds, and that he's willing to fight. Next year, when he chooses his branch, he'll be putting in for field artillery. He's a big fan of the Paladin, a heavy self-propelled artillery piece that fairly screams of the need to stop the Soviets in the Fulda Gap.

"Field artillery is the big guns, the king of battle," he says. And that it is. Just don't ask in which century.

Another cadet answers my questions with more questions: What do we do now? Who do you go after? What happens with our Arab allies? A third agrees that domestic terrorism "didn't really seem like a threat."

"I'm not quite sure if we have classes that focus on terrorism," she says. "I'm a history major, so...."

And so there's an extraordinary disconnect, somewhere within the culture of the military, in which the leading-edge ideas contained in all of those reports are getting to the really sharp colonels, the really smart analysts, and no one else. Which is, in its way, not that surprising. Very large organizations frequently have trouble moving ideas through every internal subculture, and the military -- especially when it won its last war -- has a deep natural conservatism of habit. But there are supposed to be catalysts in society that move recalcitrant organizations forward by exposing information, by pushing reality and forcing hard questions to the front. Absent that kind of informed and aggressive questioning, the whole thing reverts to its natural state. Bodies at rest tend to stay at rest, unless acted upon by an outside force.

I mention to John Arquilla a speech I once heard. The retired Army General Barry McCaffrey -- the former drug czar -- was speaking. If some really smart person in the Army gets a really great idea, he said, and it makes all the sense in the world -- well, then, you'll see it in your battalions in 15 years. Arquilla isn't sure McCaffrey got the number right.

"I'd say 20," he says. "Because change is generational."

As domestic terror attacks threaten to become "common, not rare," and one of the primary institutions charged with defending against those attacks undergoes a glacial revolution in the way it does business, we're stuck wondering how to monitor as well as make demands upon that shifting mechanism of protection. What counts? What do we watch for? The persistent problem carries over from the innocent days before we remembered the urgency of the questions.

Some journalists have bothered to dig deeper, and it's worth noting what the last few years have been like for them. In the July/August 2001 issue of the American Journalism Review, writer Lucinda Fleeson discussed the frustrations of a reporter at the Scripps Howard newspaper chain who covered the U.S. military. Before Sept. 11, reporter Lisa Hoffman was already writing stories about the growing significance of things like "cyberwar" and attacks on non-military infrastructure. In the U.S. campaign against Serbia, she wrote, Pentagon planners looked for ways to disrupt Serb computer and telephone networks. But most Scripps Howard newspapers gave Lisa Hoffman's stories on the new face of war little or no play. Hoffman's boss, Scripps Howard Editor and General Manager Peter Copeland, had an explanation. "It's just that they're not committing news anymore at the Pentagon," he said.

"To create the perfect killing machine," the conservative columnist David Horowitz wrote in June, arguing with remarkable logic against allowing gays to serve, "the military works hard to drain recruits of their individuality and their self-interested desires in order to make them think like cogs in a machine. An essential part of the military mind is that members don't think for themselves but do as they are told."

Is there anyone left who thinks that what we most need are troops who consider it a hallmark of discipline that they "don't think"? For so many of the people who write about the military, wars, soldiers, and serving your country are vague concepts -- but that's no reason not to talk about them.