When we go in this time, have the Iraqi's clear the media out.
HISTORY MUST NOT REPEAT ITSELF
cori dauber
It's clear to everyone that we're building to a climactic face-off in Fallujah. Forces are building up, pressure is building, airstrikes continue, and civilians are leaving. Everyone seems to understand that when the Marines were ordered to pull back last April, a sanctuary was created in that city that has permitted both the insurgents and the terrorists to launch attacks throughout the country.
Yet despite the understanding that the pull back in April was a disaster, and even though the Times today acknowledges that most civilians have left the city (something I've seen mentioned in every report lately) look at the preemptive caution the military is already taking with the press:
Allied warplanes including Navy FA-18's and Air Force F-16's and F-15E's would conduct air strikes against insurgent safe houses, weapons caches and other leadership targets that have been carefully analyzed for possible damage to civilian infrastructure.
The bombing would be an intensified version of the nearly nightly strikes the Americans have conducted in Falluja for the past two months but would not be a huge barrage, the commanders say.
The weapons of choice have been laser-guided and satellite-guided 500-pound bombs, which are considered better able to limit the risk of civilian casualties than 1,000-pound and 2,000-pound bombs.
What civilian casualties? The civilians aren't there anymore. That's how spooked the military is of the press coverage, despite the fact (or maybe because of it) that it wasn't correct last time.)
But no one's going to accuse this generation of military of "destroying the town to save it."
Military engineers and civil affairs specialists would follow quickly behind the main combat force, with the job of assessing how to restore services like water, sanitation and electricity, and of assigning contractors or military experts to the task.
Tell me again how Ralph Peters was wrong, that the media wasn't a key factor on the battlefield last April, perhaps the key factor, when he said:
The Marines in Fallujah weren't beaten by the terrorists and insurgents, who were being eliminated effectively and accurately. They were beaten by al-Jazeera. By lies.
Get used to it.
This is the new reality of combat. Not only in Iraq. But in every broken country, plague pit and terrorist refuge to which our troops will have to go in the future. And we can't change it. So we had better roll up our camouflage sleeves and deal with it.
The media is often referred to off-handedly as a strategic factor. But we still don't fully appreciate its fatal power. Conditioned by the relative objectivity and ultimate respect for facts of the U.S. media, we fail to understand that, even in Europe, the media has become little more than a tool of propaganda.
That propaganda is increasingly, viciously, mindlessly anti-American. When our forces engage in tactical combat, dishonest media reporting immediately creates drag on the chain of command all the way up to the president.
Real atrocities aren't required. Everything American soldiers do is portrayed as an atrocity. World opinion is outraged, no matter how judiciously we fight.
With each passing day — sometimes with each hour — the pressure builds on our government to halt combat operations, to offer the enemy a pause, to negotiate . . . in essence, to give up.
We saw it in Fallujah, where slow-paced tactical success led only to cease-fires that comforted the enemy and gave the global media time to pound us even harder. Those cease-fires were worrisomely reminiscent of the bombing halts during the Vietnam War — except that everything happens faster
now.
The only thing he's wrong about, it seems to me, is that this is purely about anti-American propaganda on a global scale. Surely that's a factor. But it was the domestic media that was relentlessly reporting the figure of 600 civilians killed, not because they're "anti-American" but because the claim was made, so to them, even though it was essentially enemy propaganda, it had to be reported as a "claim," with equal demand on our attention to what was being said by American military officers. Sure, they also reported the fact that the Americans were questioning those numbers -- sometimes. And those qualifiers gradually fell away from many reports. It just seemed so plausible. War kills, doesn't it?
Peters again:
The result was a disintegraton of our will — first from decisive commitment to worsening hestitation, then to a "compromise" that returned Sunni-Arab Ba'athist officers to power. That deal not only horrifed Iraq's Kurds and Shi'a Arabs, it inspired expanded attacks by Muqtada al-Sadr's Shi'a thugs hoping to rival the success of the Sunni-Arab murderers in Fallujah.
We could have won militarily. Instead, we surrendered politically and called it a success. Our enemies won the information war. We literally didn't know what hit us.
The implication for tactical combat — war at the bayonet level — is clear: We must direct our doctrine, training, equipment, organization and plans toward winning low-level fights much faster. Before the global media can do what enemy forces cannot do and stop us short. We can still win the big campaigns. But we're apt to lose thereafter, in the dirty end-game fights.
We have to speed the kill.
For two decades, our military has concentrated on deploying forces swiftly around the world, as well as on fighting fast-paced conventional wars — with the positive results we saw during Operation Iraqi Freedom. But at the infantry level, we've lagged behind — despite the unrivaled quality of our troops.
We've concentrated on critical soldier skills, but ignored the emerging requirements of battle. We've worked on almost everything except accelerating urban combat — because increasing the pace is dangerous and very hard to do.
Now we have no choice. We must learn to strike much faster at the ground-truth level, to accomplish the tough tactical missions at speeds an order of magnitude faster than in past conflicts. If we can't win the Fallujahs of the future swiftly, we will lose them.
Our military must rise to its responsibility to reduce the pressure on the National Command Authority — in essence, the president — by rapidly and effectively executing orders to root out enemy resistance or nests of terrorists.
His conclusion:
To do so, we must develop the capabilities to fight within the "media cycle," before journalists sympathetic to terrorists and murderers can twist the facts and portray us as the villains. Before the combat encounter is politicized globally. Before allied leaders panic. And before such reporting exacerbates bureaucratic rivalries within our own system.
Time is the new enemy
That's a soldier's conclusion. I'm thinking through ways the military can work on the way it interacts with the media differently. But one thing the military can do is realize that sometimes it's just better to take the pain of ripping off the bandaid. Taking down the insurgents in Fallujah in April would have meant several days of bad press -- after which there would have been at least the chance to counter those stories when the press was able to go into Fallujah and see that it wasn't entirely a pile of smoking rubble. Now, granted, the chance that they would actually have said that, or interviewed citizens from the city glad to be rid of the terrorists in their midst was low.
But the negative press would have been over and done with. Instead the insurgents and terrorists have been able to drag this out for months, killing more and more innocents, and providing the press a bonanza.
So, Peters solution may not always be possible. But his analysis remains critical.
Lets hope that the things the Marines are saying to reporters today are reflective of "softening the battlefield" (to coin a metaphor) with the press, not suggestive that a lesson hasn't been learned. |
