Covering the Military

If one reads this list of the wars that you've covered, and the timing of your moving to this work, it seems there have been a lot of small conflicts and a lot of changes in the military. How has the beat changed since you [first] had that beat? How would you help us understand that?

The beat's changed in a couple of ways. One, when I first started, the military tried to keep the media at arm's length when it came to the war, and this was a reflection of the tensions between the media and the military in the Vietnam War. So, for example, take the first Gulf War. There was a completely dysfunctional pool system, but basically the journalists were kept outside looking in.

In the current day, they have a practice called embedding where you live among the forces. It's the only way to do it -- it's not the only way to do it, but it's an important way to do it. It's really the old model. It goes back to the way it was done in Vietnam, and in World War II, even. That's a huge difference, because to cover a war from within a U.S. military unit, and to experience what the troops and the officers experience, and to have those sorts of insights gives you a much deeper understanding of the situation than if you're simply not with the forces, then kind of sweep in afterwards and try to reconstruct what happened.

There is a perception, especially in a place like Berkeley, that in fact, embedding leads to a compromising of the journalism integrity. So, this is another view that you're expressing here, and it's an important one. You get a feel for what's happening and you're able to talk to soldiers at all levels to understand what's happening.

There's a risk in journalism regardless of what you cover. If you cover the White House, there's a risk that you'll become overly dependent on your sources and fear alienating them. You have to balance this risk in your own work to maintain your own credibility. Embedding doesn't change that. I don't know of any examples where someone has been kicked out because they wrote something somebody didn't like. In fact, I could cite a number of examples where embedded correspondents wrote things that were not particularly flattering to the unit they were with. But in the Iraq war there wasn't much choice. There were people who went in unilaterally, and after being shot at a few times by the Fedayeen or the Iraqi military, they began to cling to the American forces on the march up to Baghdad. So, while they weren't " legally" embedded, they were de facto embedded.

I do think it gives you an understanding of what the soldiers are doing. I don't know how to cover something without covering it. So, I don't understand the argument for not taking advantage of the opportunity to be in the battle when you want to write about the battle.

What, in other areas of Pentagon information strategy, has been the change over this period that you've been covering war? Has the Pentagon become more aggressive in trying to influence the perception of the way the war is perceived? What is your view of that, aside from the question of embedding journalists?

The Defense Department is run by a civilian defense secretary, Secretary Rumsfeld, and I suppose from their perspective they make efforts to influence public perceptions. They have press conferences, which Secretary Rumsfeld has to do himself to an extent. I haven't seen a defense secretary spend so much time behind the podium, giving his own briefings, but he seems to enjoy doing it. But I don't think it's all that effective.

The view from the field, by the way, is often at odds with the view at the Pentagon. For example, in the Cobra II book I write about the tensions between the home office, so to speak, and the field as to what's required by way of troops. So, when reporters were embedded in the field, they didn't necessarily parrot the line coming out of the Pentagon. In fact, it was a lot different. The reporters in the field began writing about, hey, maybe there're not enough troops, hey, there's a different kind of enemy out here than they've been telling us back at the Defense Department. If the goal by the Defense Department was to manipulate these reporters, I don't think it succeeded.

There's been an interesting evolution during this period of this relationship between military commanders and the civilian leaders in the Pentagon. It becomes very stark, and we'll talk about that in a minute, in the current Iraq war. You describe it quite well in the book Cobra II. But how has that changed? Has there always been this degree of tension between the commanders in the field and the leadership of the Pentagon?

No. I would say that in the Clinton administration, for better or for worse, they essentially deferred to the military. It wasn't always the right thing to do, but that they were much more willing to accept the input from the military instead of dictate from on high.

A certain amount of tension is understandable. We're supposed to have a civilian oversight, and I don't want to exaggerate the tensions at this point in time. But when Secretary Rumsfeld came to the Pentagon, he had a very dim view of the U.S. Army leadership, he didn't think much of it. He thought the Army had too much of a Cold War focus. He wasn't that interested in the view of the Joint Chiefs of Staff that he inherited; he thought they were Clinton generals and admirals, and they were unable to persuade him that there were no such thing as Clinton generals and admirals, they were just generals and admirals. So, those tensions were rife in the first year at the Pentagon. In fact, before the Iraq war, and really before 9/11, there was even some speculation that Rumsfeld might leave the Pentagon.

You mentioned earlier the Vietnam War and the lessons of that war. That has influenced the way the military has changed and the way it's perceived itself. Talk a little about that, because the lessons learned from that war and the way they were implanted affected the way the military changed after the end of the war, and how it saw the world when the Soviet empire collapsed.

It certainly had a profound influence, especially on people like Colin Powell, who felt that Vietnam was a case in which the military was left holding the bag. I think the ways it affected the military were in some ways very positive. It led to the establishment of a professional military, which has been a success: high-quality force, well trained and using some very high-tech systems. That's been a plus.

It led though, also, to a restructuring of the armed forces. For example, a lot of the essential capabilities of the military were put by design in the Reserve component, and that was done by the military after Vietnam, because President Johnson was reluctant to call up the reserves. The theory was that if we ever go to war again, the president's going to have to call up the reserves because he's not going to be able to fight the war without them, and therefore we'll have the country behind us. It actually backfired a little bit in this war, because the reserves and the National Guard have been run ragged, because they provide a lot of the civil affairs, the essential logistical support that's needed for the war.

It also led on the part of people like Colin Powell to a view that we have to have overwhelming force, we've got to go in with a clear exit strategy, and we'll go in with, you know, "one's good, three's better." And we're not going to go in until we know how we get out. That was pretty much the doctrine that persisted in the first Bush administration and into the Clinton administration.

When Rumsfeld came in, he tried to introduce a new approach which had some merit to it, which he called transformation. But he thought that the military had become a little too enamored of "big is beautiful," and, "we can't do anything unless we send half the army there and we know exactly how we're getting out." So he began pushing for an approach where, a little simplistically, we'd have a leaner and meaner force, because the Powell doctrine was a little bit immobilizing at times. There are cases where you do want to use force, that you don't want to send six divisions and take six months to get ready. Well, Rumsfeld was a little bit of an over-reaction to it.

To give Rumsfeld his due, before we do the other side of that equation, he, I guess, had a sense that the military was prepared to fight the Cold War, or the Soviet army. In the wake of the end of the Cold War, changes had not been made to take into account what the new technology offered in the way of possibilities for fighting war.

I think changes were made, and I actually think all of the new technology that's been fielded in the current war was all designed and programmed prior to Rumsfeld taking over. He's just inherited these systems, because the military was already going that way. But he did think that the military was not joined enough, meaning it wasn't integrated enough among the different services. When they carried out operations, he particularly thought the Army was sort of stodgy and a little ponderous and too wedded to heavy forces, and that was the attitude he had coming in. The Pentagon was overdue for a little shaking up, at least a little intelligent shaking up.

Before we get into what the goals were of the administration in this war, and why they went awry (or at least their implementation did not succeed in the way they anticipated), what impact do you see 9/11 having on all of this? There was clearly a learning curve during the period that you were covering, by the military, by the incumbent administration, and then 9/11 hit. Did that shake up the deck of cards in making it politically feasible to take new directions?

Well, 9/11 led to the war in Iraq, rightly or wrongly. Without 9/11 there would've been no war in Iraq. When the Bush administration entered office they had an attitude on Iraq and they felt it was a problem that needed to be tended to. In fact, in a meeting that then President-Elect Bush had with President Clinton they discussed their priorities, and President Clinton said his priority was Middle East peace and dealing with North Korea, and dealing with al Qaeda, and Iraq was at the bottom. And then President Clinton said, "Well, for you," meaning President-Elect Bush, "I think your priorities are missile defense and Iraq," and he was right. But that said, they were not determined to invade Iraq.

I've looked at the meetings and discussions that were held over the summer of 2001 and I would say absent 9/11, probably the most the U.S. would have done would have been to try to sponsor some sort of Shia rebellion in the south, maybe arm them and provide air cover -- the Wolfowitz plan, basically. Certainly, there really wasn't the political support for a major invasion with ground forces, the administration wasn't focused on that. It was 9/11 that provided the political window of opportunity for the administration to pursue that agenda.

Next page: The Iraq War: Planning