New Media + Old Military = New Military
And New Military + Old Media = New Media, but I’ll get to that. First, Dave Dilegge at the superlative media-military battlespace known as Small Wars Journal has gathered some thoughts on the new media … this thing of ours … and how it is affecting the military’s lessons-learned process and reshaping the battlefield. He’s got some military and deep-think luminaries and a wide range of bloggers in there, who describe a dynamic new way of operating. It’s a great roundup.
I was distracted when Dave asked me to contribute a few weeks ago and didn’t. Sorry Dave. I don’t have anything insightful to offer on how the new media has affected military thinking and processes.
But I have some thoughts on what the new media-military nexus has offered civilians in time of war. As indicated by a couple of the blogger remarks in Dave’s roundup, the Internet has provided new, readily accessible avenues to understanding these wars, the strategy, problems of command and execution, the grunt-level fighting, the triumphs and frustrations, often just a few hours shy of real time. It has provided an unprecedented window into the thinking of our enemies and their supporters. It has given the civilian world a great bypass on the often superficial and inaccurate, sometimes biased and often delayed presentations of the old media. Throughout the surge period, thanks to sites like SWJ, it was possible to understand what the traditional scribblers weren’t bothering to explain in anything but the most simplistic and dismissive terms. How it worked. And thanks to new newsmen like Michael Yon, how it was working, when the mainstream was mainly back in Baghdad enclaves sneering at press releases.
No one who is truly interested in these matters has an excuse any more for being a complete ignoramus, or for being led around by the nose by politicians, military leaders or the press.
I was briefly part of the downrange end of that process a long time ago, when this thing was morphing, and the only people posting from the midst of frontline units and command elements were embedded reporters. In addition to filing reports to the Boston Herald, I posted at the Poynter Institute’s website. The military knew there would be problems, that bad things could happen. But the military had faith and cut us lose in line units without escorts, virtually no holds barred except the practical concerns of operational security and identification of the dead.
Counterintuitively maybe, the top Pentagon brass was ahead of the curve its young officers have seized and are now redefining. It was a new level of immediacy to war, and a bold effort by the military to give the media a chance to see and understand from a vantage point of an unprecedented intimacy. It worked.
One quick example from my own experience. The unit I was attached to fired on the Hotel Palestine on April 8, 2003, killing two newsmen, Jose Couso and Taras Protsyuk, while in the process of repelling a significant, concerted Republican Guard and fedayeen counterattack in downtown Baghdad. Sgt. Gibson’s tank round was a shot that rang around the world, and the results were quickly portrayed as a war crime. I knew the men who were involved, had seen them in combat and was very familiar with the high level of caution and compassion they maintained in the midst of heavy, aggressive combat. And I was present that morning, within a couple hundred feet of Gibson’s tank when it happened. It may have been the end of my career as a traditional reporter and the real beginning of my new media career, because as they faced condemnation, investigations and ultimately murder indictments in a Spanish court, only recently dropped, I publicly advocated for them all over the new media.
Traditional news reporters aren’t supposed to do that kind of thing. But you don’t go that far in, learn the things immediate access and shared hazards give you, and not come out with a point of view. Maybe the media traditionalists who denounced the embedding program from the start were right to resent and fear this program. It posed a major threat to their stand-off, hit-and-run way of doing business. I look at people like Dexter Filkins, the New York Times reporter who has been in heavy combat with Americans, as well as in among Iraqis of all stripes on the most intimate terms that circumstances afforded; and Robert Kaplan, who has extensively embedded around the world, in hot, lukewarm and cold war zones, and I see both compassion and deep levels of understanding fostered by these close connections, and a willingness to speak out, if more moderately than I as a conservative tabloid/new media hybrid have been inclined to do.
The embedding initiative gave our mainstream media a larger cadre of reporters who, whatever their political views, understood the military better and cared deeply about what soldiers were doing and being asked to do. They had existed before, in the likes of Joe Galloway and Ernie Pyle and others. But the Iraq invasion embedding program may be credited in significant part with cracking open the portal between the military and the civilian worlds, giving active-duty soldiers a level of comfort with public expression that they have since heavily exploited. While there were missteps by the military in the management of the embed program, the biggest misstep was the media’s failure to fully exploit that opportunity as time went on. Probably for a lot of reasons, but money being a major one. So new media newsmen like Yon, Bill Roggio and Bill Ardolino, Michael Totten and others stepped in.
One thing apart from thinking and process I want to call attention to is the poetry, or lyric contemplation and narrative of war. More precisely, real-time literary memoir that was heavily evocative, that took you there and made you look at beautiful and terrible things. I’d like to thank the Internet for bringing us sites like A Day In Iraq and Acute Politics, by frontline soldiers who in their time, 2005 and 2007, were the best American combat writers on the ground in Iraq. Appreciations here and here. A little Filkins and Kaplan here, by the way.
Posted by Jules Crittenden at 9:49 am on Tuesday, March 3, 2009
3 Responses to “New Media + Old Military = New Military”
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March 3rd, 2009 at 10:19 am
[...] The legacy media spoke in terms of “they” and “them,” and kept a tepid moral equanimity between those trying to destroy a country, and those trying to build one. Deployed milbloggers put the “I” in the tale. And that has made all the difference. [...]
March 3rd, 2009 at 1:25 pm
Very well said, Jules.
March 4th, 2009 at 4:35 am
Is it just the immediacy of the media that is new? Does that make the difference? As you note there have been embeds before.
Interesting.