In a counterinsurgency, the media battlespace is critical. When it comes to mustering public opinion, rallying support, and forcing opponents to shift tactics and timetables to better suit the home team, our terrorist enemies are destroying us. Al Qaeda's media arm is called al Sahab: the cloud. It feels more like a hurricane. While our enemies have "journalists" crawling all over battlefields to chronicle their successes and our failures, we have an "embed" media system that is so ineptly managed that earlier this fall there were only 9 reporters embedded with 150,000 American troops in Iraq....Censoring Iraq, Michael Yon, National Review Online, 10/30/2006
Robert Kaplan in Imperial Grunts, On the Ground with the American Military, Vintage, 2006, recorded an interesting conversation in Afghanistan. A Special Forces commander complained at length about how successful his operation had been in his area of command until "Big Army" showed up. The meaning of Big Army hasn't changed much. Whether in the recollections of raconteur Jean Shepherd or in the memories of almost every veteran, Big Army means "hurry up and wait," a bureaucratic tangle whose battlegrounds don't range from Normandy to Iraq, but from Repple-Depple to the current malaise in the Pentagon. What Kaplan described was an organization more devoted to paperwork and theoretical formations than to action in country. Apparently, according to Yon's disturbing article, this has not changed for the better. If no one is reporting your successes, the rest of the world may often assume that you haven't had any.
Luther
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