From: Jonathan Davis (jonathan@limbicnutrition.com)
Date: Mon May 17 2004 - 18:12:13 MDT
Some of you might find this interesting. Try to set aside this writers
ideological slant and enjoy his insightful analysis of modern "home
front" fighting.
Regards
Jonathan
________________________________
From: wretchard
Posted At: 17 May 2004 22:57
Posted To: Belmont Club
Conversation: News Coverage as a Weapon Historian John Terrain...
Subject: News Coverage as a Weapon Historian John Terrain...
http://belmontclub.blogspot.com/2004_05_01_belmontclub_archive.html#1084
80294741806978
News Coverage as a Weapon
Historian John Terraine
<http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/tg/detail/-/0283988282/002-1410050-94
12043?v=glance> notes that unit casualty rates during the Civil War
were close to those experienced by the British Army on the Somme. The
1/Newfoundland Regiment lost 84 % of its men on that fatal July 1, 1916.
But the 1st Texas Regiment lost 82.3% in Antietam and the 1st Minnesota
lost 82% at Gettysburg. Nor were these exceptional. "In the course of
the Civil War 115 regiments (63 Union and 52 Confederate) sustained
losses of more than 50 percent in a single engagement". Losses during
World War 2 were just as brutal. Although the average loss
<http://www.militaryhistoryonline.com/wwii/bombercommand/summer1942.aspx
> per individual mission was often under 5% for the pilots who flew in
the British Bomber Command, the fact that they flew 30 missions per tour
meant a crew had less than a 1 in 4 chance of completing it. Once you
signed on, there was a 75% statistical chance you wouldn't survive. Nor
were these estimates far from the truth. Almost sixty percent
<http://www.lancastermuseum.ca/commandlosses.html> of Bomber Command, a
total of 55,000 men, were killed. They had an easy time compared to
German U-boat crewmen <http://www.submarine-history.com/NOVAfour.htm> ,
who lost 630 men out of every thousand. Nations required a huge pool of
manpower and high birthrates to sustain losses on this scale. Russia
alone <http://ww2bodycount.netfirms.com/> suffered twenty million
deaths during World War 2. Even Yugoslavia, a country whose role in the
conflict is hardly remembered as central, lost 1.6 million killed.
Defeat in that conflict came to those whose armies were driven from the
field, whose cities were reduced to rubble and whose manpower resources
could no longer continue the struggle.
Viewed in this context, the American "defeat" in Iraq projected by the
press must be understood as being something wholly different from
anything that has gone before. The 800 odd US military deaths suffered
since the start of Operation Iraqi Freedom a year ago are less than the
number who died in the Slapton Sands D-Day training exercise in 1944.
The campaign in Iraq has hardly scratched American strength, which has
in fact grown more potent in operational terms over the intervening
period. Nor has it materially affected the US manpower pool or slowed
the American economy, which is actually growing several times faster
than France, which is not militarily engaged. The defeat being
advertised by the press is a wholly new phenomenon: one which leaves the
vanquished army untouched and the victor devastated; the economy of the
vanquished burgeoning and that of the victor in destitution; the
territory of the loser unoccupied and that of the winner garrisoned. It
is an inversion of all the traditional metrics of victory and defeat.
That the assertion is not instantly ludicrous is an indication of the
arrival of a new and potentially revolutionary form of political wafare.
It was during the Vietnam War that the Left first discovered the
potential war-winning ability of media coverage. The concept itself is
merely an extension of the blitzkrieg notion that the enemy command
structure, not his troop masses, are the true center of gravity on the
battlefield. During the campaign of 1940, Heinz Guderian's panzers
bypassed many French formations, leaving them unfought, knowing that if
their command structure were severed, the whole musclebound mass would
fall to the ground headless. What the Left gradually discovered during
the course of the Vietnam war was that Guderian had not been bold
enough. Guderian still felt it necessary to win on the battlefield. He
had not realized that it was possible to ignore the battlefield
altogether because it was the enemy political structure, not his
military capability, that was the true center of gravity of an entire
campaign. It was General Giap during the Vietnam War who first planned a
military operation entirely around its possible media effect. The Tet
offensive was a last desperate attempt to gain the upper hand in a war
he was losing <http://www.vietnam-war.info/battles/tet_offensive.php> .
The Communist forces had taken a series of military defeats. the
US/ARVN forces had pacified much of the south by the end of 1967 (222
out of 242 provinces). Operation Junction City (February-March 1967) and
other sweeps had seriously disrupted NLF activity in the south and
forced the COSVN into Cambodia.
At a July 1967 meeting the Communist Party leadership recognized
their failures and decided to re-orientate their operations to target
two key political weaknesses. Firstly, the deep gulf between the US
public and the US government over support for the war and its actual
progress. Secondly, the tensions existing between the US military and
their Vietnamese allies.
The leadership decided to concentrate on a few high profile
operations, that would take place in the public (and the US media) eye
rather than fighting the conflict away from major urban centres. This
would bolster Northern moral, possibly inspire uprisings in the South
and provide the impression, and hopefully the reality, that the US/ARVN
were not winning the war and it was likely to be a long time before they
did. The new policy also marked a victory for the 'hawks' over the
'doves' in the Communist Party leadership, in late 1967 around 200
senior officials were purged.
Although Giap failed in every military respect, he succeeded in
providing the press with the raw material necessary to alter the
dynamics of American domestic politics. While he could not alter
reality, the Giap could alter the perception of reality enough to give
anti-war politicians a winning hand which they played it to the hilt.
The NLF and the NVA lost around 35,000 men killed, 60,000
wounded and 6,000 POWs for no military success. The US and ARVN dead
totalled around 3,900 (1,100 US). But this was not the conflict as the
US public saw it. Without there being an active conspiracy the US media
reports were extremely damaging and shocked the American public and
politicians. Apparently the depth of the US reaction even surprised the
North Vietnamese leadership, as well as delighting them.
The emergence of the press and media as decisive implements of warfare
arose from changes in the nature of late twentieth century war itself.
If battlefield reality was paramount in earlier wars it was because
literally everyone was there. During the Civil War 15 percent of the
total white population took the field, a staggering 75% of military age
white males. During the Great War the major combatants put even higher
proportions of their men on the line. Even after World War 2 it was
still natural for children to ask, 'Daddy what did you do in the War?'
and expect an answer. Reality affected everybody. But beginning with the
Vietnam War and continuing into the current Iraqi campaign, the numbers
of those actually engaged on the battlefield as a proportion of the
population became increasingly small. Just how small is illustrated by
comparing a major battle in the Civil War, Gettysburg, which inflicted
over 50,000 casualties on a nation of 31.5 million to a "major" battle
in Iraq, Fallujah, in which 10 Marines died in the fighting itself, on a
population of 300 million. A war in which the watchers vastly
outnumbered the fighters was bound to be different from when the reverse
was true. A reality experienced by the few could be overridden by a
fantasy sold to the many. This exchange of proportions ensured that the
political and media dimensions of the late twentieth century American
wars dwarfed their military aspects.
But whereas General Giap was forced to rely on the Western media to
carry his message home, modern day Jihadis have decided to create their
own media outlets like Al Jazeera to shape public opinion. Moreover,
they have extended proven methods of intimidating the Western media,
described by CNN's Eason Jordan in his article in the New York Times
<http://www.nytimes.com/2003/04/11/opinion/11JORD.html> to a standard
operation of war
<http://www.belmontclub.blogspot.com/2004_04_01_belmontclub_archive.html
#108172305524979009> . This set up a clash between two forces, one
enjoying a preponderance in every area of military capability and skill
but failing to recognize news coverage as a strategic weapon; and
another whose military strategy was literally made for television.
The US discovered how expensive it was to be wholly outmatched in this
key combat system. Just how expensive was underscored by the media
coverage of the Abu Ghraib prisoner abuse incident in which newspapers
in the United States
<http://www.guardian.co.uk/Iraq/Story/0,2763,1216964,00.html> and
Britain <http://www.nypost.com/news/worldnews/20983.htm> published fake
abuse photographs on top of the genuine ones without a rapid rebuttal.
This blindness sprang not only from the tradition of keeping the
military apart from civilian activities, but also from a reluctance to
venture into areas protected by the First Amendment. It was nearly a
year after OIF before the US began halting steps to redress the balance
by establishing the Arabic Al Hurrah media outlet and creating a series
of local television stations under the Spirit of America
<http://www.spiritofamerica.net/> initiative.
Yet the extension of warfare into the area of media coverage is fraught
with great danger, in no small part because it subtly alters the
definition of where the battlefield lies and who an enemy combatant is.
One of the enduring strengths of Western democracy and of the US
Constitution in particular is the delineation between legitimate dissent
and enemy activity, a boundary which enables a democracy to continue
functioning, albeit in an impaired state, even in wartime. But the
changing balance between the political and military aspects of war means
that this line will begin to blur as military activities cross over into
the political. Already, the Pentagon is beginning to offer direct news
<http://www.wtnh.com/Global/story.asp?S=1675781> from Iraq. It has also
reorganized
<http://www.defenselink.mil/news/May2004/n05142004_200405146.html> its
command structure in Iraq to explicitly recognize the role of political
warfare.
WASHINGTON, May 14, 2004 - Two new military commands will stand
up in Iraq May 15, replacing the current coalition military
organization.
Multinational Corps Iraq and Multinational Force Iraq will
replace Combined Joint Task Force 7.
Coalition military spokesman Army Brig. Gen. Mark Kimmitt, at a
Baghdad news conference today, said the change addresses a concern that
a combined joint task force headquarters was not sufficient to handle
the military workload in Iraq efficiently.
"It's certainly more than a formality," he said. "It is trying
to get the proper command structure for the days, weeks and months
ahead."
Kimmitt explained that Multinational Corps Iraq will focus on
the tactical fight -- the day-to-day military operations and the
maneuvering of the six multinational divisions on the ground. Army Lt.
Gen. Thomas F. Metz will command the corps. Meanwhile, Multinational
Force Iraq will focus on more strategic aspects of the military presence
in Iraq, such as talking with sheiks and political leaders, and on
training, equipping and fielding Iraqi security forces.
The Left's very success at using the media as an arm in hyper-blitzkrieg
inevitably invited, indeed necessitated, a riposte, with far reaching
and probably regettable effects. One day Al Jazeera may be remembered in
the same manner as the Dreadnought: the first in a series of ugly
fusions between newly available technology and age-old malevolence; the
vanguard in a flotilla of lies.
Related...
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