Is This Any Way to Win a War?

Lieutenant Colonel Robert L. Bateman is an infantryman, historian and prolific writer.

Bateman was a military fellow at the Center for Strategic and International Studies (CSIS) and has taught military history at the U.S. Military Academy. He is currently stationed in Washington, D.C. Bateman has authored two books: "Digital War, A View from the Front Lines" [1] (Presidio: 1999) and "No Gun Ri, A Military History of the Korean War Incident" [2] (Stackpole, 2002). He's also contributed to or co-authored seven more.

The opinions Bateman expresses in his columns are his own and do not reflect those of the U.S. Government or the Armed Forces.

MISSION STATEMENT: Public Affairs fulfills the Army’s obligation to keep the American people and the Army informed, and helps to establish the conditions that lead to confidence in America’s Army and its readiness to conduct operations in peacetime, conflict and war.

Like any large institution, the United States Army deals with the American public largely through the medium of the press. The interface for the majority of contact between individual members of the military and the members of the press is the Public Affairs Office. In my acronym-crazed culture, we call them “PAOs” (meaning, alternately, both the offices and the officers who work in them.) Unlike most large institutions in American life, however, our PAOs are not supposed to be flacks. That is to say, they are not supposed to spin, conceal, manipulate or distort.

Now just as I have been careful to point out my general affection for both journalists and journalism, I must now assert that by and large I find PAOs to be dedicated, hardworking, intellectually honest and morally straight shooters. (The fact that some are also danged fine shots with an assault rifle is neither here nor there.) That being said, what follows is a pretty harsh critique of the ways in which my fellow Army officers are screwing up by the numbers. They are not, as their mission statement demands, keeping the “American people and the Army informed,” and they could be doing a lot more “to establish the conditions that lead to confidence in America’s Army.” In some cases, their actions (or lack of actions) have done pretty much the opposite.

A story last week set me off on this topic. Written by longtime defense correspondent David Wood, now with the Baltimore Sun, the story explains how the Army is making it excessively difficult for reporters (to say nothing of the general public) to see and read the narratives of awards for battlefield heroism. [3] We are not talking about little things here. Wood focuses on the amazing fact that among other things, the Army has blocked reporters and the general public from access to the “narratives” used for award of the Silver Star medal.

The Silver Star is two steps down from the Medal of Honor. The men (and now one woman) who earn these have done something profound, in combat, at great risk to their own lives. One does not earn this medal for lowering the venereal disease rate in your unit or for having the most sparkling barracks floors. One can earn the Silver Star only in combat for conspicuous gallantry against the enemy. This is not a low bar. This is not a small thing. This is why I am angry with a part of my own Army.

Wood explains: “But to date, Army lawyers and bureaucrats have blocked requests by The Sun and others to open these war stories to the public. They cite, among other reasons, potential threats to soldiers’ privacy and safety.”

Hello? What the hell is going on here? The U.S. Army is not above making mistakes, particularly with awards and in some cases with accounts of heroism. Granted. The Lynch and Tillman cases are both examples where either the PAO was perhaps unnecessarily enthusiastic/credulous (Lynch) or where the PAOs themselves were deceived by their brother officers (Tillman). But that does not justify, or explain, why the Army is deliberately shooting itself in the foot in this way. Privacy? Safety? If I commit a misdeed, the Army would have to explain who I am and what I did. How do we twist things around to the point where we publish the names of miscreants and conceal the actions of heroes?

The Army’s chief of public affairs has not helped. Wood quotes him, too: “As a soldier in an Army at war and an American citizen, I know we have an obligation to tell these stories,” Maj. Gen. Anthony Cucolo, an infantry officer who heads Army public affairs, said in October. “If there is a policy preventing us from doing that, we need to look at it hard to see if it makes sense.”

General, you went on the record with that reporter, and you are the man in charge of all Army public affairs, so I would note for you, respectfully, that we are at this point six years into a shooting war. Only you can fix this, and the question that leaps out to every reader is “How long does it take for the Office of the Chief of Public Affairs, your office and command, to ‘look hard’ at something like this?”

The Public Affairs people above the Army, at the Office of the Secretary of Defense level, say that there is no Department of Defense prohibition on releasing this information. The Air Force publishes the narratives for their combat heroism awards on a central Web page, which anyone can find on the Internet in mere seconds. That means this is an Army-only issue. That means, sir, that your predecessors failed to fix this, and thus far you have failed to fix this. As an officer looking up from below, I have to say that none of this instills great confidence in me or my peers about the training, thought processes or efficacy of Army Public Affairs people under your command. Indeed, rather than being part of the solution, it appears your command is part of the problem.

A brief technical note is in order here. There are two different documents we are talking about in this issue. The first, about which there is no controversy, is the actual citation on the medal itself. This is the text that fits on the presentation document, which is a single sheet of paper with huge margins. It is generally framed. The text on that page is also usually written in ALL CAPS, and so there is enough room for only about 250 descriptive words on the page. It is usually written weeks or months later by people who were not there, using second-hand information, well after the decision to make the award has been made. In short, it does not do a good job telling America about the heroism of her soldiers. It is, however, generally available. What this dispute is about is the document called the “narrative.”

The narrative is the explanation of the full situation for which the soldier is being recommended for an award. There is no real prohibition on length for this, but generally they run one to two  typed pages, so maybe 1,000 words or more. Written almost immediately after the events they describe, usually by participants or somebody close to the action, this is the full story. It is the best account of what happened. This is the document that layer upon layer of higher-level officers will read and think about when deciding if they approve of the medal recommendation and will pass it on up to yet a higher headquarters with their own endorsement.

But it was the reasoning for this prohibition in releasing the narratives of Silver Stars awarded for combat heroism, exposed in Wood’s article, that really put me over the top. Wrote Woods:

“The Army denied a March 2006 Freedom of Information Act request for the narratives, first on the grounds that it couldn’t find all of them.

“Next, Army lawyers argued that releasing the narratives ‘could subject the soldier and family to increased personal risk.’ But the Army and the Defense Department already publicize the names, photos and hometowns of medal recipients.

“The lawyers also argued that disclosure would discourage officers in the future from writing detailed battle accounts.”

OK, I will take these in sequence. First, I (and many of my peers in the infantry, and indeed in all combat arms, I don’t doubt) find it absolutely stunning that after six years of war, and six years of listening to complaints within our ranks about how “the media” do not tell the “positive story,” that we have not even so much as collected all of those positive stories ourselves. How is it that Public Affairs, at each division, corps and particularly at the Army level in the Office of the Chief of Public Affairs have not collected these stories of heroism? Why do we persist in forcing journalists to dig for the very things that we complain that they are not reporting on? Six years? Why is there not a central repository, at least for copies, somewhere in the PAO files at the Army level where at least the PAOs themselves could look up this material? Are these not newsworthy? Does the Department of the Army Public Affairs office not believe that these Silver Star narratives help “to establish the conditions that lead to confidence in America’s Army and its readiness to conduct operations in peacetime, conflict and war”?

Second, Wood does a great job of allowing the lawyers to be hoisted by their own petards. (Military technology interlude: A petard was a 15th- and 16th-century crude explosive charge used to do things like blow open castle gates. It was, essentially, a pot or a bag filled with blackpowder. You would light the fuse, run up to the castle walls, place the charge next to the doors and then run for cover. Fuse technology was also crude, unfortunately, with some fuses going slow … and some very fast. You can imagine the scenario that led to the expression.)

As for the last point, this is so outlandish as to defy description or explanation. First, most lieutenants and captains fighting in combat daily in Iraq and Afghanistan are not shrinking violets. The lawyers who think like this must never have lived among infantrymen, or any combat soldiers. We are not, as a general rule, prone to cutting corners when describing the heroism of our men, and it defies explanation to see how anyone but a D.C.-bound lawyer could imagine that we ever would be.

This is a site about journalism, and generally I write for journalists in my columns here. But if you are a journalist and have had dealings with an Army public affairs person, perhaps we all might be given some measure of satisfaction if you pass this link on to them.

You can write to LTC Bob at R_Bateman_LTC@hotmail.com [4].

Click here for more columns by Robert Bateman. [5]