Major J Lee Smart BSc Arch R SIGNALS
“Four hostile newspapers are more to be feared than a thousand bayonets.” Napoleon Bonaparte
It is commonly said that history, and therefore societies’ perception of it, is usually written by the victors. The speed and ubiquity of modern communications and the mass media today means that more often than not, history is now being made by societies’ perception itself; right or wrong. The defeat of America in Vietnam, in spite of the US Military’s record of never having lost a battle there, has become the iconic example. Their Military’s natural mistrust of the media, based on the urge to maintain operational security, was further vindicated by the media’s apparently unpatriotic and separate agenda to that of the Administration. This conceivably ultimately led to America’s humiliation and the ultimate fall of the South Vietnamese regime in Saigon in 1975. Live television pictures of America’s last act there with the scrambled evacuation of the US Embassy serving to underline the point.
“Vietnam was the first war ever fought without censorship. Without censorship, things can get terribly confused in the public mind”.
In October 1992, I deployed as a Captain with the lead elements of the 1 Cheshire (22nd Foot) Battalion Battle-group to Bosnia as the Staff Officer Grade 3 Public Information (SO3 P Info) in the capacities of Press Advisor, Public Spokesman and Press Escort. Although subordinate to a Senior Major, by dint of enthusiasm and the fact that I was the only member who carried an assault rifle, I elected myself also to the dubious role of Press Protection Officer.
At that time, recent British Military experience of the Media was mostly based on the troubles in Northern Ireland and the Falklands War in 1982. In the Falklands campaign there were allegations made of compromising reports sent by embedded journalists which tipped off the Argentine planners to British plans, such as the attack on Goose Green, and the inadequacies of their own equipments like the failure of Argentine bombs to detonate against the Royal Navy’s warships due to the low altitude of their release and the long arming settings of the fuses. Since then the British military and the press have seen highs and lows in their relationship as it has evolved through the operations that followed: 1st Gulf War, Bosnia, Kosovo, Sierra Leone, Iraq and now Afghanistan. Of all of them, Bosnia’s 4- year civil war and the British Army’s involvement in Operation GRAPPLE as part of the United Nations Protection Force (UNPROFOR) and then NATO’s Dayton Agreement Implementation Force (IFOR) probably provided the most tumultuous of periods.
The aim of this article is to detail the constant elements of the military media relationship and, combining with personal experiences as a Public Information Officer during the first British deployments to Bosnia i Herzogovina in 1992/93 as well as my impressions from subsequent operations with NATO’s IFOR in Bosnia and Kosovo, Iraq and the Middle East, to offer personal insight and perspective on this perpetual and dynamic challenge.
The second but equally important element is the Media through which the information is often sourced, then perceived, filtered and frequently manipulated – either by the journalist themselves, their editors or other interested parties. This is a major source of the distrust between the military and the media, but, with the exception of cases of downright perfidy and spin, the media cannot be blamed; they are merely the conduit for the news.
Whilst the ‘honeymoon’ period and positive reporting of the first Gulf War in 1991 provided some mutual appreciation between journalist and soldier, there had been sufficient sensationalist incidents and ‘near-misses’ in the coverage to ensure that the Ministry of Defence remained extremely wary of the media and cagey in its dealings with them. Georges Clemenceau the French Prime Minister during the First World War famously said that “War is too serious a matter to entrust to military men”. It has also been said by another wit that “Journalism also, is too serious a matter to be left just to the journalists”. Ironically Clemenceau had been a journalist before taking up politics.
The Gulf experience resulted in an expansion of the Public Information Department (P Info), which mostly consisted of Civil Servants, some with a limited media background, to vet, control and manage the news and facilities being provided to the media by the MOD. There was also a pool of trained officers with journalistic backgrounds who were part-time members of the Territorial Army, known as TAPIOs but this has mostly been superseded by regular officers in permanent posts within field units. Today in field units this staff branch is referred to as G3 Media Operations (Media Ops).
These MOD P Info officers were intended to provide news products, including news releases, background briefings, photographs and some video. This gift was presumed to negate the need to provide the facility to embed too many journalists in missions and provide some air-gap between journalists and soldiers, events and reporting, and perhaps allowing some time between to massage the message.
However, in conflict it is neither appropriate nor sensible for these civilians to provide the military’s interface with the press, particularly in a combat zone where the protection of these untrained civilians can become an unnecessary liability. Journalists want to talk to the man at the top; the commander himself- failing that, a suitable subordinate. Whilst most officers now are given some Media Ops training, better trained officers are provided as Media Ops Officers to be the main point of contact, public spokesman and media advisor to the commander. In addition the Combat Camera Teams, trained Unit Photographers and Divisional P Info/Media Ops SO2’s provided for the normal peace-time capability.
I found that the journalists themselves were cynical and distrustful of the Civilian P Info Officers and the TAPIOs, considering them “poachers turned gamekeepers”. Surprisingly, despite often anti-military or sometimes even pacifist sentiments, the journalists I met seemed to have considerable respect for the abilities of our military press officers, both for their subject matter knowledge and the willingness to be frank and succinct when operational security allows. Perhaps the officers’ better access to soldiers also counts here as the soldiers themselves never afforded the Civilian P Info staff the same trust or authority as they do the military Media Ops officers. This task requires dynamic, intelligent and impressive individuals – the difficulty is ensuring that commanders understand this and free up their more capable officers to undertake this task. This is more difficult when the lure of operations and combat itself can denude the availability or willingness of the appropriate characters.
Throughout the autumn of 1992, the world’s media were baying for the UN to take positive action and intervene in the conflict; its response was typically late, limited and lackadaisical: It consisted of a UN military Observer group which was essentially limited to counting shells fired and violations of a hundred ceasefires that normally were broken before the ink was dry on the paper, and a force of UN protection troops from various nations. This main deployment was 14,000 UNPROFOR troops, with light armour and no fire support, whose mandate directive was solely to provide protection of the UN and NGO activities providing food and supplies to the refugees. This was instead of the advised requirement of 60,000 troops.
The British Army’s perception was somewhat different from that of the majority of nations in UNPROFOR. We believed that little or nothing of value towards peace or saving lives would be achieved by strictly applying the limited directives of our UN mission and failing to apply the sort of referee diplomacy that is needed to persuade disengagement of the warring factions. Peacekeepers should be diplomats who through friendly, though persistent pressure can attempt to perhaps persuade the belligerents firstly of the ultimately futile use of force to achieve their ends, but also, more importantly, their need to properly and strictly apply the international conventions in safeguarding innocent civilians and avoiding collateral damage.
The inadequacies of our UN mandate had been glaringly exposed the first frustrating week in theatre. With our apparent impotence in front of the dramatic collapse of the Jayce siege and its subsequent flood of refugees into Travnic and the Lashva Valley, the commander of the first British Battle-group in central Bosnia, Lieutenant Colonel Bob Stewart quickly decided to apply “mission command” to identify the un-stated but “implied tasks” in our mission. He considered that we would be unable to fulfil our mission of protecting the relief and evacuation convoys through the current dangerous conditions of conflict zone. He determined that facilitating negotiations between the warring parties to broker ceasefires and then providing some elements of military protection to act as guarantors of any ceasefire was such an implied task. The Battle-group then set about trying to get between the warring factions, often literally, in our heavily armoured Warrior Infantry Fighting Vehicles with their Chobham armour almost impervious to the Yugoslav weaponry. The pro-active actions of the British Troops then attracted even more of the journalist posse normally encamped in Sarajevo into our sector.
They came with an almost insatiable demand for information, news and images. Unlike the desert war or in the distant Falklands, The media are now almost completely autonomous in their ability to reach conflict zones. No longer reliant on logistic support from the military, often operating now in Afghanistan and Iraq with private and heavily armed security companies to provide personal protection, the military are less able to barter logistics or protection in exchange for ‘good copy’ or submission to some censorship.
In normal military considerations some individual elements within the press can easily be considered as ‘enemy forces’, others as a ‘fifth column’. However, the Media itself is a broad church which includes as many ‘friendly forces’ and opportunities. The importance of the message and the danger to the mission of adverse news means that the media, in its entirety, should be given serious consideration in every phase of operations; in planning, conduct and even post-operational activities.
When I had first arrived up country into Bosnia, P Info had already been relegated to a supporting role at the end of the daily operational briefing session. But within the first week an SO2 Media Ops officer; Major Andrew Venus, was brought over from the Operation HAMPTON effort in Croatia to for a month to provide his experience to the Battle-group before taking redundancy from the Army. Having been almost constantly on operations as a media officer since the Gulf war, in Kuwait, Northern Iraq, Croatia and now Bosnia, Major Venus was content to be blunt in his advice to Lieutenant Colonel Stewart; He sternly warned “this will not be about your military operational prowess; you will succeed or fail on how you are perceived in the media”. The next day P Info was item three on the daily agenda after G2 Intelligence picture and the G3 Operational situation, and it stayed that way with the Media Ops in the forefront of everything we did. Our relationship with the Press, in spite of the odd hiccup, reached a zenith in the subsequent months.
In Bosnia, denuded of the option for full intelligence due to the UN’s policy, much of our information was garnered from the Journalists themselves. This information was hard come by. Often taking many risks in the pursuit of their stories, 78 journalist had been killed in Yugoslavia by 1994 with many more injured. With hordes of them free-roaming around the country, they provided a useful return flow of information on the movement of the fighting, frontlines, refugees, minefields, danger-zones and incidents. All of which they happily traded with me. Our P Info house, outside of the military base and furnished with the latest maps detailing this collated information, deliberately provided a comfortable briefing facility with up-to date safety information. It was a secure place for them to relax, and exchange views, opinions, confirm news and details, ensuring that media ops were able to pass this useful information back to the operations and intelligence cells in the Battle-group HQ.
The one advantage of Op GRAPPLE being a UN operation was that the UN does not ‘do’ secrecy, and so transparency is paramount. The normal contest between the military’s requirement for operational security and the journalist’s perceived duty to inform the public without restrictions was never an issue here with one small exception; that of reporting and images of UK military casualties. These days, the majority of the world’s media now understands the basic requirement not to name a casualty before the MOD has been able to inform their Next of Kin. This includes the delayed broadcast of such images - although with live television this is not always possible.
On the occasions that we suffered fatalities and injury, the Journalists’ behaviour was both sensitive and professional throughout. Ironically this was best displayed when my team partner, Army photographer Staff Sergeant Peter Bristo was shot in the head, beside me on the frontline at Turbe during an operation to provide protection for refugees crossing the minefields on 6th April 1993. The ITN News camera team who had been filming the operation under my protection caught the incident on film but immediately put the camera down, continuing only when it was obvious that the head wound was not fatal, and at SSgt Bristo’s insistence. Gentlemen’s agreements aside, this only delays the inevitable. Pictures of casualties will run; although the British media are aware that certain images would not be tolerated by the British public, in other countries audiences are less sensitive to British casualties and perhaps more demanding for these types of images. All Media organisations sell their product on the international market so it will appear somewhere.
Aside from furnishing the world’s media with product to tell the story to the world, just as important is the distribution of information to the local population within the conflict zone; civilians and belligerents alike. Of paramount importance was the need to ensure that they all understood our proper role in the situation, managing aspirations and ensuring that the UN were permitted to conduct their tasks unhindered.
It became vital to provide information by whatever means possible. Yugoslavia had been a communist state with heavily censored state media. But with the breakdown of the state, the absence of any credible central news agency created an information vacuum which was quickly and eagerly exploited by the local militia and sectarian leaders to turn information, or more importantly the lack of true information, into a propaganda tool. I was constantly amazed at the willingness of people to believe the wildest rumours and conspiracy theories and yet cynically dismiss the smallest truths with an incredible pessimism. Compared to the opportunists and criminals involved in these conflicts, the UN seems naïve and embarrassingly inexpert in both the positive use of information and combating the disinformation, propaganda and rumour that abounds.
Equally amazing was the ingenuity with which the locals adapted and improvised their information conduits. One day I was surprised by a door-step request from a self-proclaimed local journalist to give him $10,000 to buy him equipment for a radio station. He proudly showed me their home-built television transmitter consisting of a domestic VHS player, connected to a Hi-Fi amplifier to transmit a television smorgasbord of programmes from satellite television, video tapes and live broadcasts using a video camera connected into the VHS player. Unfortunately I didn’t have the money to help him but fortunately as a Royal Signals Officer, ably assisted by a competent Army technician, we were able to maximise the fidelity of the signal and extend their range from 4 kms to 15kms so providing the whole town and local villages with a news service. In return they provided the UN with regular air-time to broadcast news articles which could ensure that the population received unexpurgated information regarding the current situation. Within two months this ad-hoc arrangement had been extended to 6 other localities and stations, both Muslim and Croat, with recordings of the broadcasts provided to Serb stations for similar use, although in my time we were never able to verify if these were being transmitted.
The impartial provision of information, by the UK Battle-group in particular, acted to bolster UNPROFOR’s image as impartial and unbiased in the minds of the bulk of the population. The omnipresent danger is that pro-active provision of information can often be derided as propaganda, psychological warfare or something more ominous. But without information the benefits brought by the peace-keepers were lost on the population and the loss of support of the population to the UN mission can be devastating as the failure of the UN mission in Somalia so clearly demonstrated. Wisely used, all these means can be an ideal way to pull the rug from under the feet of even the most convincing of the more perfidious or deceitful belligerents.
However, conscious that I had begun dabbling in things beyond my training, in May 93 I drafted a paper to the UN HQ advocating the need for provision of professional propaganda and psychological operations officers to take over and run a fully-joined up broadcasting effort. The UN’s Yemeni head of P Info response was; “You’re all we’ve got! – carry on with the good work”.
An example of how even the best professionals can be usurped in this field was given to me in 1996 when I was shown the graphics for the ‘Mir’ (Peace) newspaper’s theme ‘Peace is in your hands’ showing a dove fly up out of a pair of hands, palms upwards. The paper was produced by the US Psychological Operations Battalion in the ARRC Headquarters who were mortified when I suggested that a Serb might antagonistically misinterpret this image as implying ‘peace comes from Muslim prayer’. They had naively contracted the artwork out to a design studio in Zagreb, Croatia.
Aeschylus, the Greek tragic dramatist (525 BC - 456 BC) is attributed with the saying, “in War, the first casualty is truth”. But the truth always remains to be discovered. It is perspective that is truly the first casualty, and when that’s gone, truth like many other virtues including compassion, reason, and tolerance are relegated as inconveniences to expediency and spin. Even with the truth in evidence, there are many obstacles, particularly editorial selectivity, in the passage of ‘ground truth’ to becoming news.
With the huge increase in 24 hours news channels, the media had become a massive commercial contest with a voracious appetite for new news. The proliferation of news organisations has led to events being swamped by media of all shapes and sizes from the huge corporations and professional teams down to the private individual or enthusiast sneaking about with his sony cam-corder who believes getting one ‘exclusive’ will seal his entry into a glittering career of journalism or a huge payout from a news company. On occasions they can outnumber the participants. In April 92 during the aftermath of the Ahmici massacres there were twice as many journalists as we had soldiers vying to follow our patrols into the conflict zone.
Today, with communications technology available to journalist and citizen alike, particularly with the incredible power of the internet, the military cannot realistically consider secrecy and censorship to be a tenable method of operational security. The last decade has seen the traditional press and television media superseded to the point where media products are produced by citizens themselves, sometimes and increasingly even by individual soldiers during the heat of battle. Except in the most isolated incidents, the opportunity to vet and censor news has now been almost completely lost; even the ‘Great Firewall of China’ with its reputed 50,000 Internet police could not stop the images of the Tibetan riots reaching the world in 2008.
We in the military have had to understand and learn to how to cope with this phenomenon. The US Military Field manual FM 100-5 on media operations states: The importance of understanding the immediacy of the impact of raw television coverage is not so that commanders can control it, but so they can anticipate adjustments to their operations and plans. In October 1992 my introduction to the media coincided with a significant change in the UK military’s relationship with the media. For the most part it was a positive relationship with the Army and the professional journalist working togeether with respect for each others requirements. Much of that can be attributed to Major Venus’ brief influence and on the attitude of the Officers and men of the 1st Battalion Cheshire Regiment Battle-group who took part in Operation GRAPPLE under Lieutenant Colonel Bob Stewart. The British Army has learned some of the lessons and although ninety five percent of articles can be glowing we still torture ourselves over the five percent of criticism. And so we should.
L'articolo è stato pubblicato sul N. 4 del 2011 della Rivista Il Secondo Risorgimento d'Italia,
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