Army’s New Fear: Media’s Friendly Fire

Army’s New Fear: Media’s Friendly Fire – Peter Spiegel, Wall Street Journal.

According to U.S. military doctrine, in order to defeat an insurgency like the one in Afghanistan, commanders must engage with the news media to win the hearts and minds of both the local population and the American public. But in the wake of the firing of Gen. Stanley McChrystal as Afghan commander over intemperate remarks to Rolling Stone magazine, Pentagon officials are concerned the military may recoil in fear and anger from the press.

The chill couldn’t come at a more inopportune time for the Pentagon’s leadership, with skepticism about the war’s progress growing among U.S. politicians and officials in Afghanistan ahead of what is likely to be the war’s most important operation, the imminent move by thousands of U.S. forces into Kandahar, the spiritual heartland of the Taliban. “If we recoil, if we go underground, if we get defensive, it’s self-defeating,” said Geoff Morrell, the Pentagon press secretary. “We need to remain as engaged as ever, if not more so because we are at a crucial point in this war.”

Even before Gen. McChrystal’s ouster, senior defense officials had been contemplating an overhaul of their communications strategy to get top officers in the war zone to brief reporters more frequently, a strategy regularly employed during the Iraq surge three years ago. Defense officials described the effort as an attempt to keep Washington-based reporters regularly informed of operations in Afghanistan amid concerns that news coverage was increasingly providing narrowly focused snapshots of insurgent violence in southern Afghanistan…

More at The Wall Street Journal.