Kenneth Payne has a very good journal article up in the most recent edition of Parameters. Payne discusses the evolving relationship between journalists and governments during war. He frames the paper from the perspective of government policy; in particular, Payne analyzes government involvement in a new dimension of conflict: the information war. He bases his paper on the argument that modern journalists have become powerful enough to directly shape the course of a war, and examines the logical continuations of this thesis. Payne’s essay is an excellent treatment of an increasingly important issue (alas, he does not offer many suggestions for how government should conduct itself with the press, leaving conclusions to the reader).

The author first considers the issue of media neutrality, or lack thereof.

It is difficult to generalize about the international media, a heterogeneous entity that includes representatives of numerous organizations with varying political and cultural foundations. But it is nonetheless an incontrovertible fact that the international media as a whole are not a neutral force on the battlefield.

He builds a very persuasive case that this is true. Payne immediately cites examples from Iraq, including the assault on Fallujah, and embeds further evidence throughout the course of the paper. Drawing from the work of military analyst Ralph Peters, Payne demonstrates that “the neutral status that the press enjoys in conflicts is far removed from neutrality in any normative sense.” Even more than that, he shows how this bias can have a substantial effect on the outcome of military operations. Although I think he overestimates the influence of journalists in saying that “winning modern wars is as much dependent on carrying domestic and international public opinion as it is on defeating the enemy on the battlefield,” it’s unquestionable that the media can affect operations. With its ability to shape public and elite opinion, the press can unleash intense political pressure on hot-button issues (such as the war in Iraq).

Note, however, that this depends on a high level of public and elite engagement in the issue. Since most military policy decisions are detached from normal life and fairly technical, and because the organization that directly makes policy is well insulated, it can be quite difficult for the media to significantly influence security policy. It is, for example, hard to see public pressure mounting over paramilitary operations in Colombia or sporadic combat operations in Africa. Nevertheless, major wars often become dominant political issues, and thus are highly susceptible to press signals.

Having concluded that journalists are indeed no longer neutral parties on the battlefield, he surveys the current legal framework covering treatment of the press in a war-zone. He rightfully finds the present system of international treaties to be dangerously outmoded and poorly adapted for modern conflict. He then provides an excerpt from an assessment done by the Department of Defense concerning journalists and war.

Civilian media generally are not considered to be lawful military targets, but circumstances may make them so. In both Rwanda and Somalia, for example, civilian radio broadcasts urged the civilian population to commit acts of violence against members of other tribes, in the case of Rwanda, or against UN-authorized forces providing humanitarian assistance, in the case of Somalia. When it is determined that civilian media broadcasts are directly interfering with the accomplishment of a military force’s mission, there is no law of war objection to using the minimum necessary force to shut them down. The extent to which force can be used for purely psychological operations purposes, such as shutting down a civilian radio station for the sole purpose of undermining the morale of the civilian population, is an issue that has yet to be addressed authoritatively by the international community.

The author now turns to how governments act in relation to the media, and a substantial portion of the essay is dedicated to exploring that dynamic. He prefaces the discusses by framing the issue.

The relationship between the media and the military hinges on the extent to which the media’s civilian status can be considered compromised by the activities of the armed forces alongside which they operate. At whatever level the media interact with the military during times of conflict, there is always an inherent tension between the ostensible goals of impartial and balanced media reporting and the military objectives of the combatants.

The implication of proportionality–that there is a spectrum of shades the relationship between the media and the military can take on–is very important. It suggests that military policy toward the press should entail different degrees of control and different tactics depending on the exact circumstances. Whereas a hostile propaganda effort could be subject to military assault, a major media outlet should be dealt with using softer strategies.

The first tools the author describes are the devices of public affairs, including “deception, distortion, omission, or obfuscation: the tools of political ’spin’ adapted to the ends of warfighting.” These are in many ways ideal when dealing with the mainstream press. The theory and practice behind them are highly refined, journalists have accepted them as legitimate political communication, and they allow the press the freedom to provide accurate information and criticism to viewers. They’re also very effective in fighting the information war.

The US military, as the [public affairs] manual demonstrates, is acutely aware of the importance of media portrayal of conflict, and has developed an array of techniques to affect that presentation. Public affairs staffs begin their support of information operations by drafting a Public Affairs Estimate, which includes an assessment of the media presence. […] Lying outright to the media may not, in many circumstances, make much sense, but controlling the flow of information emphatically does, and the purpose of the public affairs staff is precisely that—to control the dissemination of information so as to maximize the military and political advantage to US forces.

The author then considers the place of outright lies on the battlefield.

Of course, outright lies do have a place on the battlefield. A media-savvy commander will also seek to use the media to directly affect the enemy’s plans, as part of a military deception operation. The current US Army field manual on information operations provides further details on the military advantages that can be gained from skillful manipulation of the media. Military deception, it notes, is “a fundamental instrument of military art. Its ultimate goal is to deceive adversaries and others about friendly force dispositions, capabilities, vulnerabilities, and intentions.” The manual goes on to describe the mechanism through which an enemy can be deceived through the construction of “a plausible, but false, view of the situation, which will lead the deception target into acting in a manner that will accomplish the commander’s goal. Once the story is completed, the [Deception Working Group] determines the deception means necessary to portray the events and indicators.”

Payne cites the example of Egypt during the 1973 Suez crossing.

But the manual does point to one episode of military deception through the use of the media: the Egyptian crossing of the Suez in 1973, which it offers as an example of “Conditioning an Adversary.” The Egyptians, it notes, “used deceptive measures and a broad range of centrally directed and controlled deception events involving political and military activities. These included . . . publishing reports in the press that officers would be allowed leave for the annual hajj pilgrimage.”

As the writer correctly noted, outright lies can be an effective technique for commanders to use in furtherance of direct military operations. Deception and disinformation have a rich heritage in military tradition, and have proved their worth on more than one occasion. Tactical commanders would therefore be wise to selectively lie at key opportune times.

Yet permitting systematic lying by press officials and commanders is an extremely bad idea. Once media outfits learn that the Pentagon has been abusing its position of authority and trust to deceive them, its credibility will be shattered. Press outfits will become more critical, more skeptical, and more distrustful. Just as the word of American intelligence carries much less weight due to manipulation of the facts on Iraqi WMDs, outright lying will turn the media away from the Pentagon, and correspondingly reduce the influence of the military on coverage. Furthermore, it’s essential that accurate information be disseminated from the war back to the United States, in order for the citizenry to stay informed and develop rational opinions on the war. Public opinion can act as a regulatory agent, stopping a bad war before it turns into a quagmire. If time-sensitive operational details are not involved, the military should err on the side of caution and tell the “truth” (albeit filtered through the prism of public relations).

Embedding journalists in combat units, according to Payne, has a rich history in Western war. Iraq, however, has fundamentally changed the dynamics of embedded reporting.

Embedding in the recent Iraqi invasion was not so different from these earlier conflicts, except that reporters were tied to one unit, rather than being free to roam. But embedding in Iraq was dramatically different from the experience of the press in other recent conflicts involving the United States, particularly Afghanistan post-9/11 and the 1991 liberation of Kuwait. For Walter Cronkite, “The principal advantage [of embedding] is that it is 180 degrees better than the blackout the military enforced during the first Gulf War.”

Embedding reporters has two key advantages, he believes. “First, embedding with troops restricts a reporter’s view of the battlefield to the view available to the unit he or she is embedded with. The embedding program in the Iraq invasion demonstrated that the media, particularly television news, have a tendency to focus on the drama of the small-scale tactical actions they can see, rather than the broader operational and strategic dimensions of the conflict.” It also gives the Pentagon wide latitude in shaping exactly what events and battles the media will cover, and thus the ability to sway the overall picture to one of overwhelming military supremacy. The second advantage is more psychological. “When US forces go into combat, the mainstream American media are, in the first instance at least, predisposed to back them. There is a plausible supposition that embedding enhances this tendency, by bringing reporters closer to the soldiers of one side than the other, perhaps to the extent of prompting a subconscious bias in reporting, the product of shared hardships and camaraderie.”

The author is quite right in ascribing embedding great importance in military information operations. It’s both effective and widespread. Nevertheless, it does not solve the problem of some journalists lending material assistance to the enemy. It will never be possible to totally control the flow of information, and without a doubt some operational details will leak into the press and be picked up by insurgents. Overconfidence in the ability to control the flow of information may come back and bite.

The essay quickly dismisses the relevance of the strategic presentations given by the military to reporters. “But the strategic-level presentations, as they had in the earlier liberation of Kuwait, received a mixed reception from the media, in marked contrast to the widespread enthusiasm for embedding.” Nevertheless, the ability to influence the way print reporters strategically frame the news is not unimportant. A positive strategic backdrop will make the reader more willing to see an operational setback as relatively unimportant, while framing the overall war negatively will lead to reader to question the relevance of any particular military success. Strategic briefing materials can be used to influence reporters in just that respect.

In a protracted insurgency, information operations and media relations have to be adapted. The essay covers this area extremely well.

In both examples, the abiding perception is one of strategic defeat for US forces, whatever the tactical success achieved by the Marines. Fallujah remained an insurgent stronghold, and Moqtada al Sadr’s “Mahdi Army” withdrew from Najaf in good order. From this Ralph Peters drew the conclusion that the best way to counter adverse media reporting of the sort he perceived around Fallujah in May 2004 is to “speed the kill. . . . We must direct our doctrine, training, equipment, organization, and plans toward winning low-level fights much faster. Before the global media can do what enemy forces cannot do and stop us short. We can still win the big campaigns. But we’re apt to lose thereafter, in the dirty end-game fights.”

Peters’ approach amounts to conducting military combat without a media presence. He suggests speed as one factor—space is another. Sometimes the sheer remoteness of the battlefield, or the level of risk involved, will serve to limit the presence of the media. The invasion of Afghanistan illustrates the point, with little scope for independents to operate in Taliban-held areas of the country, or in the disputed border regions adjacent to Pakistan. Somalia, Chechnya, Georgia’s Pankisi Gorge, the southern Philippines, and Kashmir are other examples of places deemed too risky for deploying reporters by many media organizations. On the whole, however, there will always be some sort of media presence, no matter how difficult the terrain or how rapid the military exploitation of a given scenario. Bold freelancers and local operatives armed with satellite phones ensure that there will usually be a Fallujah byline if the story merits one.

Finally, the paper considers how and under what conditions journalists are targeted by the media. He quickly dispatches the myth that US forces have been intentionally killing journalists in Iraq, although the writer argues that this is primarily due to the nature of the conflict, rather than an intrinsic refusal to target hostile media reporters. Yet the more interesting question, the one Payne spends the most time considering, is what makes a journalist a legitimate target.

If the media are behaving impartially, then they are entitled to treatment as civilians. Where they are not, the assessment of the general counsel suggests that they can be targeted militarily. The trick is in making an accurate judgment about their partiality and the motives behind it.

The article provides an excellent example of a legitimate target: the studios of Radio-TV Serbia, the state broadcaster. The target was legitimate because it was a bureaucratic agent of the Serbian government, and was coordinating propaganda efforts with the government in order to help defeat the United States. Just as Pentagon psyops officials are legitimate foreign targets, state run media is a hostile agent and a functionary of the enemy government.

The most difficulty comes when the media in question is not state owned. There, I believe, the military must err on the side of caution. Where an independent outfit is clearly offering intentional, systematic material aid to the enemy, the organization can be considered a hostile target. Where it’s more unclear, the organization should be countered by other means. Killing journalists must be a last resort only. It brings negative press attention upon the military, erodes the traditions of journalistic freedom, may impede the flow of information back to the continental United States, and results in the loss of an innocent life. Although ideas do indeed, as political thinkers such as Robespierre have shown us, have a material power of their own, ideas should be countered with nonviolent means. The soft power measures discussed above are far more subtle and effective than the blunt instrument of violence.

Payne’s conclusion naturally invites the reader to fill in his or her own thoughts on the subject.

The conflicts of the last decade have amply demonstrated that the media, ostensibly non-state actors, have become an important party in many international conflicts. In conflicts involving advanced Western militaries, this is accentuated by the evolution and increasing importance of information operations. Winning the media war is crucially important to Western war-planners, and increasingly sophisticated methods for doing so have been developed— albeit with varying results. […] The existing legal framework covering the position of the media during conflict was established before many of these developments. The question now is whether a consensus can be found that systematically addresses the new realities of war-reporting. With reporters increasingly vulnerable under the existing arrangements, perhaps it is time to consider a new humanitarian law specifically addressing the issues raised above.

The answer, in my estimation, is proportionality. By scaling and adapting information control strategies to each circumstance, the military is better able to wage the information war without unnecessarily impinging the essential right of press freedom. By enshrining a flexible proportional system into international treaty law, governments can have a reasonable and advantageous framework to work from. Everybody wins.