During the Kosovo campaign this past April, I had the opportunity to ask General Hugh Shelton, the current Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, to comment on the evolution of the relationship between the US military and the media. What do these two forces share in the "Age of Information"-the Age of "Information Technology," of "Info-Terrorism," and, as the military itself puts it, of "Information Do- minance?" A month later, in Macedonia, a US Army field officer would confide to me off the record that Slobodan Milosevic was winning "the information ops, the perception management. He's the underdog," the officer insisted, "and everybody else looks like a bully ganging up on him." If you can break up an alliance by somersaulting public opinion, he said, "You've won."

The Parallel War

There is a paradox at the center of the contemporary military-media dynamic, embodied by what pundits have labeled "the new military humanism." "The more you try not to hit civilians," the officer explained, "the worse the public-relations disaster is when you actually hit them." Every American soldier is keenly aware of how swiftly a public-relations disaster can mutate into military self-defeat. General Peter Schoomaker, Commander of US Special Operations, clearly understood this in April 1999 at the Special Forces' annual conference in Fort Bragg, North Carolina. He remarked on Kosovo, "We're engaged in something here that has a lot more to do with information than with bombs dropped."

General Shelton, who was the original field commander for Operation Uphold Democracy in Haiti in September 1994, began his response to my query with an anecdote. Shelton had been ordered by his superiors at US Atlantic Command and at the Pentagon to deliver a top-secret briefing to an assembly of journalists on the eve of the scheduled invasion of Haiti. The general had balked at the order; perhaps the high command had lost its mind, he thought, but he was finally persuaded to give the briefing.

"I don't like telling the media anything," Shelton said, "because your adversary will know everything." Yet the general was satisfied, and a little amazed, that not a word of his briefing had been leaked by those who heard it. Instead, the news was properly disseminated once the troops were safely ashore on Haitian soil and the news blackout ended. "The media was very responsible during Operation Uphold Democracy," Shelton concluded. "I've learned to trust them a little more."

The issue of trust will likely persist forever as a fundamental source of tension between the media and the military. The debate, once centered on the delicate balance between maintaining operational security and keeping people informed, has expanded to include the more generic role the media plays in shaping and influencing events, or "driving the story." In managing the Kosovo campaign from the Pentagon, the Chairman of the Joint Chiefs was feeling the extraordinary pressure of the 24-hour news cycle, as the frustration in his comments implied. "The media can paint you as a success or a failure on the first day of an operation," he said. They can "devastate you if you misspeak once." Familiar with the latter-day aphorism "you don't win unless CNN says you win," the general readily admitted that "what CNN says has a great impact on the cohesion of the [NATO] alliance." Victory, one might extrapolate, has become less crucial-less a measure of success-than getting the story off the airwaves and front pages. Perhaps that's what General Schoomaker meant when during the conference he remarked, "We need our own Christiane Amanpours out there. Winning the peace of the future means winning the information war."

The US military's leadership is almost entirely composed of graying senior officers who were assigned their first command as junior officers on the front lines in Vietnam. Many of the brass harbor a residual sense of betrayal and paranoia toward the media, a quiet bitterness underscoring the received truth that, from the military's point of view, the press above all bears responsibility for the US debacle in Southeast Asia. Post-Vietnam presidents apparently have agreed with the Pentagon that the media needs to be culled, vetted, and locked down into tightly controlled pools during war-time operations. Reagan's invasion of Grenada, Bush's invasion of Panama, and the Gulf War come to mind.

Nonetheless, since Bill Clinton became the commander-in-chief of the United States's armed forces in 1993, the distrust and polarization that have characterized the relationship between the military and the media for almost three decades have slowly eroded. A cautious atmosphere of mutual understanding and symbiotic exploitation has matured. The reasons for this subtle but not insignificant change are many.

Up Close and Personal

Clinton has ordered 27 large military deployments to date; at the beginning of 1999, the United States had in the field seven engaged deployments of its army. With such large numbers of units scattered around the globe, supported by personnel rotations of hundreds of thousands of servicemen and women with an accelerated operational tempo as contingencies pile up, the wall between the military and the media becomes ever more porous, and media access becomes ever less containable. Meanwhile, the press's own numbers in the field expand to accommodate high-profile conflicts. When hundreds of reporters and camera crews from dozens of countries descended on Albania's Rinas Airfield to cover the army's Apache helicopter deployment during the Kosovo campaign, Task Force Hawk's Public Affairs Officer, Lieutenant Colonel Garrie Dornan, equated his job to "herding cats."

Lt. Col. Dornan, presiding over the media circus surrounding the Apache helicopters, felt compelled to emphasize that the army was making an honest effort to alter its innate suspicion of the media. "The press seems so monolithic to us," Dornan remarked in Albania. Key events had resurrected the warrior culture's uneasiness with the press, particularly the ambush of the US Army's Rangers and Delta Force in Mogadishu on October 3, 1993, "which seemed to totally deface the military, a mercenary act which put military families through inordinate torture," Dornan explained. "It's not a rational attitude about the press," he continued, "and while most officers will say they believe in freedom of the press and the First Amendment, most general officers seem naïve about the media and don't object to coverage unless something bad is said about them. Although many of the colonels are media-savvy these days, interacting with the press inherently goes against the grain of a senior officer who's spent most of his life protecting information from people who aren't cleared or people who don't need to know. But you want your story told, and it doesn't happen by accident." Task Force Hawk was crawling with an international cohort of reporters attended to by a cadre of public affairs officers who pried the task force wide open for the media to an unexpected extent, even permitting correspondents to ride along on perilous nighttime Apache missions up to the Kosovo border.