Of all human activities, war is one which requires a high degree of knowledge, to make a sensible appreciation of whaIt is incredibly difficult than to make a strategic judgement based on the very fragmented, inadequate and usually inaccurate information one picks up on bumpy jeep rides around the front, casual conversations with junior officers, glimpses of a tiny portion of the wider reality.
I’ll give you a personal example: in October 1973, I flew to Tel Aviv to report the Yom Kippur War imbued with the same confidence as most of my colleagues in the absolute supremacy of the Israeli army. Having attended a characteristically arrogant press conference given by the Chief of Staff in Tel Aviv, I made my way the next morning to the Golan Heights by taxi, via unauthorised roads through the kibbutzes. This was a time honoured fashion for foreign journalists to get close enough to report Israel’s wars, since we were normally accorded no official facilities worth mentioning to go to the front under escort.
Within a very few minutes of getting onto the Golan, it was self-evident that the picture painted for us in Tel Aviv had been wildly optimistic. The scale of damage and military wreckage, matched by fierce gunfire both incoming and outgoing, made plain that a desperate battle was in progress. I made my way over to a group of Centurion tanks that were rearming in haste, and talked a little to their crews, who were at the limit of exhaustion. Later that morning, I returned to Tel Aviv to file as strong a story as the censor would allow about the seriousness of the battle upon which Israel was plainly engaged. But I did not know then, and I could not know until I read the books years later, that the group of tankmen I talked to that third morning on the hills represented, at that time, about a third of Israel’s remaining tank strength on the Golan. Context – a sense of perspective – this is what is hardest for a journalist to come by on the battlefield. The problem becomes near insuperable if, as soldiers often report happening to them on the battlefield, they find reporters asking them the difference between a company and a platoon, a battalion and a brigade, the range of a 105mm gun. Even given determination and honourable intentions on the part of the journalist, it is very difficult effectively and accurately to judge a war without at least some military knowledge.
The British army has learned a great deal in modern times about how to handle journalists, because it is living with them all the time in Iraq and Afghanistan. In recent years, it has also displayed great skill and astuteness in its public relations. Come to realise its soldiers are its best advocate, most reporters become troopie groupies. Worst thing happening now MoD and politicians news management try to separate soldiers from journalists- 3 Para battle group in Helmand. Nobody will ever trust civilian press officers. Vital to have soldiers, and good soldiers, handling reporters. They learn v.different demands of different bits of the media- serious press and silly press.
activities of Lieutenant Prince Andrew; and that the most famous headline of the war, and one of the most dreadful of all time, ran across the front page of The Sun the day the heavy cruiser Belgrano was sunk: “GOTCHA”. Yet it is not enough for others of us, as professional colleagues, or for the military command, to condescend to ‘the pops’, the ‘redtops’. They reaches a vast readership, for whom they are the only source of information. Somehow, their weird needs and priorities must be acknowledged and met.
One of the most precious assets any army can have on the battlefield is that its leaders should be believed by the public.