behind the news

General Petraeus and the domestic information war

By the book

August 29, 2007

In my free time, I like to do things like read the recently released U.S. Army and Marine Corps Counterinsurgency Field Manual. It’s sad but true. In it, I ran across some interesting stuff concerning the media that I kept forgetting to comment on until recently, when I began to notice some high profile trips to Iraq by reporters and bloggers, and something clicked.

This past summer, we’ve seen reporting from Iraq from the likes of Michael O’Hanlon and Ken Pollack, who returned to write a controversial, positive assessment of their eight days in country; perennially victorious Weekly Standard editor Bill Kristol; Time‘s Joe Klein; and blogger and Princeton student Wesley Morgan, who was invited by General Petraeus himself to embed in Iraq.

These recent trips didn’t all come about by accident. General Petraeus understands the media in a way that his predecessors, Generals George Casey and Ricardo Sanchez didn’t, as shown by his availability to all forms of media, including recent interviews with Fox News, CNN, NPR, the New York Post, Alan Colmes’ radio show, the BBC, Hugh Hewitt, the London Times and his upcoming sitdown with CBS’ Katie Couric during her trip to Iraq. And that’s only a partial list. Add to this the recent star turn by Lt. Col. John Nagl (one of the authors of the Counterinsurgency Manual that Petraeus put together) on the Daily Show this week, and you get a feel for the hard-charging media operation Petraeus is running.

All this is prelude to the report the general is set to give to Congress next month, about which the Washington Monthly‘s Kevin Drum hit the nail on the head when he wrote yesterday that “Petraeus has been treating the September report like a military operation, trying to generate as much good press and congressional change of heart as he possibly can in the weeks leading up to 9/11.”

There’s something to this, especially when you look at what the Counterinsurgency Manual has to say about how the military should deal with the media:

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5-28 : Effective media/public affairs operations are critical to successful military operations.

2-5: COIN [counterinsurgency] is also a battle of ideas…Comprehensive information programs are necessary to amplify the messages of positive deeds and to counter insurgent propaganda.

In the first appendix, the manual also instructs soldiers and marines to “treat the media as an ally. Help reporters get their story. That helps them portray military actions favorably. Trade information with media representatives.”

There’s nothing insidious or sly about these suggestions–in fact having them appear in a official military manual helps everyone involved, soldier and journalist and citizen alike. It’s just an interesting example of how General Petraeus is actually using the ideas he helped articulate in the COIN manual to wage the information war at home.

Paul McLeary is a former CJR staff writer. Since 2008, he has covered the Pentagon for Foreign Policy, Defense News, Breaking Defense, and other outlets. He is currently a defense reporter for Politico.