General failure; what the press doesn't tell you about America's military leaders

Washington Monthly, March, 1991 by Scott Shuger

Ignorance. Most reporters, like most other Americans, have never served in the military, so they have no personal insight into what makes for good or bad performance in military jobs. (A telling indication: Most papers treated General Schwarzkopf's efforts to get free mail for his troops and his redesign of their boots as quaint little sidebar items-whereas soldiers know that on deployment overseas you live in your boots and mail is your principal form of entertainment, so in fact these actions of Schwarzkopf's said quite a lot about him as a field commander. While The New York Times did once run a front-page story mentioning Schwarzkopf's attempts to get radios and newspapers for his troops, the more blue-collar USA Today was alone among all newspapers in including the mail and boot details in its profile of the general.)

So to most of the press, generals are as indistinguishable as their uniforms. This attitude readily translates into "one general's as good as another," an attitude reinforced by a lack of attunement to military history. Maximilian was no Napoleon, Burnside was no Grant, and Von Paulus was no Rommel. And this belief in turn promotes the idea that it's weapons that are the determinant of victory-another notion refuted so often in history. At Pearl Harbor, the difference wasn't hardware: the U.S. had radar and air defenses, and could have used antitorpedo netting to protect its capital ships; what's more, the U.S. was reading the message traffic of the approaching Japanese fleet. No, the official postmortem on the attack attributed the disaster to "the complete inadequacy of command." Another example: When, in 1986, the U.S. botched the attack against Libya, it wasn't because it didn't have weapons capable of doing a better job-our inventory then contained the same stealth fighters and Tomahawk cruise missiles that are now being credited with such spectacular success in the Gulf-it was because the military planners had decided not to use those weapons.

Elitism. Most reporters come from the educated professional class that views the military not as an interesting opportunity for national service but as a dreaded and thoroughly simple-minded occupation. It's absurd but true that in our culture, being a military man carries considerably less cachet than working at Century 21. H.G. Wells gave voice to what a lot of other journalists think when he wrote, "The professional military mind is by necessity an inferior and unimaginative mind; no man of high intellectual quality would willingly imprison his gifts in such a calling."

Richard Cohen of The Washington Post, in writing about the Dugan affair, referred to the general as a "talkative flyboy airhead." Could Cohen's scorn have something to do with his six months' active-duty experience as an Army clerical worker? Now, even if Cohen disagreed with say, Lee Iacocca or James Baker on some matter, he would never call either man an "airhead"-although managing the Air Force well takes every bit as much brainpower as managing Chrysler or the State Department. Apparently, antimilitary venom runs so deep in Cohen that he wasn't able to bring himself to notice that, for example, the feat that generals like Dugan and Schwarzkopf accomplished in supervising the setting up of U.S. forces in the desert is at least the equivalent of moving all of Chrysler's operations to a new location, and within a few months, turning out cars again. In short, reporters' ignorance of what goes into military command is deepened exponentially by their contempt for military commanders.