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

Washington Monthly, March, 1991 by Scott Shuger

Recently, U.S. News & World Report made a commendable bid to go beyond the journalistic conventions about military reporting when it ran an essay about generals by history professor and former Marine colonel Allan Millett. But while Millett's piece stood way above the pack with its historical illustrations of how generalship can be decisive, it concluded that good generalship is an "intangible quality," a mystique." This is a dangerous sentiment. Journalists should never presume that something that important to national life is a mystery, resistant to all reporting and analysis. That's giving up the game before it starts. Sure, as hard as it is to figure out whether or not the M-1 is a good tank, it's a hell of a lot harder to figure out if Blowzit is a good tank general. But since when is easiness a criterion for what kind of stories ought to get done?

During his briefing on the first day of the Gulf war, Lt. General Homer said, "It has been in some respects a technology war, although it is fought by men and women." Despite this, the press always seems too readily lured by the equipment into overlooking the human elements of combat. Now, media people know that having a better computer, more staff, and a bigger office doesn't mean that a reporter will write better stories. So why can't they figure this out about the military? Like any other reasonably complex task, fighting a war has objective and subjective components. And the quality of command is one of those subjective components that is essential to a war's outcome. Isn't it high time reporters covered it just as vigorously as the obvious physical stuff?