“…It’s now clear that in the run-up to the war, during the war in 2003 and in its aftermath, we would have all benefited from hearing more from experts on Iraq and the Middle East, from historians, from anti-war advocates. Retired generals play a role, an important one. But for the networks, they played too big of a role — just as the “military” solutions in Iraq play too big of a role, just as the military solutions in the war against terrorism swamp every other approach…”

By William M. Arkin
Source: Washington Post

From 1999 until the end of last year, I was a military analyst for NBC News, one of the few non-generals in that role. During the wars in Kosovo, Afghanistan and Iraq, I worked with generals who were retained by NBC and MSNBC and found them mostly to be valuable. I saw the tasks they did behind the scenes, from educating correspondents and producers to facilitating access to the military.

The New York Times’ investigation into the relationship between the Pentagon and retired military officers who serve as paid “analysts” for television focused on the wrong issues. The problem is not necessarily that the networks employ former officers as analysts, or that the Pentagon reaches out to them.

The larger problem is the role these general play, not just on TV but in American society. In our modern era, not-so-old soldiers neither die nor fade away — they become board members and corporate icons and consultants, on TV and elsewhere, and even among this group of generally straight-shooters, there is a strong reluctance to say anything that would jeopardize their consulting gigs or positions on corporate boards.

During my time at NBC, one general — Barry McCaffrey — stood out for consistently criticizing the Pentagon on the air, and to this day he is among the most visible of the paid military analysts on television. Part of it is McCaffrey’s personality and decisive voice. And while he was one of the earliest and most forceful figures arguing that more troops were needed, much of his analysis of Iraq in 2003 was handicapped by a myopic view of ground forces and the Army, and by a dislike of then-Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld that was obvious and outspoken. (To be fair to McCaffrey, few former or active duty generals read the war or its aftermath correctly.)

They say in the military that there’s the tactical, the operational and the strategic. Television itself does a good job of capturing the tactical — the combat of platoons and companies and battalions, the bombing attacks, the single incidents. The phenomenon of embedded reporters in 2003 gave an almost-live view of a war at the tactical level.

The job of the analysts (and I sat at 30 Rock for weeks doing this) was to make sense of the accumulation of the tactical into understanding the bigger battle. The generals would use their knowledge and plumb their contacts to get a sense of what the divisions and corps and the coalition formations were doing at a higher level. The non-generals who were analysts (there weren’t many of us) and the correspondents and producers would use their skills and perspectives and do their own reporting, and the idea was that the final product provided a richer understanding of what was going on.

Given that Rumsfeld and Gen. Tommy Franks — the commander at the time — tended not to say much, or even to obfuscate in the name of deceiving the enemy, the generals were invaluable. When they made the effort, they could go places and to sources that the rest of us couldn’t. That the Pentagon was “using” them to convey a line is worrisome for the public interest but not particularly surprising.

On the war itself — on the actions of the U.S. military in March and April of 2003 — there was an official line that was being pushed by the Pentagon and the White House. I’m not convinced that the generals (at least those who were serving at NBC) were trumpeting an official line that was being fed to them, but neither am I convinced that their “experience” or professional expertise enabled them to analyze the war any better than non-generals or the correspondents in Washington or out in the field.

McCaffrey, to his credit, publicly lambasted the war plan — during a time of war! In the grand scheme of things, though, I’m not sure that McCaffrey was right — and I’m not sure that having more troops then, given our assumptions about what would happen in postwar Iraq and our ignorance of the country and its dynamics, would have made much of a difference.

In other words, we still could have won the battle and lost the war.

Once the “major” fighting was over in 2003, once the Iraq quagmire destroyed the American consensus on the war against terror, once Guantanamo and other issues of American tactics became issues between the Bush administration and the body politic, the value of the American generals as news commentators diminished significantly. They were no longer helping us to understand battles. They were becoming enmeshed in bigger political and public policy and partisan battles, and as “experts” on the military, they should have known better not to step too far outside their lane. The networks should also have known this, and indeed they did learn eventually, as there are certainly far fewer generals on the payroll today than there were at the height of the “fighting.”

It’s now clear that in the run-up to the war, during the war in 2003 and in its aftermath, we would have all benefited from hearing more from experts on Iraq and the Middle East, from historians, from anti-war advocates. Retired generals play a role, an important one. But for the networks, they played too big of a role — just as the “military” solutions in Iraq play too big of a role, just as the military solutions in the war against terrorism swamp every other approach.

The Bush administration, in reaching out to sympathetic news commentators to shape public opinion, isn’t doing anything different than the Clinton administration. I am not sure the Bush administration’s efforts in the Iraq campaign were any more treacherous. It’s just that the stakes were higher.

Unresolved in all this is the role of the retired military and the larger question of civil-military relations in our society. Also unresolved is our love affair with the uniform. Ever since 9/11, we have deferred to the military and the national security community, hardly recognizing that we do so at our peril.