The Sorrows of Empire: Militarism, Secrecy, and the End of the Republic

romantic, patriotic, and fun. According to the Chicago Tribune, military recruiters even set up tables in the lobbies of theaters where Pearl Harbor was being shown in hopes of catching a few youths on their way out of this three-hour recruiting pitch.²⁸

Disney and the Pentagon also worked closely with the media to promote the idea that Pearl Harbor recounted the achievements of what the NBC broadcaster Tom Brokaw has called “the Greatest Generation” in his book of that title—as distinct from the Vietnam generation, which the Pentagon would prefer the public to forget. On May 26, 2001, the day after the film opened in theaters, the Disney-owned ABC-TV network ran a one-hour special on the Pearl Harbor attack narrated by David Brinkley, and the next day rival NBC broadcast a two-hour National Geographic special on the subject, featuring Tom Brokaw himself. The NBC cable affiliate MSNBC then put on a two-hour program about the survivors of the Pearl Harbor attack narrated by General Norman Schwarzkopf, commander in the Gulf War.²⁹

After the September 11 attacks, the Pentagon introduced a short movie advertisement presumably meant to bolster civilian support for the armed forces and designed to be shown before numerous films. Entitled Enduring Freedom: The Opening Chapter, the trailer was created by Lieutenant Colonel James Kuhn at a cost of $1.2 million. “Operation Enduring Freedom” was, of course, the title of the military’s campaign against Afghanistan. Although some parents objected to attaching the film—which shows scenes of the airplanes ramming New York’s World Trade Center—to G-rated children’s movies, the public seemed to accept its running with films like The Four Feathers or Sweet Home Alabama. The military’s camera crews shot over 250 hours of footage in making the film—on location with an antiterrorist squad in Kabul, Afghanistan, at the marine base at Twentynine Palms, California, and in the Indian Ocean, Hawaii, Yuma, Arizona, and Norfolk, Virginia. The leftover footage will be made into recruiting commercials and DVDs. In a tie-in with Regal Entertainment Group, the nation’s largest theater chain, the Pentagon also planned to show the short before all feature presentations on Regal’s 4,000 screens.³⁰

Closely related to the Pentagon’s film activities are its general public relations operations. These include helping the mass media portray the military in a favorable light, cultivating promilitary civilian groups at public expense, and suppressing information the military does not want Congress or the public to have. As with support for war movies, so the manipulation of the media to whip up pretexts for military action has a long history in the United States. Prowar and anticommunist propaganda has been a constant in public life since the country’s entry into World War II. In the 1970s, uniformed and civilian militarists’ obsession with closing the Vietnam “credibility gap” spurred a whole new effort. Official lies about military progress during that war and their subsequent exposure by the press caused Pentagon managers to professionalize news management and look for ways to suppress negative aspects of any American military campaign.

“Operation Urgent Fury,” the Reagan administration’s October 1983 invasion of the small Caribbean island of Grenada, allegedly to rescue some American students, figures prominently in the history of the Pentagon’s manipulation of the press. With memories of Vietnam fresh in their minds, Defense Secretary Caspar Weinberger and the commander of the invasion forces, Vice Admiral Joseph W. Metcalf III, banned all reporters from the island. It was the first U.S. conflict from which the media were excluded at the start of military operations. After seizing the island, the military even took a journalist who had been on the island prior to the invasion into custody and transported him to the navy’s flagship. More significantly, reporters who tried to get to Grenada independently accused navy aircraft of attacking their boats. The claim by critical reporters that press restraints were designed to hide military embarrassments was almost certainly true given the numerous instances of faulty intelligence, failed communications, and general incompetence during the taking of the largely undefended island.

The invasion force included some 5,000 marines, Army Rangers, and parts of the Eighty-second Airborne Division, plus a navy SEALs team, against an all but nonexistent resistance. On the third day of the five-day campaign, the military allowed a carefully chosen “pool” of reporters to visit Grenada. This was the first use of the pool system, in which a few reporters are grouped together and given an officially escorted tour of the battle area. Until Gulf War II, the pool was the standard way of ensuring that nothing disturbing to the military was reported.

In Afghanistan, the military actually issued laminated cards to all soldiers with instructions on how to deal with journalists. The cards included hypothetical questions and answers, such as “How do you feel about what you’re doing in Afghanistan?” Answer: “We’re united in our purpose and committed to achieving our goals.” “How long do you think that will take?” “We will stay here as long as it takes to get the job done, sir!” To give the feeling of spontaneity, some alternatives were provided. “How do you feel about being here?” “I’m proud to be serving my country, sir. We have a job to do and I’m glad to be part of it.” Conversations with reporters at Bagram Air Base near Kabul were so stilted that a BBC journalist finally became suspicious and two GIs showed him their prompt cards.³¹

In preparing for the assault on Iraq in the spring of 2003, the Pentagon invented a new ploy in its unending campaign to control what the public learns and to portray the military in a favorable light. It decided to “embed” (the military’s term) some 600 male and female reporters, photographers, and television crews into combat units and allow them to accompany the troops throughout what was expected to be—and largely was—a walkover of a war. All the journalists assigned were given inoculations against smallpox and anthrax, just like the fighting forces, and about half of them completed weeklong training programs—“camps”—at Fort Dix, New Jersey, and other domestic military bases to expose them to “combat conditions,” including wearing a gas mask. They were not allowed to carry or fire weapons or to drive their own vehicles. The Pentagon’s rules prohibited reporting a continuing action without the permission of the commanding officer or offering the date, time, place, and outcome of a military mission except in the most general terms. In the first Persian Gulf War, the military had relied on the pool system. In the second, it felt more confident that nothing would be on display it did not want reported and that there would be recruitment advantages to bringing one of America’s new, antiseptic wars into the nation’s living rooms.³²

In addition to massaging the media to get out its message, the Pentagon tries to cultivate civilian groups who are likely to support it politically or who have vested interests in defense spending. This lobbying went unnoticed until a fatal case of negligence aboard the submarine USS Greeneville brought it briefly into the open. On February 9, 2001, the 6,500-ton nuclear-powered attack submarine performed a simulated emergency surfacing off Honolulu, colliding with and sinking the Ehime Maru, a 190-foot Japanese high-school training ship, with a loss of nine young Japanese lives.

The Greeneville had put to sea solely to give sixteen rich civilian backers of the navy a joyride. It was missing about a third of its crew and was operating close to Waikiki Beach with several pieces of equipment out of commission. Its captain, Commander Scott D. Waddle, initially testified before a court of inquiry that he had not been distracted by the civilians or by a navy captain escort, even though all of them were crowded into the control room. Nonetheless, a collision between a surfacing submarine and another ship could only have been caused by inattention. On April 16, 2001, the Honolulu Advertiser reported that Waddle reversed himself. If he were court-martialed for negligence, he said, his main defense would be that he had been ordered to take the civilians on a cruise and that, as he told Time, “having them in the control room at least interfered with our concentration.”³³ A Texas oil company executive was actually at the controls when the submarine shot to the surface.

To prevent Waddle from repeating his comments for the official record, the navy’s court of inquiry did not call for testimony from any of the civilian guests, and Admiral Thomas B. Fargo, commander of the Pacific Fleet, decided against court-martialing him, because it would, he argued, be detrimental to morale.³⁴ In a court- martial, Waddle would have been able to introduce a defense, which the navy obviously did not want. Instead,