Warheads: Cable News And the Fog of War

I picked up this book by MSNBC military analyst Ken Allard at a NYC book sale because I expected that there would be some Wes references...and, of course, there were. I also thought it would be interesting to read Allard’s take on cable news and how it works. It’s a pretty interesting book overall. I really don’t know anything about Mr. Allard’s commentary not having seen him enough to even recognize him so I wondered how I’d react to him from his writing. Having now read the book, I think I actually sort of liked him.

I did find him to have a snarky tone toward Clinton throughout, writing things like “every time the president got in trouble, it seemed like he launched cruise missiles at places most Americans couldn’t find on the map.” But he throws some snark in there about Bush too so it kind of balances things out.

He talks about NPR as if the staff were a bunch of hippies “Beards and earth shoes were everywhere---and these were only the women”...but also gives them props for being one of few outlets doing a good job on dealing with news stories in great depth.

I found him pretty fair on the whole.

The title Warheads refers to the term the military analysts use to refer to themselves as a group. They include such retired military as Barry McCaffrey, David Grange, Allard and, of course, our General. Allard tells of how he got involved in broadcasting, his experiences on radio and TV through various events (including one time when he was called upon to comment on a speech of Bush’s but, because of a screw up by the car service, he got to the studio with no time to see the speech but went on the air, commented as if he had seen the whole thing and was congratulated on his insightful comments) and how the news is shaped and presented. He bemoans the fact that the military analysts only get 3 minute blocks to deal with a story although when, during the rush to Baghdad the embeds became the focus of the extended coverage and MSNBC instituted the hourly “military minute” in which the Warheads were to summarize the battlefield events once an hour in under sixty seconds, he was actually reduced to pleading with the producer for three minutes to cover something of substance. His request was not granted.

He sounds too cocky for my taste when speaking of the US ‘triumph’ in Afghanistan, especially considering the way things are unraveling there after our great victory. As he crows about how the US forces triumphed where the vaunted Russian Army failed, I remembered reading in Hyder Akbar’s wonderful Come Back to Afghanistan how the Russians had control of every major city in Afghanistan in a week. The initial invasion apparently was never the hard part. Akbar quotes a historian as saying “Afghan wars become serious only when they are over.” We are now learning that lesson, I believe. Hopefully, Allard is as well. You can sense how proud he is of the US forces as he writes of the Afghan campaign, though, much as Wes takes pride in their accomplishments.

He’s not quite so proud when writing of the Abu Ghraib scandal. Having supervised the training of Army interrogators at the Army Intelligence Center in Arizona decades before, he denounces what happened at Abu Ghraib, saying it “was the antithesis of everything we had taught our trainees.” He also notes the irony that those higher up in the chain of command were not being held responsible while, as he was reading in James Brady’s Flyboys, the US had traced responsibility for certain incidents perpetrated by Japanese soldiers against prisoners during World War II “all the way up the chain of command”.

He relates an interesting moment when he gave a speech to an audience of business folk at a resort in Arizona in May of 2002. He was disappointed that they had reacted so unenthusiastically to his presentation but was assured that the speech was fine. “It was just that the war seemed an east coast thing and the only time they even thought much about it was when they might have the bad luck to get frisked before boarding a plane.” What a different experience from those of us who were living in a city that was still crawling with armed National Guardsmen and Women!

He contrasts the approach of the Clinton White House to the Warheads, when they were more or less ignored, to that of the Bush White House, when they were gathered together for briefings with Rumsfeld, and has a number of interesting observations about Rummy and the way he operates.

A recurring lament of Allard’s throughout the book is the disconnect between the American people and the military, how we fight our current wars with “other people’s kids”, how we are so removed from the notion of joining the military as national service which we should feel obligated to do. He comes back to that again and again, this disconnect. It is something that distresses him greatly. He talks of the ‘Electric Coliseum’ that “substitutes for the direct experience that our Founders always assumed would be a cornerstone of American democracy”, as the book jacket says and includes, using quotes from a book written by Samuel Huntington, a Harvard Professor of his, an interesting discussion of the citizen-soldier from the time our nation was founded.

He writes, quoting from the book, The Soldier and the State: the Founders “believed that in a free state the citizen did not cease to be a citizen when he became a soldier but rather became a soldier because he was a citizen.” And “They were more afraid of military power in the hands of political officials than of political power in the hands of military officers.” I’m thinking there are more than a few over at DU that could use to read Huntington’s book for a better understanding of what our founding fathers envisioned when it comes to the military and politics.

There are a number of basically favorable references to Wes, as well as a couple of pictures, one from Bosnia and one from CNN. One has to read to page 79 to get to the first Wes reference. Allard refers to him as a “prominent West Point Alum” and writes “I had known Wes for twenty years; now he was fast gaining notoriety for his articulate public policy positions--not always related to defense--both on TV and in front of political groups across the country.”

Later he writes of how, when it was imminent that we would invade but before the actual invasion had started, the cable news networks held briefings with their military analysts to discuss the upcoming action.

He writes of Wes at the CNN briefing:

When Wes Clark stood to give his presentation, an understandable stir went through the audience. For months he had been taking positions that put him outside the prevailing consensus of military analysts.....Wes had consistently maintained that war would be costly, was likely to disrupt the oil markets, and could commit the United States to billions in post-war reconstruction costs. He was also sharply critical of the Pentagon for attacking with force less than half the size of what it should been....

He then relates Wes’ thoughts and words regarding the differences between those advocating a “new kind of war” and those who still believed in the “boots on the ground” theory of warfare...including Wes’ recollections about the debate during the Kosovo campaign.

My favorite Wes reference, and maybe my favorite passage of the book, comes on page 106. Allard writes again of how some of the military analysts spoke out against the number of troops Bush chose to invade with. He writes of how overextended supply lines and Iraqi resistance, which slowed the rate of advance in the first week of the campaign, prompted Barry McCaffrey to note on the Today Show that the US “was relying on airpower to compensate for our deficiencies on the ground.” Rumsfeld and Gen. Myers reacting by strongly defending the war plan and Myers chastised McCaffrey saying, “It is not helpful to have these comments come out when we have troops in combat.”

He continues:

Several weeks later, with US troops now about to seize the Iraqi capital, Vice President Dick Cheney was speaking before a convention of the VFW to which he presumably had been invited as a guest, not ever having served in the military himself. Commenting on the success of the campaign, Cheney noted that “in the early days of the war, the plan was criticized by some retired military officers embedded in TV studios.”

He certainly meant McCaffrey and Wes Clark, but probably Jack Jacobs and me as well....I gave a characteristically starchy reply to the reporter who called that day for a comment: that Barry McCaffrey and Wes Clark had won many of the nation’s highest awards for gallantry in combat compared to none at all for Dick Cheney or me. Therefore they had earned the right to comment as they chose and didn’t have to go to the damned VFW convention on a guest pass either.....(snip)

So who was right?.... The most worrisome concerns the Warheads had voiced were probably well founded but did not, in the end, come true. That was the good news: that we had successfully conquered Iraq, ended the regime of one of the most despotic dictators since Adolph Hitler, and given ordinary Iraqis a chance for a decent life. This was, of course, also the bad news, and for reasons that only Wes Clark had had the requisite vision, courage, and maybe just pure cussedness to articulate: several millennia of military experience suggest nothing so much as war’s outcomes are best written in pencil.

I loved the digs at Cheney there and also Allard’s defense of Wes and Barry to the reporter but I especially enjoyed his acknowledgment of Wes’ vision and courage.

He writes later of Wes’ jumping into the race and how he’d warned Wes that he’d be put under the microscope and attacked if he ran. “Wes listened politely, thanked me, and then, of course, entered the campaign knowing full well what he would face,” Allard writes.

He goes on:

The standard rap on him was that he was tightly wound, an ambitious, highly politicized general who could sometimes be tough for superiors and subordinates to deal with. After his candidacy had been announced, one of the first calls I fielded was from Jonathan Alter of Newsweek, who asked “Is it really true that General Clark is considered the Eddie Haskell of the officer corps?” I laughed, of course, because you could probably make that argument or, if you wanted to, ruminate on his flaws. But you could not argue with his extraordinary talents nor fault the man’s courage; and even if you disagreed with what he said, you had to admire the force and cogency of his views.

He also relates Shelton’s slimy smear with no commentary or explanation. Grrr.....

It is interesting, too, when he speaks of Kerry’s campaign and notes how Ret. Lt. Gen. Dan Christman took heat from his former West Point classmates for joining the Kerry campaign.

“How could you possibly be supporting Kerry?” they demanded. Here we were at war and whatever could Dan mean by suggesting that it might be acceptable for military officers to vote for...those people?

This passage and a number of others throughout the book made me realize just how big a deal it was for Wes...and others...to come out so strongly against this Administration. God bless Wes. He’s such a good, brave man.

It was also fascinating to read Allard’s thoughts on watching the beginning of the invasion. He writes of how hard it was to suppress his emotions, of the “overwhelming sense of what it had cost the nation to put those forces on the battlefield, not only the treasure expended but also the lives risked as our soldiers were committed to battle.” He writes of the exhilaration of watching the forces move in, saying it was hard to keep from breaking into war cries, but he also speaks of a “more pervasive sense of regret: that we had stopped short the first time and now had to go back...that things would go inevitably and disastrously wrong, and when they did, soldiers would die.” Made me understand just a little bit some of the thoughts that must be going through Wes’ mind as he watches this mess play out. He understands so much more than I what the consequences of what we’ve done so far and what we do now will be.

Toward the end of the book, Allard discusses the 2004 election and how the serious issues had been ignored in favor of discussion of service records from long ago, how the election should have been ‘a referendum on Iraq and the global war on terror’ but was not because the people were not asking the right questions, in part because we as a nation were so removed from the actual fighting and its consequences, the disconnect between the military and the rest of the nation, the consequence of fighting the ‘war on terror’ with “other people’s kids”.

He also relates some interesting information about a trip to Baghdad that the Warheads took in December of 2005. It’s obvious the pride he takes in the military and what they’ve been able to accomplish, even as he laments the damage being done to it. He calls the action of the retired generals asking for Rumsfeld’s resignation “the first steps toward ensuring the survival of the larger institution.

Wes is mentioned one more time here.....

Clark joyfully jumped into the middle of the fray, arguing as strongly as ever that retired generals had a perfect right to voice their disagreements, many of which reflected his own earlier campaign positions and where had those guys been then, hey?

There is much more in the book. I’ve only related some of the pieces that struck me as I read. I found it an interesting and enjoyable book and I look forward to watching Allard on MSNBC.