Air University Review, January-February 1982

Strategy and the Social Dimension in the 1980s

In 1979, in his essay "The Forgotten Dimensions of Strategy," British military historian Michael Howard described four elements of strategy: operational, logistical, technological, and social.¹ All were derived from Clausewitz’s "remarkable trinity" (political objective, operational instruments, and social forces), and Howard maintained that "no successful strategy could be formulated that did not take account of them all . . ."² He argued that since World War II the technological dimension of strategy has become preeminent in the minds of Western strategists. Unlike our opponents, while we have merely neglected operational and logistical aspects, we have ignored the societal dimension altogether. Remembering that this last dimension is, in Howard’s words, ". . . the attitude of the people upon whose commitment and readiness for self-denial we depend upon,"³ let us, in this essay, concentrate on one aspect of it. Within the next decade, advances in communication techniques will enable wars to be broadcast live from anywhere in the world into our living rooms. Such a development may have profound effects on our strategy and on our war-fighting ability. The question thus arises: Will people have the stomach to observe at close and realistic hand what they have asked their armies to do?

"Vietnam was television’s first war, a war whose end was hastened by public opinion."⁴ That war has been called the living-room war: the jerky, monochromatic newsreels of Korea and World War II, complete with homespun commentary, had changed by the 1960s into aggressive, full-color reporting with extensive interpretation and analysis by members of a new and nontraditional school of journalism. The latter felt and still feel that their responsibility is "to discover truth, not merely facts."⁵ Reporters, denying their very name, are encouraged to give their own subjective analyses of events. The result has been that "to an unprecedented extent, the media have not just reported events, but have stimulated, sometimes created, and even actively participated in those events."⁶

Critics of U.S. media performance in Southeast Asia—and the Johnson and Nixon administrations contained many—maintained that the press establishment willfully distorted the Vietnam news to enhance the case of the opponents of the war. Peter Braestrup, in his detailed analysis of U.S. press and television reporting and interpretation of the 1968 Tet offensive,⁷ suggested that, at least in that case, the extremes of so-called "advocacy journalism" (the use of news media facilities to conspire against and influence national policy) were not, in fact, reached. Despite a lingering and wholesale belief to the contrary, Braestrup concluded that there was no such conspiracy. Instead, he demonstrated that the events at Tet were simply too much for the U.S. media to comprehend accurately at the time and that it was overwhelmed by what happened. There was no deliberate misrepresentation; the events themselves, reported within the peculiar pressures of U.S. television and press time demands, conspired to give the impression that Tet was a disaster for the United States rather than a severe defeat for the North Vietnamese. Braestrup, answering his own question about the unsatisfactory performance of the U.S. media, concluded that

the special circumstances of Tet impacted to a rare degree on modern American journalism’s special susceptibilities and limitations. This peculiar conjuncture overwhelmed reporters, commentators, and their superiors alike. And it could happen again.⁸

Was there an ideological antiwar conspiracy by the press? Braestrup is convinced that such ideology played "a relatively minor role. . . the big problems lay elsewhere."⁹ This conclusion notwithstanding, reviewers of his study have not been kind to his professional colleagues:

The American public, disenchanted with the war and the Johnson administration, learned from the press exactly what it wanted to hear. The press went along, untroubled by factual errors from the field or from reviewing editors at home.¹⁰

And the Southeast Asia period has been described as "a shameful episode in the annals of the American media.’’¹¹

If Vietnam was the first war to be brought into the American living rooms during a TV supper, that coverage was primitive by 1980 standards. The Tet offensive newsreel footage was 24 hours old by the time it had been processed for home consumption. If Tet occurred today, the news would be transmitted instantaneously. Portable videotape cameras and worldwide satellite coverage give real-life and precise pictures; transmission costs are no longer only for the rich nations, and satellite ground stations are spreading throughout the Third World. One consequence has been the recent increase in foreign news coverage on U.S. television. The coverage on NBC news alone has tripled since 1976, and there is increasing evidence that would-be leaders are realizing the potential power of such exposure. From the late President Anwar Sadat in Jerusalem in November 1977 to the Pope in Poland in 1979 and now Ayatollah Khomeini in Iran, those with a message see their opportunity. The pressure of real-time reporting leaves the possibility of any censorship or news denial more and more in the hands of the newsman on the spot rather than in those of the producer in the studio and even less to the government of the day. The effect on national policymakers, and those of us who may have to implement the policy in the future, will be far-reaching. The power of the media has always been there but never so instantaneously and with such clarity.

President Johnson was not the first leader to fall afoul of the news reporter. The Crimean War in the middle of the nineteenth century, one of the more ignominious episodes in British history, produced the first war correspondent, William Howard Russell of the London Times. It was Russell’s disclosures of political and military incompetence, of blunders and inefficiency in the conduct of the war, and the hardships experienced by the troops that led to the downfall of the Prime Minister, Lord Aberdeen. Half a century later, another young war correspondent, Winston Churchill, saw at close hand during the Boer campaign in South Africa the beginning of Britain’s loss of empire and, by using the wireless telegraph, added his own acerbic pen to the worries of the administration in London. Both Churchill, in the Second World War, and his predecessor David Lloyd George in the First World War, exerted domination over the internal press and rudimentary radio and were able to regain control of the media and even turn it to their advantage. Tight censorship in both wars helped the Allies maintain the confidence of the people. "I might add that 5 minutes after the attack started, if the British public could have seen the wounded struggling to get out of the line, the war would have possibly been stopped by public opinion," wrote Private J. F. Pout of the 55th Field Ambulance Brigade after the appalling first day of the Somme offensive in 1916.¹² But he could tell others of his diary entry only after the war. If he had written such a sentiment in a letter during the war, it would have been deleted by the official censor.

Imagine the effect of a hand-held color camera projecting the horrific pictures to 1916 English firesides! How long could Prime Minster David Lloyd George have maintained the pressure, and how would such a story have impacted on U.S. public opinion before the latter country’s entry into the war? A generation later, Churchill and Royal Air Force Bomber Command leaders were able to sustain, with a disingenuity difficult to appreciate at this distance, a night area bombing offensive against German cities for the length of the whole war against little domestic opposition. Even as late as March 1945, critics of the policy, in and out of Parliament, were few and easily put down. The author David Divine, commenting on such terror raids as that on Dresden, has said: "The British government had been able to safeguard its secret from the day that the first area raid had been launched on Mannheim on 16 December 1940, right up to the end of the war."¹³ Similarly, the U.S. Army Air Corps/Air Force, emphasizing the morality and heroic sacrifice of daylight precision bombing in Europe, has been able to divert criticism of its fire-storm raids against Japanese cities to this day. Imagine the effect of a color camera in Dresden or in Tokyo instantaneously transmitting to, perhaps, a hesitant home audience. And if those same cameras had been used inside the Jewish extermination camps, how long could the German people have professed ignorance?

So what of the future? The totalitarian societies hold all the advantages. In Howard’s words:

There can be little doubt that societies, such as those of the Soviet Union and the People’s Republic of China, which have developed powerful mechanisms of social control, enjoy an apparent initial advantage over those of the West . . .'though how great that advantage would actually prove under pressure remains to be seen. ¹⁴

But there are signs that Western leaders are beginning to appreciate the power of the media, too.

President Carter’s decision to withhold U.S. participation in the Moscow Olympic Games was aimed at breaking through the defensive barrier the Soviet Union, with its strictly controlled and government-only press and television, puts around its people. It was interesting to see how that country explained the U.S. absence and how the United States managed to play successfully what for it was an unusual and therefore difficult card: how to get inside the minds of a totalitarian country. Meanwhile, the power of third parties and particularly that of the revolutionaries and terrorists has expanded while the power for retaliatory action of the great nations has correspondingly decreased.

Television and the press feed on terrorists; terrorists need publicity—and they are receiving it. According to Walter Laqueur, "The media, with their inbuilt tendency toward sensationalism, have always magnified terrorists exploits quite irrespective of their intrinsic importance. . . . All modern terrorist groups need publicity."¹⁵ Rogues, despots, fanatics, and revolutionaries, from the Irish Republican Army in the United Kingdom to Khomeini in Iran, feed on the same publicity. At the moment, Western democratic nations, with their untrammeled television and press, are prepared to give that publicity in a form that, for immediacy and scope for manipulation, is unprecedented. Some argue, "the concept of power has been altered in the modern world by the revolutionary developments in technology and communication."¹⁶ Others fear that the likelihood of our free institutions being overthrown by the very freedom they sustain is becoming particularly real. So what can we conclude from this new revolution?

"Political scientists have rightfully written for years about the abuses of executive power and congressional power," but "the relatively unrestrained power of the media may well represent an even greater challenge to our democracy."¹⁷ Give that power to the wielder of the hand-held micro television camera transmitting the use and abuse of U.S. power instantaneously into not only every American home but into the homes of the ally and the enemy alike, then total power has escaped forever from the hands of the politician.

For the military personnel, the auguries are no less worrying. Because of the nature of our society, the liberal democrats will probably argue that since societies let their governments fight wars, there is every reason why those societies should see the implications and the outcomes of their choices. Tom Wolzien, an NBC news producer, asked recently: "Would live broadcasts of troops dying shorten the time it took this country to become disillusioned with a war, or would those same pictures raise the level of anger toward the enemy and build support for the war at home?" and again: "Is it ethical to show war live on television—is it moral not to?"¹⁸

Questions such as these were unnecessary to our fathers’ generation. They were unimaginable to Clausewitz. But, from now on, his "social dimension," at least for the Western democracies, is likely to have a greater effect on the use of force than ever before.

1. Michael Howard, "The Forgotten Dimensions of Strategy," Foreign Affairs, Summer 1979, pp. 976-78.

2. Ibid., p. 978.

3. Ibid., p. 977.

4. Michael Mosettig and Henry Griggs, Jr., "TV at the Front," Foreign Policy, Spring 1980, p. 68.

5. Max M. Kampelman, "The Power of the Press: A Problem for Our Democracy," Policy Review, Fall 1978.

6. Ibid., p. 18.

7. Peter Braestrup, Big Story, vol. 1 (Boulder, Colorado, 1977).

8. Ibid., p. 705.

9. Ibid., p. 707.

10. Paul R. Schratz, "Sea Breezes," Shipmate, March 1980, p. 5.

11. Kampelman, p. 20.

12. Martin Middlebrook, The First Day on the Somme, 1 July 1916 (New York, [ca. 1972]), p. 297.

13. David Irving, The Destruction of Dresden (London, 1974), p. 227.

14. Howard, p. 984.

15. Kampelman, p. 23.

16. Ibid., p. 39.

17. Ibid., p. 7.

18. Thomas Wolzien, "Watch Your Loved One Brave Bombs and Bullets," TV Guide, January 26, 1980, p. 6.

Wing Commander Nigel B. Baldwin, Royal Air Force, is RAF Adviser to the Commandant and a faculty instructor, Air Command and Staff College, Maxwell AFB, Alabama. He has flown the Vulcan throughout his career and served as officer commanding No. 50 Squadron, RAF Waddington. Wing Commander Baldwin is a graduate of Royal Air Force College, Cranwell, RAF Advanced Staff College, Bracknell, and a Distinguished Graduate of USAF Air War College. He is a previous contributor to the Review.

The conclusions and opinions expressed in this document are those of the author cultivated in the freedom of expression, academic environment of Air University. They do not reflect the official position of the U.S. Government, Department of Defense, the United States Air Force or the Air University.

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