American Magazine | Spring 2006
http://www.american.edu/american/fall06_warriors.html
Words and Warriors: Military adapts to the high-tech news era
It was around 9:40 a.m. on September 11, and Frank Thorp ’92 was thinking his words were a bit harsh. He had been standing by a television with his staff and coworkers, watching the smoke from the World Trade Center, but there was a project to finish and it was time to head back to their desks near the big glass windows on the west side of the Pentagon. “Okay,” he had finally said, “we’ve gotta get back to work.”
But Thorp was sensitive to the impact of words—he is, after all, a press officer—and he felt he was being too hard on a naturally distracted staff. So he added a suggestion. “But first,” he said, “let’s all get a cup of coffee.”
At 9:43 a.m. Thorp and eight of the 10 people on the staff were in the corridor when United Flight 77 smashed almost directly into the office they had left, and a wall of black smoke came rushing at them.
Five eventful years later, he is a rear admiral (lower half), the naval equivalent of a brigadier general, and the newly named deputy assistant secretary of defense for joint communications. What he is doing, and the changes he is implementing, will help to shape the way the military works with the media in the Information Age.
His new office is spare and clean; he’s still moving in, but he’s brought his mementos. Some are playful; all make him think.
There’s his old name plate, which somehow escaped the flames on September 11.
There’s a framed poster of an Arab crowd, with a single printed question: “Blame the media?” It’s a gift from the staff at the Arabic news channel Al-Jazeera, who Thorp got to know at his press briefings during the invasion of Iraq, when he was media chief for U.S. Central Command in Qatar.
And there’s a plastic action figure in a black beret. That one is a gift from his wife, a network news producer. Push on “Baghdad Bob,” and the 12-inch version of the Iraqi information minister repeats what he said when he and Thorp were both, as it were, expressing different philosophies of media relations. One day in April 2003 stands out in his memory.
The live 24-hour news cameras were trained on both spokesmen—Thorp in Qatar and Mohammed Said al-Sahhaf in Baghdad. “I triple guarantee you,” al-Sahhaf was insisting, “there are no American troops in Baghdad.” Meanwhile, the U.S. tanks in the Baghdad streets were clearly visible to the world. What, reporters asked Thorp, did he make of that statement under the circumstances? “It indicates,” Thorp said, “that the war of words is over.”
It was a very twenty-first century moment.
“People think of a spokesman as the podium jockey. But a fairly small percentage is about that,” says Rear Admiral Steve Pietropaoli ’89, who has been the Navy’s media chief and spokesman for two chairmen of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, Generals John Shalikashvili and Henry Shelton.
A good spokesperson spends a lot of time “on background”—chatting with reporters and providing context to help explain say, the culture of the military or the players in a policy debate. There’s an element of advocacy, but much of it is education. No one wants a front-page story that gets everything wrong.
“These official spokespeople are really on the hot spot,” says journalism professor Laird Anderson ’73. “They have to be not only knowledgeable, but credible in their reputation with the media, and at the same time very careful about what they say or not say. Lies don’t work. If you get caught in one of those things, you’re dead.
“That doesn’t mean some won’t try to put a spin on certain things, depending on the depth of the subject and how controversial the subject matter might be. But you start screwing around with trying to put a spin on this stuff, and it gets murkier and murkier, and you’re going to lose your credibility with journalists. That’s one thing they don’t want. They want to be credible.”
And if the numbers don’t add up, or a mistake is concealed, there’s another audience whose faith is broken, Pietropaoli says. “Your troops won’t trust you. They’ll think, ‘If you lie to the public or the press, maybe you’re lying to me about why I’m going over that hill.’”
It’s not unusual to find young officers in AU classrooms. The earliest to rise from the School of Communication to become a top military spokesman may have been Kendall Pease ’76, whose first taste of journalism came while guiding reporters around Vietnam. He became a rear admiral and the Navy’s chief of information, long the highest post for a public affairs officer until the creation of Thorp’s job.
Most reporters who spent time with the troops in Vietnam, like those he was ambushed with in the Mekong Delta, reported the war objectively, Pease felt. But he looked less kindly on “the ones who covered it from Queens, New York.”
By the time Pietropaoli came on active duty in 1977, “the feeling that the media lost the Vietnam War was very prevalent in the military community,” Pietropaoli says.
What’s more, the military had some people it didn’t care to introduce to a hostile press. “In the late ’70s and early ’80s, we had a lot of problems with drug use, disciplinary problems, malcontents,” says Pietropaoli, now executive director of the Navy League, a defense policy advocacy and military support organization.
Although the all-volunteer force brought a different tone to the military, the distrust toward the press lingered in many quarters—and so did the atmosphere of tight control. In the Navy, says Pietropaoli, “Our rule of thumb for embarking the press was, ‘On board one night, 24 hours, run ’em around, keep ’em busy all the time, and they won’t see any bitching sailors.’”
The press was kept at bay. But there was a price. “At the end of Desert Storm, I think the Navy recognized that because we’d been so restrictive, Americans didn’t see much about what we contributed. We were flying flights off six carriers, and there wasn’t much coverage of it.”
Then a reporter from a local Virginia paper asked to ride a ship back from Gibraltar to Norfolk. The Navy’s reaction, according to Pietropaoli, was, “Ten days with sailors?!?” But it was approved—and resulted, he says, in a constant flow of thorough and balanced stories. The public got a look at how tax dollars were spent; sailors and their families enjoyed the news clippings; and the benefits of openness with the media grew clearer.
“When you’re out there for a longer period of time, if out of a crew of 5,000 there are 50 malcontents, you know it’s a small proportion. The fact is,” says Pietropaoli, “by the early ’90s we’d so turned around the post-Vietnam force, we were OK letting people see their military. We now have individuals at every level who are truly eye-watering in their skills and dedication. It’s a lot easier to be open and accessible when you have a military that’s competent and drug free.”
By the time Thorp was heading down the Pentagon hallway for a cup of coffee on September 11, relations between the military and media had vastly improved. Each branch of the service had its public affairs specialists, many of them equipped, like Thorp, with multiple degrees. On top of his AU master’s degree in broadcast journalism and public affairs, he holds a master’s in national security and strategic studies from the Naval War College.
Thorp had not set out to pursue a military career. A native of Annapolis, Maryland, he had applied to the U.S. Naval Academy in his hometown largely because it was the alma mater of three brothers-in-law. “I knew I wanted to do some kind of public service, and I thought I’d use the experience in the Navy to get my life started,” he says. He put in his required post-Academy years as a surface warfare officer aboard a ship and then interviewed in the business world.
That’s when he realized how much he had come to love the Navy. “I enjoyed the camaraderie, and the opportunity to do something bigger than myself. At the end of the day, you look at it, and the measure of what you did is, ‘Did I do the right thing?’ It was just a job that’s bigger than any one person.”
He decided, though, to switch to public affairs, where he thought he could make an impact more quickly. It was fairly early in his career when the Navy sent him to SOC. He already knew a lot about the school; two sisters had gone to AU, and he knew the reputation of “the colonel,” former Wall Street Journal reporter and Green Beret Laird Anderson, who taught officers both on and off the AU campus.
“There’s a small number of people who’ve influenced my life to an incredible degree,” Thorp says. “One is Laird Anderson, who made an impact and stayed an impact.” He not only taught the reporters’ craft and the value of thinking beyond the deadline. “What Laird Anderson tried to imbue in his students was character and leadership.”
After AU, Thorp continued up the ranks. Public affairs in the military looks a lot like the media divisions of any corporation or university—but a whole lot bigger. Officers and enlisted personnel write stories for in-house papers and Web sites, put together television shows for troops on aircraft carriers, and answer questions from the outside press. They’re charged with putting out their employer’s message, but most subjects aren’t controversial. There are features on the unsung heroes of aircraft maintenance, briefings on policies, press releases about classes for spouses. In 2001, body counts weren’t part of the job.
That changed after September 11. “There was this huge explosion. It moved me—physically moved my body. We instantly knew we had been attacked. We didn’t know it had been an airplane, but we knew it was an attack,” says Thorp, then special assistant for public affairs for the chief of naval operations.
Acrid smoke poured into the corridor. “It seemed like hours, but thinking back, it was probably only seconds,” he says. A number of friends died that day, but everyone with Thorp survived. “I’ll never know what would have happened if we hadn’t gone for coffee. But I do know it wasn’t our time.”
It became clearer than ever to military planners after September 11 that speed, flexibility, and the ability to conduct joint operations would be key to military effectiveness in the future. But that vision had not quite become a reality in public affairs when Thorp was ordered to Qatar in 2003 to run the Coalition Media Center for round-the-clock coverage of Iraq.
Press would be pouring in from around the globe. Television news would be 24-7. Even print reporters no longer kicked back after nightly deadlines, but scrambled for constant updates for Web pages. In the Vietnam days, Pease recalls that film would be flown first to Manila and then onto U.S.-bound planes. By the 1990s, “we had media on aircraft carriers off Bosnia for three weeks, and we flew off their tapes every night on tactical jets into Rome so it could be uplinked.” But even that was low-tech by 2003, when reporters would expect to hit a keyboard and file instantly.
Thorp would also have to deal with a high-pressure news climate that Pease calls “the race to be wrong.” Says the retired admiral, now vice president of communications at General Dynamics, “Everyone talks about the CNN effect—you’ve got to be first. Therefore, you [as a spokesman] have got to get as much out as you can, as quick as you can. Otherwise, there’s speculation.”
Yet there wasn’t much of a plan. How many phone lines would a center need? What about the satellite capabilities? The press officers, culled from different branches of the service, had never trained together. “I was struck with the ad hoc way the military did public affairs,” Thorp says. “Because we had really good people, we did OK. But we could have done a lot better.”
While embedded reporters provided on-the-ground coverage, Thorp and his press squad kept up a constant stream of briefings on the overall picture: the “shock and awe” campaign, the firefights in Nasiriya and Najaf and Karbala, the rescue of Private Jessica Lynch, the fall of Baghdad.
When he returned to the Pentagon, he went to work as spokesman for General Richard Myers, chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, who was among those pushing for transformation in the military. That didn’t just mean unmanned drones and high-tech weaponry. The most important area for transformation, Myers said in 2004, would be the “space between our warfighters’ ears.”
That’s where Thorp’s new position comes in. He’s charged with looking at communications across the military and transforming not only how media relations is handled during the joint operations that will characterize the future, but also how it’s thought about by combatant commanders.
Commanders plan what they’ll do if the enemy attacks their left flank; they also need, he says, to train for what they’ll do when reporters appear. While some in the past had invited reporters to join training exercises, it was on a piecemeal basis and frequently a last-minute addition—which meant, Thorp says frankly, that it wasn’t taken very seriously.
Now combatant commanders will have press officers on staff to work with journalists, provide them if necessary with state-of-the-art satellite equipment—and, of course, deliver the message when the journalist asks for the military’s perspective.
That’s clearly a good thing for the military image when it’s a matter of helicopters flying into the Pakistan earthquake zone, or Marines digging for landscape survivors in the Philippines. But working closely with the media in a time of war is also going to involve risks. “If it goes well, you get positive coverage; if badly, instantaneous negative. But frankly, instant negative is better than rumored negative and conspiracy theorists the rest of your life,” says Pietropaoli.
That’s the argument also made by former assistant secretary of defense Torie Clarke. “In the Information Age, the bad news is going to get out,” writes Clarke in the just-published Lipstick on a Pig: Winning in the No-Spin Era by Someone Who Knows the Game (2006). “The only questions are who will tell it first and will they tell it accurately.”
Of course, it’s a challenge. “It used to be that engaging the media was something people in the military were reluctant to do. It’s now something people recognize they need to do—because it’s part of what we do as a country,” Thorp says.
“We’ve got to balance a couple things in the military. American taxpayers expect their military to be honest and open—maximum disclosure, minimum delay. There are two constraints: security and privacy. But the American people want and expect, and rightfully so, honest and forthright information.
“The military today enjoys tremendous credibility. It took a long time, a lot of work, to earn that credibility. It wouldn’t take many mistakes to lose it.”
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