I was reading Ralph Peter's new book Wars of Blood and Faith as part of my Future Wars Class at American Military University. I am currently enrolled in the M.A. program in Military Studies and loving every minute. More on that later.
So Ralph makes the point in several essays on how the modern global media has become at best a naive "unbiased" bystander in the current war in Islamofacism and more likely an unarmed belligerent, and one not on our side. This completely tracked with the research I did during a previous class on the Fallujah campaign in 2004. In the First Battle of Fallujah, the 1st Marine Division was putting the slow squeze on the Sunni insurgents and their Al Queda allies from three corners of the city, slowly collapsing them in a pocket where they were going to meet Allah. But then the global media, led by Al Jazerra, started up the poor pitiful terrorist machine and the Marines were called off. After a long, hot summer of beheadings and IED attacks across Anbar Province, the Marines went back into the city in November 2004 in an armored juggernaut and crushed the hopped-up jihadists in about two weeks.
Ralph continues by dissecting the media's role in the 2006 First Israel-Hezbollah war and notes that the global media was practically a third party to the fighting and not on Israels side to be sure.
What does this all mean...well Ralph makes the very congent and VERY scary point that for the foreseeable future, until we can find journalists like Ernie Pyle and Bill Mauldin again, that the U.S. and Israeli militaries, and probably any military fighting poor, pitiful, head removing Islamofascists, that the media is not their friend and is likely hostile. How the military handles this fact, will sadly have a greater effect on our battlefield victories than how many bad guys we send to Allah or how many American lives we save.
So Ralph makes the point in several essays on how the modern global media has become at best a naive "unbiased" bystander in the current war in Islamofacism and more likely an unarmed belligerent, and one not on our side. This completely tracked with the research I did during a previous class on the Fallujah campaign in 2004. In the First Battle of Fallujah, the 1st Marine Division was putting the slow squeze on the Sunni insurgents and their Al Queda allies from three corners of the city, slowly collapsing them in a pocket where they were going to meet Allah. But then the global media, led by Al Jazerra, started up the poor pitiful terrorist machine and the Marines were called off. After a long, hot summer of beheadings and IED attacks across Anbar Province, the Marines went back into the city in November 2004 in an armored juggernaut and crushed the hopped-up jihadists in about two weeks.
Ralph continues by dissecting the media's role in the 2006 First Israel-Hezbollah war and notes that the global media was practically a third party to the fighting and not on Israels side to be sure.
What does this all mean...well Ralph makes the very congent and VERY scary point that for the foreseeable future, until we can find journalists like Ernie Pyle and Bill Mauldin again, that the U.S. and Israeli militaries, and probably any military fighting poor, pitiful, head removing Islamofascists, that the media is not their friend and is likely hostile. How the military handles this fact, will sadly have a greater effect on our battlefield victories than how many bad guys we send to Allah or how many American lives we save.
Comments