The front-page news of ten humanitarian medical workers murdered in Afghanistan is so shocking because it
is so rare.

Every day in Afghanistan hundreds, maybe thousands westerners working with NGOs, aid groups and the media roam about the country unarmed or only armed with side arms.  When they complete their trips without event it is not news.

When I went on a roadtrip to Bamiyan province and came back only with photos of the lush valley and ancient ruins it was not news.  Had I been kidnapped and taken hostage, it would have been news.

This skews the public perception of what is happening in Afghanistan and ultimately affects US policy.

The murder by basmachi of ten dedicated people is a tragedy.  That it took their murder for their work to be reported in the media is a serious failing.

I will be giving a speech / presentation in Chicago at the 1st Infantry Museum on March 3rd.

The topic will be counterinsurgency in Iraq.

Click here for more information about "A Date with History"

Another write-up from David Bellavia (with some interesting comments.)

Over the years I have written that the strategy and tactics of Al Qaida and the Taliban were geared toward affecting media coverage of the wars.

The best chance of the US and Coalition withdrawing from Iraq or Afghanistan was not through military force employed by the Taliban or Al Qaida, but through an erosion of political will on the part of the American public and members of Congress.  The will of the public is affected by what it sees in the media, therefore, the media has always been the target of action.

This is 4th Generation Warfare.

A line in a report about the kidnapping and detention of New York Times reporter David Rhode caught my eye and is excerpted by Powerline .

The key line in the excerpt:

"The kidnappers initially said as much."

The Taliban, normally not ones to shy away from publicity wanted the kidnapping to fly below the radar.

If the ransom to be negotiated was money, the Times, even in its current straights, could cough up enough to purchase release.

But going back to the Taliban and Al Qaida's primary strategy of attacking American public opinion, what if the ransom was not cash but news coverage?

This is not to say that the Times yielded and shaped their coverage to the demands of the captors--I sincerely doubt they did.  The Times may be many things, but from my contacts with its reporters, it is not the type to negotiate coverage with terrorists.  Even they are smart enough to realize if you do it just once--you are gonna have to do it forever.  Which is why you do not negotiate with terrorists.

But, I can definately see the Taliban wanting to put that option on the table.  And if that option was on the table, broad public knowledge of a reporter for the Times being held hostage would make it more difficult to get the editorial ransom from the Times.  A shift in tone of coverage coinciding with kidnapping would deminish the effectiveness of the Taliban's editorial demands.

In modern 4th Generation Warfare, the media is the target of many actions.  If I was the Taliban, I would kidnap reporters and demand editorial ransom.  Many things can be purchased with cash from opium or other criminal enterprises ran by terrorist organizations, but editorial coverage is too tempting not to ask for.

In the modern media battlespace we have already seen media outlets capitulate to threats of violence--the cartoons & Fitna come to mind.  CNN traded access for self censoring editorial in Iraq under Saddam's regime.  And of course there is Walter Duranty.

As the threat enviorment and 4GW grows, editors and publishers will have to steel themselves to the new environment.  The public will have to be aware of how modern terrorists and insurgents target them through the media.

I have received many interesting emails in the past 24 hours.

More emails than I ever receive while running around Iraq and more hits than I ever receive when filing reports from Iraq.

I want to point out something interesting.

The only post to get nearly the traffic as my comments on the Joe the Plumber is this one .

In the Spring of 2007, Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid said the war in Iraq was lost.

I was in Iraq at that time and was able to point to facts showing the contrary .

No one complained about my embedding then.  Well, Glenn Greenwald did, but time has proven him wrong.

I was the first civillian to see the Anbar Awakening spread down the Euphrates river valley from Ramadi toward Fallujah.

I was the first civillian to see it jump the Euphrates to the Kharmah region .

No one complained then.

In fact, I was the much linked and cited counter-point to Reid and others.

When Joe stated, "I don’t believe they need to be in the front lines with soldiers, I don’t believe they need to, uh, you know, be bothering the military for information or for access to certain areas," he made a very blanket statement.

A statment that said he felt I should not have been embedded and covering the Anbar Awakening in 2007.

If you agreed with Joe, you felt I should not have been covering the Anbar Awakening and therefore should not have been a counter-point to Reid.

Which makes me wonder how many people who are celebrating Joe now, cheered me in 2007?

You see the conundrum.  It is impossible to cheer the reporting of a Michael Yon, or Michael Totten or John Burns or the countless other even handed embeds and then support a blanket ban on embeds.

In my blogs I pointed out how ending the embedding programs would be a strategic mistake and how Joe's support for such in a sit-down, on-camera, on-the-record interview showed he did understand the importance of the media battlespace.

I never criticized his reporting work.  In fact I was complimentary of it.  I never stated he should not be there.

I did clearly state that on the policy of embedding he was wrong and his opinion of a blanket end to embedding showed that he did not understand what he was talking about.

In modern warfare, the media is its own battlespace.  Something will fill it.

Saddam's execution was closed to the media, but we all watched it.  It was recorded with a cell phone camera.

If embeds are eliminated, the information void will be filled by whoever is walking by with a video camera or cell phone, or the enemy.

You could argue that the military should be the only source, but then you will have press conferences and power-point presentations competing against video shot by local stringers or the terrorists.

We can all guess who will win that battle and it isn't the guy with a flip chart.

I took Joe's statement at face value and I took it personally.  When I first went to Iraq with elements of my old Marine Corps unit I did because I knew if I didn't cover them, no one else would.  Because I went with them, their story was told on several network TV affiliates and then those reports became my first documentary.

When someone intimates that their story should not have been told, I take it very, very personally.   

I have since been informed by Roger L. Simon, who I trust and respect, that Joe is revising and extending his remarks on embeds.

Will all of you who sent colorful emails be willing to do the same?

And to those of you on the left and the MSM who are using my disagreement with Joe on one policy position to bash his reports, let me be clear by quoting Les Grossman :

"First, take a big step back... and literally, FUCK YOUR OWN FACE! I don't know what kind of bullshit power play you're trying to pull here, but [South West] Asia Jack is my territory. So whatever you're thinking, you'd better think again! Otherwise I'm gonna have to head down there and I will rain down in a Godly fucking firestorm upon you! You're gonna have to call the fucking United Nations and get a fucking binding resolution to keep me from fucking destroying you. I'm talking about a scorched earth, motherfucker! I will massacre you! I WILL FUCK YOU UP!"

Now, I have to get back to planning my next expedition to some crap hole war zone and practicing my Pashto. 

Updated Jan. 14  4:45pm & Again 10:20pm

Just got off the phone with Roger L. Simon of Pajama's Media.

Evidently I've stirred a few things up.

Roger's spoken with Joe and assures me that Joe's not in favor of a blanket ban on reporters on the battlefield and embeds.  I trust Roger's statement and Joe.

Roger gave me some background on what spurred Joe's initial comments on the street and his comments during an on-set segment on PJTV.

Here is what Joe said that made my jaw drop:

WURZELBACHER: you don’t need to see what’s happening every day, that’s my personal opinion, you don’t have to share it. But, you know, okay, you don’t have to see, you know, 800 dead, 801 dead. It’s like they drill that in your head. … They want you to sit there saying there are so many people dying. You know these are large, these are numbers, you know I don’t want to take away from that. Let me, uh, think about how to say that again. Just essentially, they keep drilling it into your head, newscast after newscast after newscast.

I think the military should decide what information to give the media and then the media can release it to the public. I don’t believe they need to be in the front lines with soldiers, I don’t believe they need to, uh, you know, be bothering the military for information or for access to certain areas. (Emphasis added)

I saw that on PJTV during an on-set interview.  I nearly fell out of my chair.  I generally agree with the first paragraph, but the second one is a bad idea. 

The first remarks like that were made on the street and off the cuff which I gave him a pass on.  On the street comments are so fast I'll give anyone a pass.  But when he said it on-set, in a sit-down interview in such a blanket way, he was advocating yielding the media battlespace to the enemy.  He didn't realize it, but that is what that statement is.  There is really no other way to read his statement than to think he means no reporters on the front lines.  No elaboration, no caveats.

Roger gave me the back story.  If the backstory had even been hinted at, I would have given the blanket statement a pass.

Joe caught a glimpse of the sausage being made.

As I stated below, embeds with an infantry unit are at the discretion of the commander.

Sometimes this almost resembles lining the reporters up and picking teams--except some people don't get picked.

If you were to suddenly be an infantry officer and had to pick a reporter to embed with your unit on an operation, would you pick Michael Yon or Glenn Greenwald or Al Jazeera or Reuters?

I would pick Yon.  Which would make Greenwald and the rest throw a fit.

An observer who is unfamiliar with the media battlespace would probably throw up his arms and say screw this, none of you should be here, unaware of the reprecussions or that preventing even handed reporters like John Burns, Brian Bennett and others would actually increase the power of the enemy within the media battlespace.

Unfortunately, that got caught on camera on the street and then he repeated in an on-set interview.

I've been there when those selections are made.  I've been there when I was allowed to go on the mission and another reporter had to stay on base.

Roger says some the little dust up will addressed and we both had a great laugh how this got spun out of control.  Roger is a friend and I trust him.

Roger also gave me a preview of some upcoming reports and they are what Joe does best and what I have enjoyed about his coverage. 

I hope this never gets lost in the translation:  Joe is wonderful when he is relating the story of regular working people in a dire situation.

As a child-less bachelor who has spent the better part of the last few years in a war zone, the things that Joe picks up on would never occur to me.  Which makes him better than I or others who ply the nuts and bolts combat reporting trade.

The ultimate irony in all this is that Joe became famous for asking Obama a question that resulted in an off the cuff remark that people pounced on. 

----------- 

Previously in this space I remarked that PJTV's sending Joe The Plumber to Israel felt like a shark-jumping publicity stunt and it was a risk that could put PJTV's credibility at risk.

After watching a few reports , I felt Joe was fine, when he related things as the average Joe that he is.  When he expereinces a rocket attack, then walks past a playground, he thinks in terms of a suburban father.  This is a very good angle and plays to his strengths.

Where Joe gets into trouble is every time he moves beyond that angle, specifically in a long report where he says reporters should not be out in the battle with the troops.

That means Joe thinks Michael Yon, Michael Totten, Bill Roggio & his team, myself and others should not be running around with infantry units.

PJTV, the first majorly funded new media venture of its kind, hired, as its first star middle east reporter, a man who thinks the U.S. Military and IDF should yield the media battle space to the enemy.

I don't know what fantasy world Joe lives in, but the media is going to cover a war however they can get access to it.  If the U.S. military or IDF doesn't allow access, you can bet the Taliban, Hamas, Hezbollah, Al Qaida, Jaish al Mahdi, etc. will become the primary distributors of information.  Heck, they already are.

Luckily General David Petraeus sees things differently and in the counter insurgency field manual stated clearly that the media should be encouraged to embed with infantry units for long stretches of time.

And this is the hazard of sending Joe to be a media organization's star correspondent.

Far from being a burden, the media is an important compenent of modern 4th Generation Warfare.

First, in the embedding programs of the Western military, unit commanders have the option to take on an embed.  More often than not, the command puts me right in the thick of the action, even putting me in place so I can cover a large operation and allowing me to sit in on classified mission briefings.

LTC Valery Kaeveny, LTC Patrick Frank, General Mark Gurganus & LTC James McGrath put me repeatedly at the pointy end of the spear.  (In my upcoming documentary 'Baghdad Happens' the pointy end of the spear chasing down a terrorist was a Captain, a PFC, then me.)

These officers understood that if I was not there--the story would not be told.

In modern warfare, winning or losing has as much to do with polling results, election returns and roll-call votes as what happens on the battlefield.  Modern 4th Generation warfare is about turning the voting public against military effort or foreign policy.  The public is influenced by what they see in the media.

Clamping down on media access always fails because someone else then provides the content and seizes the battle space.

Which is why back in 2005 I bought a camera and a plane ticket and went to Iraq.  There was a part of the story that was not being told and I quit my job and rolled the dice to tell it.  In a perfect world, the media would already be telling that story, but we do not live in a perfect world, so I did what I felt needed to be done.

I wasn't on Fox & Friends before I left or any radio shows.  It took months of churning out copy and video before anyone in the blogosphere even noticed me.  My local paper still hasn't done the "local guy makes movie in Iraq" story yet.

By making a 15-minute-of-fame political media celebrity its point man in Israel, PJTV took a risk and they've now been bitten by it.

Joe is now the face of PJTV.  His saying that reporters should not be with front line soldiers undercuts any effort by PJTV to put reporters on the front lines of a war.

If Joe had his way, I could not have filed this report , or this report or made these documentaries .

Joe would make the government the dispenser of information--gee, what could go wrong with that?

The plumber should stick to what he does best as a media personality--relating things as a father and skilled tradesman trying to make a living.  When he moves beyond that, he is out of his depth.

UPDATE Wed Jan. 14 1:55pm

"You know, every unit should be set up like you guys are?" Sergeant Hutch said.

"Set up how?" I asked.

"Old experienced NCO's, grunts, and vehicles with optics.  And an embedded reporter like you."

The embedded reporter part surprised me. 

We were on a long mission.  The battalion was clearing Kharmah, again, and the platoon I was embedded with was tasked with hunting down some vile decapitators who called themselves the Green Battalion.

This was the second operation Hutch and his sniper team had been attached to the platoon and I had gotten to know him a little bit.

Hutch was one of the top snipers in Fallujah.  A serious operator who looked through the scope and killed insurgents, pulling the trigger betwen heart beats.

Although we personally got along well, I didn't expect that he would care much for a cameraman along on missions.  I asked him why he thought more units should have reporters embedded.

"If they are like you," he clarified, meaning former military, or in good shape and not likely to get in the way.

I still didn't get it.  So he explained it to me.  At that time in the Summer of 2005 the media's coverage of the war was farmed out to stringers who shot video or stills of the daily car bombing.  I was the only reporter running around Fallujah.  All the public saw of the war was a narrow snap shot, not the full picture and it would take a lot more embeds like me to show the full picture.

Over the years, I've seen a lot of embeds.  Some are good some are bad.  Some develop close bonds with units and soldiers.  The Strykers adopted Maya Alleruzzo.  Duce Five adopted Michael Yon.  The Regulars of 1-22 adopted Brian Bennett.

What I have found over the years is that units and soldiers don't like parachute embeds, the reporters who drop in for a day and leave.

Sergeants Michael Copney and Kenneth Edwards, who are featured in my upcoming documentary, made that point to me on a hot summer afternoon in Fallujah Bahgdad.

A New York Times reporter did a parachute.  Dropped in, rolled around with the Battalion Commander LTC Patrick Frank, then moved on.

They thought it was really cool that I went out on missions with them and took the time to interview them on camera.  They also liked movie night, where we watched the video I shot of a successful mission.

I write all of this in response to a commentor on Hotair who said that embeds are a burden and that Joe the Plumber is right--there shouldn't be reporters with infantry units.

The commentor must have glossed over the paragraph where I described embedding.

Unit commanders can decline an embed.  If they can't handle one, they don't take one.  If their mission is too complicated, they don't take one.  I've seen reporters who were just not physically able to keep up with grunts and they are not embedded.  I've even heard of them being dis-embedded and shipped to Baghdad and told never to come back.

Embedding is at the discretion of the unit commander, not the reporter.

That said, I've had units that were sceptical at first, until they got to know me.

1st Sgt. Gerald Cornell, of Battle Company was skeptical, but then he told me that once he saw me in action, running across rooftops with his soldiers he knew I was the "real deal."

One Captain, one of the greatest Captains of the war, Brian Ducote, asked me to stay on with Battle Company.  His men had started to see me as one of their own.  But I moved on.

I make myself move on.  It hurts too much to stay with them.  I will have to leave them at some point and the sooner I leave, the better it is for all of us.

I learned this lesson after spending months with Vengeance Platoon mentioned above.  I was not just a reporter, I was THEIR reporter.

On the last day of the last mission, we got hit by an IED.  Our interpreter, Ali, lost part of a leg and arm.  Everyone was angry, including me.

Ali was sitting in the passenger's back seat.  I always sat in the same seat.  If the humvee I was in had gotten hit, I would have been the one losing a leg and arm.

The next day Corporal Matt Stillman said something that showed the true inherent danger of embeds, "If that had been you, instead of Ali....it would have been a massacre."

We were all angry about Ali, but we had only known him a few days.  I had been with them for months.  The anger could have easily boiled over into something horrible.

I will never live with a unit for more than a few weeks again.

My criticism of Joe is not of the segments on PJTV.  I enjoy them.  He points out things that are never covered.  His perspective as a suburban father, a skilled tradesman is great.  He sees things I would not.  I'm a bachelor and would not be able to put what happens during a rocket attack into terms as a parent.

I've been mortared and rocketed so many times, I would probably just stand there--which is what I've done the past few times it happened in Iraq.

But when he strays into areas he is not an expert, he commits and err we all do.

The strength of the blogosphere and new media is the diversified expertise.  Law professors blogging about the Law.  Screenwriters and directors blogging about Hollywood.

My expertise is in polling, media rating points, TV News, running political campaigns and warfare.

When you throw them all together, I'm an interesting expert in those areas.

I do not blog often.  I do not blog about court cases or most of the passing things in the news.  I don't even blog about Iraq much.

I blogged about Joe the Plumber because PJTV's putting him in Israel has established him as the most recognizeable new media foreign/war correspondent and what he does reflects on me.

In my first post I explained why I wanted thim to do well and explained my apprehensions.

Those apprehensions are now being seen as justified as Joe went beyond his expertise.

His comments about embedded reporters shows how little he knows about modern 4th Generation Warfare and how embed programs work.

I understand that in a perfect world the media would be fair and truly balanced and accurate.  But we do not live in that fantasy perfect world and never will.

To end embed programs would create a vaccume in the information battlespace.  That vaccume will be filled with someone.

The solution to the media, that Sgt. Hutch lamented in 2005 is not to ban embeds, but to get more embedded reporters on the front lines.

The reports of the daily car bombing were not coming from embeds.  They were coming from stringers working unilaterally.

Joe's proposed solution to his complaints about the media will exacerbate what he seeks to eliminate and the stories of the soldiers and their daily successes would never be told.

Because he did not think before he spoke and then said it again, he showed himself to be out of his depth.

I would be out of my depth trying to relate what it is like as a father to contemplate rocket attacks.  I'm not a father, I'm not even married.  Joe as a father, is prefect to relate that part of the ongoing war.  Joe should stick to his expertise.