Just as the bow and arrow warfare that Thucydides witnessed is a far cry from the American laser guided missiles of the Gulf War, so too has the media and the relationship of the media with the military also changed quite drastically. In the United States the First Amendment guarantees freedom of the press, yet during warfare, it has always been necessary to limit this freedom for reasons of military secrecy and security. It is the paradoxical nature of the media-military relationship that there are times of national and international crisis in which the Constitutional rights of American citizens must be limited in order to preserve those same rights. Yet, throughout the last half of this century during which America suffered military loss in Vietnam, economic hardship at home, and political scandals such as "Watergate" and "Iran-Contra," information control and press restrictions have often occurred more in the interest of political security than national security. The tensions between freedom of the press and the needs of national security always become clearest during times of war when the American public is least capable of collecting its own information and most dependent on the press and the military to deliver it to them honestly and expeditiously.

To be sure, conflict between the press and military has existed since the founding of the United States. During the Revolutionary War newspapers were the American public's main sources of information, yet, they had little organized means of coverage so soldiers often doubled as correspondents. Despite this, George Washington complained in the Spring of 1777, "It is much to be wished that our printers were more discreet in many of their publications. We see in almost every paper proclamations or accounts transmitted by the enemy of an injurious nature." Soldiers continued to serve as reporters during the Mexican-American War of 1846-47. In that war the New Orleans Picayune assigned newsmen to the front for the first time ever, and the tradition of the war correspondent began. It did not take long for the antagonism to start between the American media and military. During the Civil War, unabashed press hater, General William Tecumseh Sherman, scorned the Northern press telling correspondents, "You fellows make the best paid spies that can be bought." One of the major reasons for Sherman and other officials' uneasiness about the press was the advent of the telegraph. With this new form of communications technology, word of military movements and operations could be transmitted faster than ever before sparking concern that information useful to the enemy might be revealed. During the Civil War, the military often took the step of suspending publication of newspapers for printing "false reports deemed harmful to the Northern cause," and for attacking the Lincoln administration. Though no formal policies of restricting press access to the battlefield were ever established and correspondents were accorded a great deal of freedom in combat zones, the Civil War set enduring precedents in the ways in which the civilian government and military would try to restrict future news reporting. The next major conflict, the Spanish-American War of 1898, saw the use of trans-ocean cables for the transmission of military orders as well as press reports. Though few restrictions were placed on the press in this predominantly naval war, bitter competition between journalists fighting to get the best stories caused a number of controversial secrecy lapses.

After the Spanish-American War the U.S. Army began to formulate the beginnings of its public relations program and press policy. In 1904 the first formal press release was distributed to correspondents, and in 1916 Douglas MacArthur was appointed as the War Department's first "press release officer." By World War I public relations was formally organized as an Army staff function. Though at first General John J. Pershing attempted to impose accreditation requirements and limitations on reporters in World War I, journalists generally had the freedom at the front lines to come and go as they pleased, living with soldiers in the trenches and even going "over the top" into battle if they so chose. But while the American press functioned rather freely at the front lines in Europe, back at home information and propaganda were being controlled and manipulated by the federal government to an unprecedented extent. President Woodrow Wilson created the Committee on Public Information (CPI) which among other things was responsible for the creation of anti-German propaganda, censoring and banning school text books, and even changing the name of sauerkraut to "liberty salad." In addition to the CPI, the Sedition Act of 1918 banned printing or uttering any criticism of the U.S. government.

Propaganda and censorship were also a significant aspect of World War II, but members of the press and the military today commonly have fond memories of their relationship during that time. Correspondents in Europe had a great deal of freedom to move with and observe allied troops although all of their film and copy had to pass through Army censors before transmission to the United States. Just before the allied invasion of Normandy, General Dwight D. Eisenhower outlined a rather liberal official policy towards the press, ordering his unit commanders to give correspondents "the greatest latitude in the gathering of legitimate news. They should be allowed to talk freely with officers and enlisted personnel and to see the machinery of war in operation in order to visualize and transmit to the public the condition under which the men from their countries are waging war against the enemy." Journalists had easy access, and at the height of the war there were some 2,000 reporters in action on all fronts and accompanying soldiers nearly everywhere. As for the censorship, Walter Cronkite told the story of how,

The modern media technologies of World War II were newsreels and radio. Newsreels became a powerful tool with which the government presented the war to the American public, and radio began to transmit live broadcasts long distances. Journalist Edward R. Murrow's proposal to broadcast without a script from a London rooftop during German bombing raids so concerned allied military officials "that he had to record a series of trial runs on phonograph discs. He submitted them for approval but they were lost. So he had to record six more before he could persuade the authorities that he could speak off the cuff without violating the censorship rules." Though tensions between the military and the media still existed, throughout World War II the American press was overwhelmingly willing to censor themselves and undergo military censorship for the sake of the allied cause.

Like World War II, in Korea the press went into battle with the first U.S. troops, was present at the front lines, and went ashore aboard landing craft during the invasion of Inchon. Journalists, however, eventually asked the military to impose censorship on their stories. In seeking the lesser of two evils, correspondents preferred mandatory censorship to what one called the "'you write what you like and we'll shoot you if we don't like it' approach." Without such censorship, the military authorities were at liberty to ban reporters whenever they objected to their stories. This arrangement, apparently acceptable to both the military and the media, constituted what might be labelled collaberative censorship.

Thus, at the outset of the Vietnam War, the media and the military enjoyed a generally cooperative relationship, but it was a relationship which must also have compromised journalist's roles as independent observers. Indeed, in no other war before Vietnam had the press been treated so well. Newsmen had access to all of the amenities enjoyed by rear-echelon officers such as cold beer, hot showers, and televised baseball. It was official policy to give the press as much access as physically possible. Helicopters were often assigned to bringing reporters to the field, and they could hitch rides on choppers almost as easily as in passing jeeps in World War II. Journalists could usually have their footage back in Saigon and ready to be shipped to their U.S. offices the same day they filmed it. In March 1968, at the height of the Vietnam press coverage there were 648 newsmen accredited though there were never more than 100 of them in the field at one time. Of the several thousand journalists who passed through Vietnam during the war years, only nine of them ever had their accreditation suspended for breaking the media coverage ground rules.

At the beginning of the conflict the American press was overwhelmingly supportive of the Kennedy and Johnson administration's actions in Vietnam. Television reporting also portrayed America's involvement in a positive way. "The morale of American troops was very good when the war began, and most television was filled with vignettes of brave soldiers and their powerful weaponry, which of course, made wonderful visuals for TV. The 'big picture' was filled in by military planners." However, shortly before and after the surprise of the Tet Offensive on January 31, 1968, the American press and the public's skepticism about the conduct of the war increased dramatically. Tet seemed to prove what one Wall Street Journal article described as early as 1965, that "time after time high-ranking representatives of government -- in Washington and Saigon -- have obscured, confused, or distorted news from Vietnam, or have made fatuously erroneous evaluations about the course of the war for public consumption." Public opinion began to turn against the war as casualties rose and television invited bloody images into Americans living rooms every evening. Whether the press influenced public opinion or reflected it will be argued for years to come, but one thing is clear: because American journalists in Vietnam had the freedom to observe the action and accurately report what they saw, the press had the ability to illuminate the inaccuracies of the official version of the war and thus successfully fulfilled its role as the American public's proxy observers. As Colonel Harry Summers noted, "In Vietnam, the objective, and hence the value [of waging war], was deliberately not established, and the price was eventually deemed exorbitant. It was not the news media which reported the price that lost the war; it was the government which, especially in the case of President Lyndon Johnson, deliberately failed to establish its value." The failure of the Johnson and Nixon administrations to develop coherent strategies and the fundamentally flawed reasoning behind the war were what lost Vietnam, not the reporting of American journalists.

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This thesis intends to examine the relationship between the media and the military during the three major American military operations that followed Vietnam. It will outline the changes that have taken place in this relationship, the factors that have caused these changes, and explore their implications. During Operation Urgent Fury in Grenada in 1983 the American press was completely excluded from the mission and barred from the island until days afterwards. Though the military had never before placed such extreme restrictions upon the press, the American public was overwhelmingly supportive of such measures. Nevertheless, in the aftermath of the Grenada operation, a commission known as the Sidle Panel was established to discuss new ways in which the media and the military might work together during times of warfare and secret operations. The Sidle Panel established a system of press pools that was first used in 1989 during the Operation Just Cause invasion of Panama. The pool system was supposed to allow the Pentagon to summon a small group of journalists who would supply all news organizations of various media with information on military operations. Rather than being given the freedom to travel with troops, however, the press pool arrived late in Panama, was locked in a windowless room on a U.S. base for hours, and only then was taken by military escorts to locations where the action had already ended. By most accounts, the Panama press pool was a dismal failure. Just over one year later Operation Desert Storm began in the Persian Gulf. From the beginning the war was a major media event. For the first time ever in warfare, for example, the American media was able to transmit on live television the results of the bombing of an enemy capital while in progress. As over 1,400 members of the media scurried about the Persian Gulf region during the forty-three day war, the military reached new levels of sophistication in its methods of information management and manipulation. Yet, even though the American public was bombarded with news coverage from the Persian Gulf throughout the war, the overwhelming majority of what people saw and read was controlled by officials in Washington, Riyadh, and Dhahran. Clearly, the media-military relationship that emerged in the Gulf War was quite unlike anything that had previously existed.

Three main factors caused the changes in relations between the media and the military from Grenada to Panama to the Persian Gulf. First, in the years following the Vietnam war, the American press became intricately tied to what became known as the Vietnam Syndrome -- the national feelings of self-doubt and insecurity that followed the war, and its associated political, economic, and social fall-out. Many in the military and the public made the media a scapegoat for the loss of the war, and decisions were made in the Pentagon that the media would never again have as much freedom to cover war as it did in Vietnam. The nation's memories of Vietnam loomed over Grenada, Panama, and the Persian Gulf and were a major factor in defining the media-military relationship in all three of these military operations.

A second factor that continued to define and change this relationship was that of technology. During the 1983 invasion of Grenada, CNN and satellite transmission of remote television broadcasts were just coming to fruition. Less than ten years later, in the Persian Gulf, a reporter's ability to send pictures to a global audience from nearly anywhere in the world had increased exponentially. The political and social implications of this media power during a time of war are profound. From the days of the telegraph in the Civil War to the Gulf War's satellite television, the on-going conflict between the media and the military has been a record of both institutions trying to come to grips with the implications of new technology.

The final defining point of the media-military relationship in Grenada, Panama, and the Persian Gulf was the growing culture clash between the media and the military. Even though both of these institutions play key roles in American democracy, during warfare they inevitably come into tremendous conflict with each other. Though a certain amount of tension between the media and military is to be expected, reporters and soldiers must fulfill their respective obligations. The military must have the freedom to fight a war, yet, the press must have the freedom to observe and report it.

The invasions of Grenada and Panama, and the war in the Persian Gulf illustrated that the fundamental problems of the media-military relationship that have existed since the founding of the nation still exist and have grown more visible and more acute. The relationship that emerged in the aftermath of Vietnam often has not functioned in the best interests of either the press, the military, or the American public which both are supposed to serve. California Senator Hiram Johnson said in 1917 that "the first casualty when war comes is the truth." As Grenada, Panama, and the Gulf War have shown, this is truer today than ever.