War in the Age of Technology: Myriad Faces of Modern Armed Conflict

3. The Impact of Communications and the Media on the Art of War since 1815

chapter 3 ✦ ✦ ✦ ✦ ✦ ✦ ✦ ✦ ✦ ✦ ✦ The Impact of Communications and the Media on the Art of War since 1815 Stephen Badsey Introduction The very start of the twenty-first century has witnessed a preoccupation in the developed world with both communications technology and the mass news media. This has included a belief (often expressed in terms of very deep conviction) that both communications and the media have played a critical role in the wars of the 1990s and will do so again in the future. In light of this preoccupation, it is understandable that historians have begun to trace the impact of communications and of the news media on warfare back through past conflicts. Most of this research is new, emerging in a comparatively underdeveloped field. What is presented in this chapter therefore represents a synthesis of historical work in progress, rather than a definitive account. A critical finding of this research has been that, in historical practice , military communications have developed intertwined with civilian communications, and not separately; and both have developed in a wide social and political context. In some cases the development has been principally military, and the effects on wider society have been correspondingly delayed. In others, military communications and the art of war have been changed by what have been essentially civilian developments. A recent example of the first case 66 is the Internet, which was conceived in the 1960s as a “post-apocalypse command grid,”1 a method of maintaining strategic military communications in the event of a surprise nuclear attack. An example of the second case is television, an essentially civilian development of the 1930s that has had a large impact on military affairs, including communications. Sometimes the two developments have been virtually indistinguishable, in cases such as the civil and military evolution of radio communications. While studies of military communications have tended to ignore or marginalize the issue of civilian war reporting, much research in the field of military-media relations has focused chiefly on the role of civilian war correspondents, whose writings and memoirs are often a valuable historical source. It is also quite common for general histories of wars to quote from contemporary newspapers or other media sources as authoritative evidence, rather than reflecting on the circumstances that led to their production. But the role of the war correspondent in campaign has been only the most visible facet of a more complicated interrelationship that reveals much about the nature of industrialized society as well as about industrialized warfare . Part of the value of studying any government’s behavior toward the mass media at war, and also the response of the mass media, is that historians have found such behavior to represent an extreme form of peacetime practices, rather than an exceptional case.2 Any historical assessment of the role of the mass communications media in war and of the military-media relationship since about 1815 must therefore take into account a wide range of factors . Among these factors are: how far the country had embraced concepts of civil society, and the role of the media within them; the media within that society as an institution, and its structures; what the nature of warfare was, and was believed to be at the time; and the physical means available both for military and for media communications . Above all, there must be an understanding of how the relationship between government, armed forces, and “public opinion ”—however that difficult term is defined—worked, or was believed to work. A simple description of who the war correspondents the impact of communications and the media 67 were and how they reported the war completes such a picture, rather than defining it. Research into communications, media, and warfare not only has revealed complex interrelationships but has provided valuable new insights into the nature of how warfare has developed. It is well understood that technological developments do not necessarily impact on human society to cause change immediately but may be taken up or delayed in their impact through a wide variety of social, cultural, or practical factors. This has turned out to be as true of developments in communications and the media as in military technology.3 It has also been the case that some—if by no means all—influential military writers since 1815 have included an understanding of changes in communications as part of their theories of warfare. Some successful commanders also have included an...