Quote Originally Posted by zenpundit View Post
Always good to hear from you, Wilf and glad that you helped get this discussion flowing. Your views here on the media and warfare are neat, plausible and wrong
I don't fear being wrong. I fear being confused... which currently I am not...

The media is not "irrelevant". If commanders find themselves eschewing perfectly legal and militarily efficient options because of how they would "look" under conditions of a panopticon battlefield, then the political effect of the media is one of the variables to which modern armies must adapt. If the adaptation is a continual circumscribing of military operations over time, then I submit that they are not being particularly creative in adapting.
I never said the media is irrelevant. I said it is "utterly irrelevant unless commanders are taking their orders from the BBC." The political dimension is decided by the chain of command (civilian) - not the media. Politics is why wars occur and how they are conducted. Media influence is ENTIRELY political. The impact of the media is only relevant to the the policy being sought by force. If it is not, then commanders are asking Media permission or approval to do stuff - which is like asking an 8 years old for advice on marriage.

Warfare has oscillated historically through periods of stability where tactics, weaponry, accepted rules of engagement and parley, treatment of prisoners went unchanged in significant ways for decades or even centuries. I agree with you that "adaption has always been required" but as institutions, militaries are often very conservative. It often takes many hard knocks for them to give up beloved but outdated practices, be they caste-based military systems, red coats, bronze cannon, horse cavalry or battleships.
So show me successful armies that failed to adapt? 1914-18 and 1936-45 saw far more radical changes in Warfare than anything seen today. Why do we now think it "requires adaptation." Kind of silly to even say it, in an historical context.

This can be contrasted with periods of innovation where new ideas - for example, metal weapons, writing, the stirrup, gunpowder, close order drill, republican government, nationalism, industrial mass production, railroad timetables, atomic bombs - disrupted customary patterns of warfare. Some of these inventions amounted to game-changers for warfare.
Again, show me a successful Army or society that failed to notice this. What is more, where are new technologies used by our enemies since 2001? - I submit none.

Wilf, what democratic government with a modern military conducting operations is not going to expect its military leaders to make an effort a priori to account for the possible political effects of global media in their planning?
Whose media and effect on who? You cannot please everybody. Military forces, use violence to gain political outcomes. "The Media" is not a cohesive coherent body. What play well with Fox, will be called a "war crime" with the BBC, and no one in Texas cares what anyone in Cairo things.

German media cared very little about the alleged atrocities of German troops in Belgium in 1914, yet they became a de-facto "cause for war" for the British population.

Modernity is relative, not absolute. Luther had the printing press and the Bible in the vernacular. For his time, that was "modernity" and it had an explosive political impact that transformed the military dynamic of the Holy Roman Empire by giving rise to Protestant powers.
So why not point this out and stop panicking about complexity and media? Do we really think that the political dynamic of today is more complex than that in Europe at the time of Luther?

The critical relationship is between military force and politics. Media only bears on the latter - as CvC explained. Surely the aim here is to explain something simply and usefully, not compound the problem.