Lessons from the Falklands

The weekend was the time to be a tourist in London, taking snaps of the Trooping of the Colour and the Falklands commemorations. The week of Falklands memories started for me at the Imperial War Museum with a talk given by Robert Fox, Brian Hanrahan, Michael Nicholson and Sir David Ramsbotham, the army's public relations officer during the conflict (nicknamed 'Rambo').

Having studied the Falklands war for a university project, I already knew how unprepared the forces was for a press presence. They simply didn't have a policy on how to deal with journalists: what to tell them, where to put them, how to communicate with them. The military was wholly and totally unprepared for press. The first journalists to sail with the navy were only six - and none were defence correspondents, unthinkable nowadays.

Brian Hanrahan told us how he just 'packed and left' with no idea behind the thinking and no experience at all in military matters. These days the BBC won't put a journalist near a conflict zone without a hostile environments course. The navy, as the most 'old school' and traditional of the forces, said at first they wouldn't take anyone. It was Margaret Thatcher of all people who said they must.

Robert Fox was told to go and watch the ships leave but received a late call telling him to pop along. The distrust of the navy was such that one commander said, 'keep the media out of it, if they're lucky, we'll tell them who won'. Michael Nicholson interjected at this point revealing that the last published 'regulations for correspondents' at that time (1982) was originally written in 1052 in the aftermath of the Suez crisis. Nobody had thought to update it as media relations was not a part of military strategy.

How different from now; just think of the media coverage of the commandos captured by the Iranians or the Abu Ghraib scandal - media control is crucial to winning a war.

I recently took part in a military exercise up in the Highlands and, although the military types we met were all friendly and generally well disposed towards the media, how true it rang when Brian Hanrahan recalled an Admiral who believed that the media were aboard his ship purely for distributing propaganda. As a journalist you are viewed by the military as part of the Military of Defence: you are only here through the courtesy of the military, so you better keep your mouth shut. This has a practical point as Mike Nicholson gives an example: if a journalist describes his surroundings as 'foggy' for atmosphere's sake, the enemy only has to look for the foggy area to get a good idea of your position. It's your life at stake as well as everyone on the ship.

However, the journalist has a duty to his readers, listeners and viewers to give a true picture, not propaganda. To describe the bawdiness and sometimes bizarre rituals of sailors before a battle, might not be to the taste of the military PR, but it makes our forces more human, more understandable to those back home and they will be much more accepting if things go wrong.

The journalist has to be careful and thoughtful when describing conflict. One's instinct might be to file the report immediately and escape censorship. With satellite technology this is becoming very possible. But Sir Ramsbotham disagreed hotly: 'it's not that simple. What you're seeing might not be what you think. Take Fallujah, for example'.

He also flagged up how blogging has introduced a completely new angle into war correspondence. The media have been blamed for giving away military routes in Iraq when, in fact, it was actually emails and blogs. Blogs can be important. Long before the official investigation, an anonymous forward interrogator was writing about abuse of villagers going to a prison called Abu Ghraib.

The line of information is as powerful as the line of force and, according to Ramsbotham, training is changing for this new world. In the Gulf, when British commandos were kidnappers, what happened was that the Iranians were in a spectrum of confrontation to conflict. Our government has got to be more intelligent when it comes to media management. Who's the best at spin, asked Robert Fox, 'not the West, but the man with the sad eyes, sitting in a cave in Pakistan: Osama Bin Laden'.

Even positive stories can be harmful, if they're not thought through. Brian Hanrahan described a story about how successful the British bomb disposal team had been in the Falklands. When the Argentinians read it, they discovered that was a problem with the fuses in their bombs and promptly fixed it. Ships were sunk. Information control in wars needs to be handled differently than the usual way the government damage handles. They save ministers' careers first when they should be saving lives.

Embedding journalists works for everyone. When journalists are allowed to mix with troops and report (with sensible restrictions) it keeps everyone honest. Said Brian Hanrahan: 'Our troops are mostly good people doing a good job - if journalists are scattered in amongst them it keeps them like that, rather than leaving the temptation to go wrong.'

Pictures

1: the panel chaired by Peter Snow
2: sailors onboard the flagship Ark Royal
3: Ark Royal, sailing up the Thames for the Falklands celebrations (more pictures here, courtesy of Victoria Cook)
4: me sailing towards Ark Royal