Chalmers Johnson - The Sorrows of Empire - Militarism, Secrecy, and the End of the Republic

The Pentagon was so pleased by this development that it decided to extend its newly found leverage to the nation’s universities and graduate schools, most of which withhold their career placement services from employers that discriminate on the basis of race, sex, religion, national origin, disability, or sexual orientation. Until August 2002, Harvard Law School, for instance, managed to bar recruiters for the Judge Advocate General’s Corps of the military because qualified students who wish to serve are rejected if they are openly lesbian, gay, or bisexual. However, the Department of Defense has reinterpreted federal law to say that if any part of a university denies access to military recruiters the entire university will lose all federal funds. Harvard could not afford to risk the loss of $300 million in federal grants and therefore forced its law school to comply. The military says that it will continue to bar openly lesbian, gay, or bisexual lawyers because they allegedly threaten “unit cohesion.” As George Fisher, a professor at Stanford Law School, commented, “On the battlefield, this justification is merely improbable; in a JAG Corps law office, it is absurd.” 25

Another aspect of the Pentagon’s creative efforts to attract more recruits is its support for prowar Hollywood films. This is nothing new. The first Hollywood film about aerial combat, made with military advice, personnel, and equipment in return for an advance look at the script and the right to make changes, was Wings in 1927. As Lawrence H. Suid, a historian of military films, has written, “What Price Glory, Wings, Air Force, Sands of Iwo Jima, The Longest Day, and hundreds of other Hollywood films have created the image of combat as exciting, as a place to prove masculinity, as a place to challenge death in a socially acceptable manner. As a result, until the late 1960s, American war movies have always ended in victory, with our soldiers, sailors, marines, and fliers running faster than their enemy—whether German, Italian, or Japanese. These screen victories reinforced the image of the American military as all-conquering, all-powerful, always right.” 26During and after Vietnam there were some changes— Patton (1970) introduced an element of realism into war films and the Pentagon declined to assist Apocalypse Now, about one officer in Vietnam sent to kill another, who has gone mad. In the post-Vietnam era, it also did not support films like Demi Moore’s G.I Jane, featuring a woman determined to join the all-male SEALs. Soon, however, the old pattern was largely reestablished. Each branch of the military now has a Los Angeles office, and the relationship between producers and Pentagon “project officers” sent on location to watch everything being filmed and offer advice is closer than ever. 27

A contemporary example of the direct ties between Hollywood and recruiting efforts was Disney Studio’s Pearl Harbor. The movie premiered on May 21, 2001, with a special showing on the flight deck of the nuclear-powered aircraft carrier USS John C. Stennis. Bleachers had been built, a huge screen installed, and the carrier moved (without its aircraft) from its home port in San Diego to Pearl Harbor specifically for this purpose. The navy and Disney invited more that 2,500 guests to the film’s premiere. As the credits reveal, numerous U.S. military commands helped make the movie and in turn extracted changes in the scenario in order to portray the military in a favorable light and promote the idea that service in the armed forces is romantic, patriotic, and fun. According to the Chicago Tribune, military recruiters even set up tables in the lobbies of theaters where Pearl Harbor was being shown in hopes of catching a few youths on their way out of this three-hour recruiting pitch. 28

Disney and the Pentagon also worked closely with the media to promote the idea that Pearl Harbor recounted the achievements of what the NBC broadcaster Tom Brokaw has called “the Greatest Generation” in his book of that title—as distinct from the Vietnam generation, which the Pentagon would prefer the public to forget. On May 26, 2001, the day after the film opened in theaters, the Disney-owned ABC-TV network ran a one-hour special on the Pearl Harbor attack narrated by David Brinkley, and the next day rival NBC broadcast a two-hour National Geographic special on the subject, featuring Tom Brokaw himself. The NBC cable affiliate MSNBC then put on a two-hour program about the survivors of the Pearl Harbor attack narrated by General Norman Schwarzkopf, commander in the Gulf War. 29

After the September 11 attacks, the Pentagon introduced a short movie advertisement presumably meant to bolster civilian support for the armed forces and designed to be shown before numerous films. Entitled Enduring Freedom: The Opening Chapter, the trailer was created by Lieutenant Colonel James Kuhn at a cost of $1.2 million. “Operation Enduring Freedom” was, of course, the title of the military’s campaign against Afghanistan. Although some parents objected to attaching the film—which shows scenes of the airplanes ramming New York’s World Trade Center—to G-rated children’s movies, the public seemed to accept its running with films like The Four Feathers or Sweet Home Alabama. The military’s camera crews shot over 250 hours of footage in making the film—on location with an antiterrorist squad in Kabul, Afghanistan, at the marine base at Twentynine Palms, California, and in the Indian Ocean, Hawaii, Yuma, Arizona, and Norfolk, Virginia. The leftover footage will be made into recruiting commercials and DVDs. In a tie-in with Regal Entertainment Group, the nation’s largest theater chain, the Pentagon also planned to show the short before all feature presentations on Regal’s 4,000 screens. 30

Closely related to the Pentagon’s film activities are its general public relations operations. These include helping the mass media portray the military in a favorable light, cultivating promilitary civilian groups at public expense, and suppressing information the military does not want Congress or the public to have. As with support for war movies, so the manipulation of the media to whip up pretexts for military action has a long history in the United States. Prowar and anticommunist propaganda has been a constant in public life since the country’s entry into World War II. In the 1970s, uniformed and civilian militarists’ obsession with closing the Vietnam “credibility gap” spurred a whole new effort. Official lies about military progress during that war and their subsequent exposure by the press caused Pentagon managers to professionalize news management and look for ways to suppress negative aspects of any American military campaign.

“Operation Urgent Fury,” the Reagan administration’s October 1983 invasion of the small Caribbean island of Grenada, allegedly to rescue some American students, figures prominently in the history of the Pentagon’s manipulation of the press. With memories of Vietnam fresh in their minds, Defense Secretary Caspar Weinberger and the commander of the invasion forces, Vice Admiral Joseph W. Metcalf III, banned all reporters from the island. It was the first U.S. conflict from which the media were excluded at the start of military operations. After seizing the island, the military even took a journalist who had been on the island prior to the invasion into custody and transported him to the navy’s flagship. More significantly, reporters who tried to get to Grenada independently accused navy aircraft of attacking their boats. The claim by critical reporters that press restraints were designed to hide military embarrassments was almost certainly true given the numerous instances of faulty intelligence, failed communications, and general incompetence during the taking of the largely undefended island.