WHENEVER I COMPARE NOTES WITH FELLOW REPORTERS who’ve covered wars, we’re not likely to agree on everything. I for one don’t like the label “War Correspondent,” which makes it sound like a specialty, one being deliberately pursued.

The truth is, certainly in my case, covering military conflict is simply part of the warp-and-weft of practicing international journalism generally. For me such conflicts have tended to be guerrilla wars, not so often what’s called conventional warfare - set-piece, nation-on-nation wars, army to army.

But there’s one major, fundamental point on which I and other correspondents do always agree, especially those of us operating in or with a base in the United States.

I can’t improve upon the way that Nancy Youssef, who covers military affairs for the Atlantic magazine, encapsulated our work recently. She’s been a past-president of the Pentagon Press Association and is naturally still a member. I’ll quote her directly and at some length, because what she has to say about the job is worth registering in full, I think:

“Military leaders have rarely been delighted to see me … I have reported news that they didn’t want publicized, as well as information they were eager to share. I have traveled in and out of Iraq and Afghanistan, prepared to die in pursuit of informing others, losing colleagues along the way and getting seriously injured myself. To witness the horrors of war means to forever carry scars. And yet, I am one of the lucky ones. I survived.

That part of Youssef’s summary made me appreciate afresh my own considerable good fortune. In a half-century of work, my worst injury was once a bloodied knee, caused when diving for cover from a hail of army bullets in Northern Ireland. But let’s return to the point Youssef was building up toward making …

“My job has been to ask questions on behalf of my fellow citizens, seeking information we all have the right to know about national security in the United States.”

With this clear journalistic job-description in mind, we should note something that happened recently, considerably in advance of this week’s summons home to Quantico, Va, for hundreds of top American military commanders, wherever in the world they may have been stationed -- a summons issued by the Defense, or is it now War Secretary, Pete Hegseth? What happened back on September 19th was possibly much more serious in its effect: the Pentagon radically changed its rules for journalists.

Reporters will no longer be accredited to enter the Pentagon building unless they sign on to an entirely new arrangement. In the past, they had to sign a one-page agreement with stipulations to … be careful in locking office-doors, and to wear their ID badges above the waist. The new restrictions are very different. They effectively put severe limits on news-gathering activity … and impose penalties on reporters seeking information outside of what the Department’s decision-makers want to have released. Under these rules, running now to 17 pages, “information must be approved for public release by an appropriate authorizing official before it is released, even if it is unclassified.”

Anyone who does publish information that’s not been thus pre-approved will have their accreditation revoked, which would leave them barred from the Pentagon — and it seems from US military facilities worldwide. Reporters who refuse to sign will lose that badge … which has, until now, given them the right to work in a building that’s been available to the press — through wars and national crises, under Democratic administrations and Republican ones — ever since it came into existence in 1943.

To quote the Washington Post:

“The new agreement represents a sharp departure from the practice over decades of military leaders who have felt comfortable openly talking to, and going into war zones with, the press -- In their midst or alongside them.”

WHAT TRANSPIRED THIS WEEK, THE MASSING of America’s senior serving officers at the Marine Corps base in Quantico, naturally enough fast became public knowledge, and was fully covered journalistically, but at first it had been shrouded in some mystery. Hegseth’s summons had not been accompanied with any explanation of the purpose or the intended content of the great gathering. So early on, the press gave it labels like “highly unusual,” “unprecedent,” even “hush-hush” – that last term, rather silly in the circumstances, came from the usually serious-minded and well-informed Axios news outlet.

Many in national security circles felt there were grounds for concern about the meeting, … and so Hegseth felt he had to retaliate ahead of time. A retired senior officer, Lt. Gen. Ben Hodges, tweeted on the X platform a historical reminder for us, that in 1936, German generals were “called to a surprise assembly in Berlin” and “required to swear a personal oath to the Führer.” Hegseth reacted with his own comment: “Cool story, General,” the Secretary wrote. That was presumably meant to be sarcastic – but then again, you can’t ever be sure about Hegseth’s reading of political and military history.

We can recall, at the risk of being unfair, that Hegseth faced allegations of financial mismanagement, alcohol misuse, and sexual misconduct just before his confirmation. Those who had accused him included his own mother, who’d written to him that I QUOTE “you are an abuser of women,” but she retracted her charge in time for his confirmation hearing. The Senate did confirm him, but only with Vice President J D Vance having to cast a tie-breaking vote.

One of Hegseth’s few achievements in office so far has been to fire without cause roughly two dozen senior officers — a disproportionate number of them female. The list includes Admiral Lisa Franchetti, the Navy’s first female chief-of-operations; Admiral Linda Fagan, the Coast Guard’s first female commandant; and Vice Adm Shoshana Chatfield, who represented US forces within the NATO alliance. Oh, and he also replaced Admiral Yvette Davids, the first woman to lead the US Naval Academy, substituting for her a male general, it goes without saying, from the Marine Corps. If any officer among those dismissed by Hegseth has been male, it’s highly likely that he’d also be Black, like (very notably) Air Force General Charles Q. Brown, who was stripped of his top position as Chairman of the Joint Chiefs-of-Staff.

What this week’s occasion turned out to be of course was a supposedly necessary reaffirmation of our military’s so-called “Warrior Ethos.” So what is this ethos, exactly? Hegseth’s notion of what it means, has been rather clear for a long time. It underlies the overarching mission he’s assigned himself, employing his own adaptation of the original MAGA slogan – for him it’s “Make America Lethal Again"

And what’s the underlying belief? Well, in a podcast back in November, around the time of his nomination, he made this very specific statement:

“I’m straight up just saying we should not have women in combat roles. It hasn’t made us more effective. Hasn’t made us more lethal. Has made fighting more complicated.”
In his book titled The War on Warriors he indulged in some noteworthy, reductive logic for his position: “Dads push us to take risks. Moms put the training wheels on our bikes. We need moms. But not in the military, especially not in combat units.”

In the end this week, there was little new to report coming out of the mass assembly of top brass. That’s even counting the originally uninvited attendance of that unstoppable newsmaker, President Donald Trump, who of course just had to be there. (We can safely assume that he simply couldn’t bear to have been left out.)

*US “War Secretary,” PETE HEGSETH, on the move*

Hegseth’s own arranging of the meet-up, entirely his idea evidently, came as a further reminder of his propensity for grandstanding, as opposed to any great managerial attention to detail. His inattention had been very evident in the Spring, when he allowed his personal phone number to appear widely on WhatsApp, Facebook and even on a fantasy sports site. And that served to compound his other, rather bigger error, of using the Signal commercial messaging-app to inadvertently reveal ahead of time crucial flight-data for US Air Force strikes in Yemen against the Houthi militia.

But undaunted, Hegseth adopted a (let’s say) vigorous communications style in his speech that opened Tuesday’s event. Given the new circumstances of the President’s presence, the President had predictably to become the high point of the morning. But wait, there was something rather new. The Secretary walked as well as talked -- leaving the podium to stride about the stage manfully, complaining about “fat troops” and that “it's completely unacceptable to see fat generals and admirals.”

He also more positively, in his terms, urged the familiar remedy of physical fitness and a prevailing regime in which “Standards must be uniform, gender-neutral [sic] and high.” He stressed as well of course his opposition to any kind of diversity program in the armed forces – and to what he often calls wokeism in their ranks.

A pointed review of his performance came my way from a longtime senior military acquaintance (whose words have to be non-attributable, I’m afraid - unavoidably so, given this Administration’s propensity for retaliation). The officer’s assessment was framed as a question, or perhaps two: “Is this speech he’s delivering meant to impress us? And is delivering it while walkin’ about meant to impress us even more?” I will leave that matter unanswered

When the President’s turn finally came, his own bulk (which probably wouldn’t pass any fitness test) was traditional and static – until he (rather slowly) walked off in the end, to the chest-pounding, trumpeted march-tune from John Philp Sousa, Semper Fidelis meaning “Always Faithful,” the Marine Corp’s famous motto.

TRUMP’s BUSY WEEK, WE KNOW, also included a shutdown of the government – something that hasn’t happened since, umm, the previous Trump Administration. This offered him the opportunistic chance to threaten yet more, possibly thousands of government employees with being fired. Déjà vu all over again.

But he also launched a Gaza peace proposal which possesses a somewhat different flavor from many previous attempts, in that it contains some future-looking elements, and eight Arab and Muslim-majority countries have signed on in support of it. But Hamas, obviously essential to making peace, must look like a very unlikely signatory. His plan is also a reminder, as if we needed one, that Trump is determined, for all his noisy saber-rattling in so many directions, to claim just as noisily that he’s a serious contender for the Nobel Peace Prize.

It was almost poignant to see the New York Post -- by its owner’s orders almost always an unqualified supporter of Trump -- adding a dash of unusual skepticism to its headline-writing. In reporting the Quantico get-together, the Post proclaimed: “Trump threatens foes and ‘enemy from within’ while demanding Nobel Peace Prize in speech to generals.”

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