Still Not Capable of Doing Their Job

I've expressed my amazement that our press corps is, collectively, still clueless about military matters despite having nearly nine years to learn their subject matter, and a year and a half to gear up for the Iraq War. A paper wouldn't stand for that kind of subject ignorance on fashion or sports coverage, but for war that doesn't seem to be an obstacle to success. Strategypage addreses this and covers some of the media myths about the Iraq war:

Since September 11, 2001, the mass media has been covering military matters much more intensively than they had in the previous decade. It showed, in the amount of misinformation and bad analysis that flowed from so many media outlets. These are some of the more misleading ones. ...

Too Many Contractors In The Combat Zone.

The Invasion of Iraq Was Illegal and Misguided.

The Invasion Was a Failure.

The Invasion Helped Al Qaeda.

The U.S. Did Not Work With Locals.

Iraqis Were Better Off Under Saddam.

The U.S. Needed More Soldiers.

The last one is one I offer a qualified agreement on. I supported squeezing 9 more brigades out of the existing manpower rather than adding troops, which we did. We got more troops after that but we basically won the war in Iraq before we could really incorporate the added troops. That said, it would have been nice to have the extra troops to help rotation to avoid stressing the troops on repeat rotations. On the other hand, we didn't break the Army, and now with the administration seeking to cut the military's budget, the extra troops no longer needed for rotations could very well lower the quality of the troops as training and readiness is slighted to pay for troop pay and housing, and all that.

And one that isn't so much a misconception but an explanation:

The Three Year Rule.

Do read it all. It is frustrating to me, and by all means I'd like everyone to be just as frustrated at the low quality of the reporting. As I've long held, you can figure out what the reporters are seeing if you have a grounding in political science, history, and military matters, so you know what to disregard and what to accept (or what they probably meant).

This is still a long war against Islamo-fascists. So it isn't too late for those reporters (with rare exceptions who do know their subject) to get a clue about military matters and military history. Absent that, they could just focus on reporting and spare us their lame attempts to analyze the news.