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In the 18 years I have been reporting at the Pentagon, military leaders have rarely been delighted to see me. Over the years, I have had heated conversations with generals, spokespeople, and civilian leaders. I have reported news that the department officials didn\u2019t 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.<\/p>\n
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. The First Amendment protects my ability to do this work. But one week ago, the Pentagon announced that journalists would no longer be accredited to enter the building unless they sign a new agreement. In the past, reporters were required to sign a one-page agreement with stipulations about locking office doors and wearing badges above the waist. The new restrictions are very different. Although worded somewhat ambiguously, they appear to put sharp limits on news-gathering activities and may impose penalties on people seeking information\u2014including unclassified information\u2014outside of what decision makers want to share. Under the proposed rules, which run to 17 pages, \u201cinformation must be approved for public release by an appropriate authorizing official before it is released, even if it is unclassified.\u201d Anyone who publishes unapproved information could, theoretically, have their accreditation revoked, which would leave them barred from the Pentagon\u2014and maybe from military facilities worldwide. Reporters who refuse to sign will lose the badge that has, until now, given them the right to work in a building that has been available to the press\u2014through wars and national crises, under Democratic administrations and Republican ones\u2014since the Pentagon opened its doors on January 15, 1943.<\/p>\n
Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth on X described the changes as an effort to impose common sense. \u201cThe \u2018press\u2019 does not run the Pentagon\u2014the people do. The press is no longer allowed to roam the halls of a secure facility. Wear a badge and follow the rules\u2014or go home,\u201d he wrote. But at its best, the press works on behalf of the people, seeking to hold the powerful to account. The Reporters Committee for Freedom of the Press has asked the Pentagon for clarification and noted the inscrutable nature of some of the proposed rules. In response, the Pentagon spokesman Sean Parnell wrote Wednesday that the restrictions are meant to remind reporters that Pentagon employees operate under strict protocols for what they can and can\u2019t disclose and that the department wants to prevent \u201cactive solicitation that encourages DoW personnel to violate these disclosure rules.\u201d The acronym refers to the \u201cDepartment of War,\u201d Hegseth\u2019s preferred name for the entity with nearly 3 million employees that he runs.<\/p>\n
These are not the first restrictions that Hegseth has placed on the reporters who cover him. In May, he reduced journalists\u2019 once-expansive Pentagon access to a few hallways and banned us from talking face-to-face with any of the officials from the service branches or from the Joint Chiefs of Staff\u2019s office without an escort. Now we would lose even that.<\/p>\n
Up until last week\u2019s announcement, I never worried that I could be kicked out of the building, no matter how aggressive I was in pursuing my stories. The U.S. military\u2019s policy of opening the Pentagon to the press was never a favor to the journalists who cover the military, but rather an obligation to a country that asks its sons and daughters to volunteer for service. If the government was going to ask Americans to risk their lives for our freedoms, then those empowered to send them into harm\u2019s way would be willing to answer questions, especially tough ones. The Pentagon\u2019s decision to let the press into the building served its own interests.<\/p>\n
President Donald Trump noted over the weekend that reporters won\u2019t be stopped from doing their jobs. He is technically right. If these rules are implemented, the best journalists will become better at their craft and find other ways to report their stories. But I have found that giving reporters less access to information about what the military does rarely serves the American people. The Pentagon has already dramatically curtailed its willingness to share basic facts. I struggle to see how this new policy doesn\u2019t further reduce the availability of information that the public has come to expect: Which ocean is a U.S. carrier strike group operating in? Did the secretary speak with his Chinese counterpart? Why is the U.S. denying a shipment of approved weapons to Ukraine? What are the rules of engagement for National Guardsmen deployed on American streets?<\/p>\n
News organizations, including this one, have made their opposition to these changes clear. \u201cThe Atlantic<\/em> fundamentally opposes the restrictions that the Pentagon is attempting to impose on journalists who are reporting on matters of defense and national security. The requirements violate our First Amendment rights, and the rights of Americans who seek to know how taxpayer-funded military resources and personnel are being deployed,\u201d our editor in chief, Jeffrey Goldberg, said in a statement. \u201cThese proposed rules also break with long-standing practices\u2014under presidents of both parties, through wars and national crises\u2014that have allowed Pentagon correspondents to do their jobs without political interference.\u201d<\/p>\n During the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, the Pentagon wanted reporters to embed with the troops\u2014even when we ended up documenting civilian deaths, abuse at military prisons, and the fallacy that the U.S. was turning the corner in those doomed conflicts. Generals and civilian leaders regularly answered questions in the briefing room. The Pentagon wanted us to pay attention to what it was doing, especially when it came time to discuss the need to grow the DOD budget, which now stands at nearly $1 trillion. Asking for more money is a lot easier when Americans can see what U.S. troops are up to. Americans may not be willing to give so much\u2014either financially or through those who serve\u2014if they are allowed to see so little.<\/p>\n If the leaders of the world\u2019s most advanced military aren\u2019t comfortable responding to critical questions, they look weak\u2014not strong. Hegseth has repeatedly promised to bring back \u201cthe warrior ethos,\u201d a prospect that\u2019s impossible to imagine if taking questions from the American public is too scary to countenance.<\/p>\n Some past DOD leaders welcomed questions as a form of accountability\u2014or at least a bellwether of how those outside the U.S. military were receiving its message. Air Force General Richard Myers, the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff on 9\/11, sometimes began briefings in the years after those attacks by asking reporters: \u201cHow are we doing?\u201d In his memoir, former Defense Secretary Bob Gates, who worked under Presidents Barack Obama and George W. Bush, said repeatedly that he would not have learned about the horrible conditions that troops and their families were living in at Walter Reed Medical Center without the press.<\/p>\n \u201cThe Pentagon is fortunate in having, on the whole, an experienced and capable group of reporters assigned to it, most of whom are interested in the substance of issues and not personalities. I never had a real problem with them,\u201d Gates wrote, adding: \u201cI hated leaks. I rarely blamed the reporters for printing leaks, though; my anger was reserved for those in government entrusted to keep secrets who did not.\u201d<\/p>\n Or, as he told U.S. Air Force Academy cadets during their 2007 commencement address: \u201cI want to encourage you always to remember the importance of two pillars of our freedom under the Constitution\u2014the Congress and the press. Both surely try our patience from time to time, but they are the surest guarantors of the liberty of the American people.<\/p>\n \u201cThe press is not the enemy,\u201d he added, \u201cand to treat it as such is self-defeating.\u201d<\/p>\n Mark Esper, who was the defense chief during the first Trump administration, listed in his memoir the number of times he answered questions from the media or spoke publicly to explain Pentagon decision making: \u201cBy the end of my [15-month] tenure, I had held nearly two dozen Pentagon Briefing Room briefings, eight town halls, thirty-two so-called press gaggles, twenty-nine televised or taped interviews, twenty-two off-the-record sessions, sixteen briefings with Q&As at think tanks, nine messages to the force, and eleven major policy speeches.\u201d<\/p>\n To Esper, being available for questioning from the public appeared to be a point of pride, and a fundamental part of his duty. As it should be.<\/p>\n The place where reporters gather in the colossus that is the Pentagon is a hallway leading to two big rooms for print press, several closet-size offices for TV journalists to broadcast from, and a large space for easy access to spokespeople. Throughout my time, that corridor has been a physical representation of a free press. Defense officials have regularly introduced their foreign counterparts, usually unannounced, to our part of the building to demonstrate the U.S. commitment to the First Amendment. The day before the proposed new rules were announced, I met a visiting delegation from Poland, a country that, within the past decade, has had its own struggles with media clampdowns.<\/p>\n If we do our jobs correctly, the Pentagon is not surprised by our coverage, both what we publish and what we don\u2019t. When journalists obtain sensitive information through their reporting, basic ethical and professional codes dictate whether the people\u2019s right to know outweighs any potential risk in putting the information before the public. This past spring, The Atlantic<\/em> was extremely careful in choosing to publish the messages that Hegseth and other members of the Trump administration\u2019s national-security team inadvertently sent over Signal to our editor in chief. The Atlantic<\/em> informed the government before the story\u2019s publication and verified in advance that the chat group was legitimate. We published the full text exchange only after the administration insisted, implausibly, that \u201cthere was no classified material that was shared in that Signal group,\u201d as Director of National Intelligence Tulsi Gabbard put it at the time. Why did we ultimately publish the full text exchange? Because the American people had a right to make their own assessments.<\/p>\n Reporters have frequently held back information that would endanger U.S. troops. And even more frequently, journalists have written stories exposing lies that could have endangered American forces. Without coverage of Iranian-made explosives in Iraq, Pentagon leaders said, there would not have been the urgency to get mine-resistant vehicles, or MRAPs, to the troops downrange. The press revealed how exposure to toxic fumes at U.S. bases harmed troops. It documented security lapses during the 2012 Benghazi-consulate attack and the failures of the U.S. withdrawal from Afghanistan.<\/p>\n My introduction to the U.S. military came on the front lines of the war in Iraq. I sat alongside troops, some of whom had never before been outside the United States, as we rode together in Humvees, tanks, and Strykers, bracing for an attack. I watched troops get hit by explosives, dodge live fire, and relearn the same lessons as their predecessors, who had rotated back to the U.S. I witnessed troops raiding the homes of Iraqis and felt the fear of those we said we were liberating. I spent years of my life counting the number of shoes piled up after bombings to determine how many lives had been lost. I wrote stories about Iraqis and American troops alike fighting to survive, never quite knowing what it was all for.<\/p>\n The first time I stepped into the Pentagon, shortly after returning home from Iraq, I experienced a different kind of wartime shock, a feeling of sterility as people went about their days as though they were not responsible for the suffering thousands of miles away. Nobody I saw had the look of robbed innocence that only war can permanently etch into a face. Those who served in the building may have thought about war during the day, but they went home to a family at night.<\/p>\n And yet they, too, suffered. Gates requested that his staff show him local press accounts of every troop killed during his tenure. Once, on a flight aboard his plane, I snuck a peek into his quarters and saw him crying as he read the story of a fallen service member in Iraq. During the first Trump administration, I saw angst on commanders\u2019 faces ahead of U.S. strikes in Syria. During the final days of the war in Afghanistan, I saw their horror as the number of troops and civilians killed by a suicide bomber outside Abbey Gate grew over the course of the day. Officials at the Pentagon knew they had failed those troops and the Afghans so desperate to leave.<\/p>\n No phone call can replace going to a general\u2019s office and seeing the challenge coins he or she has collected, the art displayed on the office walls, or the small everyday interactions that give you a window into who that person is. The best stories are ones found unexpectedly, by walking the hallways and getting to know the people who command the U.S. armed forces.<\/p>\n That ability to see so much made the Pentagon the best agency in Washington to cover\u2014and imposed a great responsibility on the journalists assigned to it. Our presence was the military\u2019s way of saying it saw the value of a free press, not just in helping to execute its mission but also as an American ethos. Strong leaders, in my experience, welcome the opportunity to defend their handling of U.S. national security. They open their doors, in every sense of the term.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" Sign up for National Security, a newsletter featuring coverage of rising authoritarianism, military intelligence, and geopolitical conflicts. In the 18 years I have been reporting at the Pentagon, military leaders have rarely been delighted to see me. Over the years, I have had heated conversations with generals, spokespeople, and civilian leaders. I have reported news<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":24201,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[55],"tags":[7511,1230,4316],"class_list":{"0":"post-24200","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-social-issues","8":"tag-afraid","9":"tag-pentagon","10":"tag-press"},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/naijaglobalnews.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/24200","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/naijaglobalnews.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/naijaglobalnews.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/naijaglobalnews.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/naijaglobalnews.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=24200"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/naijaglobalnews.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/24200\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/naijaglobalnews.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/media\/24201"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/naijaglobalnews.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=24200"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/naijaglobalnews.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=24200"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/naijaglobalnews.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=24200"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}