War is different: that's all I can come up with to justify my internal battle between free speech - the public's right to know - and my extreme discomfort with the 24-hour barrage of images and verbiage about the war, that, cumulatively, I find depressing and dispiriting. (I will not even address here the incredibly selfish, thoughtless, immoral, and just plain stupid revelation of strategic information in which Geraldo Rivera indulged - endangering your own troops can never be justified.)

Why? It isn't any specific aspect of the coverage that is worse than any other: watch too many targeted explosions of buildings - what should be little "victories" - and it causes me just as much anxiety as shots of civilian casualties and chatter about "quagmire," critiques of strategy, and grieving on the home front.

The truth of the matter is that war is dirty, nasty, ugly, dehumanizing business - especially in the detail - but that doesn't make it any less necessary or the ultimate goals any less critical. As Steven Den Beste writes, there's just an awful lot of information that the public doesn't need to know while it's going on:

Japanese anti-submarine warfare capability was never really very good, and in the early part of the war it was particularly dreadful. One reason for this was that the Japanese had incorrectly calculated the depth to which American boats could dive. They set their depth charges based on that, and the American submariners soon learned that if they dove deep enough (at depths well within the safety limit of the boat hulls) they would be all but immune to Japanese depth charging.

Obviously this was quite useful and interesting, and it began to be talked about back on shore, in a "Boy, have you heard about how stupid the Japanese are?" kind of way. The story spread, and spread, and it eventually ended up in a newspaper. And then one Congressman included it in a speech before Congress.

As might be imagined, the Japanese heard about this, and started setting their depth charges to go deeper. This prompted an officer in the Navy to send a letter to the Congressman saying that he was sure the Congressman would be pleased to learn that the Japanese had corrected their mistake.

....when the Special Forces are operating in a combat zone, and are in areas nominally under enemy control and outnumbered thousands to one, they only really survive as long as the enemy doesn't suspect they're there. If the enemy knows a SF team is in a general area, and decides to get them, that SF team is in pretty big trouble unless it can manage to get extracted pretty rapidly.

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