The Pentagon’s Military Analyst Program

ABSTRACT This article provides an investigatory overview of the Pentagon’s military analyst program, what it is, how it was implemented, and how it constitutes a form of propaganda. A technical analysis of the program is applied using the theoretical framework of the propaganda model first developed by Noam Chomsky and Edward S. Herman. Definitions and parameters of what constitutes propaganda as outlined by Chomsky and Herman, particularly through their analysis of ‘filtering ’ mass media news through ‘sourcing’, are drawn on in order to determine how various aspects of the program can be qualified as propaganda. There are few, if any, other issues of civic importance for which a government will pursue a more boldly ambitious and inherently manipulative campaign of public information management than that of a nation going to war. This is the case for nearly every society regardless of its form of government, from the most obviously authoritarian to the most ostensibly democratic. It was no less a political authority on leading a society to war than Nazi Germany’s Reichsmarschall Hermann Göring who asserted that, regardless of a national populace’s lack of desire for pursuing the course of war: it’s the leaders of the country who determine policy, and it’s always a simple matter to drag th