Truth Is Our Most Powerful Weapon.

Academic Elephant posted her article on the interview she and Jeff had with Rear Admiral Mark Fox.

They talked about the nature of the conflict in Iraq:

There really is no comparison between the enemy we fought in Iraqi Freedom in the air campaign and the enemy we're fighting today...Flash forward four years later: We don't have a conventional military threat. There is a residue of an enormous amount of explosives and ordinance that has been left over from Saddam'a era--Iraq had more conventional ordinance than the United States. It was awash in bombs and ordinance and so there is a seemingly endless supply of old weapons that can be used in these improvised explosives...and there were some non-military people we were fighting in the first round, but now the people we are dealing with are absolutely--they are only interested in terror and creating terror and mayhem. There are no rules of war, there is no sense of morality or restraint in terms of who's a viable target on their part.

And so it's completely different--there's no conventional aspect to this conflict that we're in right now...The foe that we're now fighting has evolved to the point that it's unrecognizable from a conventional point of view. Now you still have to use all the different pieces of modern warfare to be able to do this mission.

They also talked about the information war:

He considers the Israeli-Hezbollah conflict in Lebanon probably the closest comparison, with the enemy "swimming" in a civilian population and waging not just a campaign of violence, but also one of misinformation:

Now I'm in this world of communications it's incredible--the old Mark Twain saw about how a lie can get half way around the world before the truth can get its boots on and that's the case here.

You can point to a number of examples where oh no, there were people who were burned when they came out of a mosque. I mean they were set on fire and they were burned. And so we don't have any people on the scene and we don't know, but it sounds like something awful has happened, and it's not the case.

Not that long ago, maybe six weeks ago, there were 18 children, they were on a soccer field on Fallujiah and there was an explosion. So we say "Oh, no," and we spin on this for 12, 18 hours and then we find out no, that's not the case. There were not 18 children killed on a soccer field.

It's created a tremendous, difficult thing. The truth is ultimately I think our most powerful weapon. And to be committed to really sticking to the truth is the most important thing we can do. That said, being painstaking and finding the truth and recording it a lot less, it's not nearly as sexy as the blood or whatever it is.

There is much, much more. Read the whole thing here.