COLUMN ONE : Military, Media Face Off in Gulf : Advanced technology in the Information Age adds new tensions to an old debate--where is the balance between maintaining security and a free press?

As the world watches for war--the television on in the background--the Information Age is adding new confusion to the ancient tensions between soldiering and reporting.

And as a result, the U.S. military is imposing the tightest restrictions in American history over what the public learns about the battlefield.

Perhaps most fearful to American commanders is that--in the era of satellites and mini-cameras--the world now faces at least the theoretical prospect of the public seeing soldiers killed on live television. “In many ways the issue is not what you report, but how soon,” said one aide to the Joint Chiefs of Staff.

The explosion in the number of news outlets and the amount of news broadcast each day is also complicating the task of covering the potential combat in the Persian Gulf. Already, more reporters are working in Saudi Arabia than were in Vietnam at the peak of action.

And there is also the ghost of that last war, the first of the Television Age. Many commanders blame the media for America’s loss of the war in Vietnam, and see the press not merely as careless but adversarial.

As a model for military press management in the modern era, U.S. military commanders have studied the Falkland Islands War. In that conflict, the British kept reporters aboard ship and briefed them about the action secondhand.

In the media’s grammar of fairness, especially its treatment of the diplomacy still under way, some U.S. commanders even see the press as making the enemy seem agreeable.

“I don’t know what side (the media) are on,” Pentagon spokesman Pete Williams recalled one commander telling him. “I see them interview (Iraqi Foreign Minister) Tarik Aziz in Baghdad and the next day interview Secretary of State Jim Baker as if they were the same, as if this is some kind of big political debate.”

In reaction, the Pentagon has arranged rules for covering the gulf that are now the focus of a simmering feud between the military and the media.

First, battlefield dispatches and photography will have to clear military “security review”--something not required since Korea.

Second, reporters cannot travel on their own, as they have in all other modern American wars, but only in organized pools.

Third, reporters also must be accompanied by military escorts at all times.

And all reporting must conform to a series of elaborate written guidelines stipulating what kind of information is “unreleasable.”

The military says the controls are needed for security. Journalists complain that they are being treated as if they were unpatriotic.

The debate is a new version of an old question: How much should the public know about the state of its troops in battle? How quickly does it need the information? Where is the balance between military security and a democratic free press?

Within both the Pentagon and the media, the answers vary widely.

“I think a lot of officers question whether we need the press over here (at all),” said Capt. Mark White, an assistant intelligence officer with the 82nd Airborne Division. “They see a lot of things in the media which they feel are blatant security violations.”

On the other extreme, on Thursday a group of liberal news organizations and writers filed a lawsuit asking a federal court to nullify the Pentagon rules as unconstitutional. The plaintiffs include the L.A. Weekly, the Nation and author William Styron. The nation’s major news organizations did not participate.

In general, journalists argue that the American public has a right to know about war because of its investment of half a million people, its weapons and its tax dollars.

And some caution that trying to censor critical or embarrassing reporting is also unwise on a practical level. “It is always tempting for generals to think they can solve their problems by trying to hide bad news,” said Peter Braestrup, author of a book on the media and Vietnam and also a recent background paper on the history of the media and the military in general.

“That was the approach of the Johnson Administration, and it didn’t work,” Braestrup said. “If you try to sanitize the war, the truth will come out anyway, and then the American public will begin to lose faith in the war because they will think they are being lied to.”

Pentagon spokesman Williams says that in the correct balance, military press restrictions should maintain the security of current and future military operations and protect lives--not curtail critical or embarrassing coverage. But most reporters believe that systems used previously, particularly in Vietnam, offer better models to follow now.

In all previous modern U.S. wars, reporters could travel on their own without escort, although until Vietnam they did have to file through military censors.

In Vietnam, the Pentagon gave reporters guidelines about what not to report and left it to the journalists to follow them on their own. After publication, anyone violating the guidelines could lose accreditation and be sent out of the country.

In all, Williams acknowledges, only five or six reporters violated the guidelines through the course of the war and had their credentials suspended or withdrawn.

“All these rules and barriers will end up leaving the American people uninformed and the American government with pie on its face,” Andrew Glass, bureau chief of Cox Newspapers, told Williams in a Pentagon meeting last week. “These (reporters) are serious people, patriotic Americans. Let them do their jobs, and if it doesn’t work, kick them out of the country.”

But Pentagon officials say the Vietnam rules will not work in the gulf for several reasons.

For one, a Persian Gulf war would resemble the conflict in Korea, where there was censorship, more than that in Vietnam, where there was not, because it would involve movements of large bodies of troops and equipment. In Vietnam, the major deployments stayed in permanent bases, and most of the fighting was carried out in guerrilla-style forays that were over before journalists published stories about them. In short, there was little strategic information the press could disclose that would aid the enemy.

Also, Pentagon officials say, there is the nature of the enemy. “This guy has the ability to inflict great damage on us in a way that the Vietnamese did not,” said one aide to the Joint Chiefs of Staff.

Ill will toward the media over Vietnam is also a reason for the increased restrictions, military officials admit, even though the great majority of soldiers and officers in Saudi Arabia are too young to have served there. “The rapprochement since Vietnam has been minuscule,” one high-ranking Pentagon public affairs expert concedes.

And then there is the larger issue of the technology and how to conduct war at all in the age of satellites and computers.

“What you are seeing is a system (of press management) that is justifiable because of modern technology,” the Pentagon aide said.

The Pentagon’s primary concern is pictures, particularly television. “In terms of communicating secrets to the enemy, they really are worth 1,000 words,” one Pentagon official said.

Even showing what kind of jets the Americans might use, or what kind of condition they are in, could violate operational security in some cases, the official said.

Then there is the question of immediacy. Today, with Cable News Network broadcasting internationally, whatever Americans see, Iraqis can see at the same moment.

That was not true in previous wars. In Vietnam, all television was shot on film and took at least overnight to get to the United States, often longer. In addition, the enemy had little chance to see American television.

Some journalists think the commanders are overly concerned. “The U.S. military has the technical capability to get live battlefield pictures, and they therefore assume we do too. But as a practical matter you cannot,” said Ed Fouhy, a longtime network producer and member of a recent Twentieth Century Fund task force studying the military and the media.

But some news organizations, including CNN, did request permission from the military to take a satellite dish into the battlefield to broadcast live.

Said one military officer: “We didn’t just say no. We said, ‘Hell no!’ ”

And news organizations have the means to get other footage. For instance, CNN has a contract with a commercial telecommunications company to purchase satellite photography of battlefield sites, though it is not clear how quickly it could be obtained. Pentagon officials shudder at the thought that the pictures would amount to giving the Iraqis crucial aerial reconnaissance.

Williams, the Pentagon spokesman, insists that the rules that have been proposed for words and pictures are not censorship but merely “security review,” since military escorts in the field cannot unilaterally delete material, but only delay its transmission. If the media persist in wanting to publish, the dispute is continued up the chain of command.

The news media say this language is a smoke screen, arguing that publication delayed is publication denied.

Not all coverage will undergo pre-publication review. Reporters back in their Saudi hotels are left to follow the guidelines on their own.

But in the end, the real problem is that, today, how to protect operational security, or even what that means, is open to wide interpretation.

One high-ranking Pentagon official explains, for example, that in one instance even talking about troop morale could be critical. In another, showing the condition of equipment could be. That is why the “security review” is needed, he argued, to help the journalists interpret the guidelines.

Journalists counter that their experience in the gulf suggests that commanders often have a much more fearful view of information and intend to go much further than helping the media interpret.

As an example, editors note that reporters from the Miami Herald and Newsday in Long Island, N.Y., have already been banned from making further visits to the main Marine Corps unit in Saudi Arabia, in part because, during a chemical weapons defense drill, they asked questions about the size of deployments that were deemed inappropriate.

The reporters--Carol Rosenberg of the Herald and Susan Sachs of Newsday--were also “rude,” according to a letter from the commanding general. Another Marine “memorandum for the record” refers to one of the reporters’ “exaggerated sighs” at the way an officer answered a question.

The Marine Corps argues that these actions violated guidelines governing press conduct in the gulf. The reporters’ newspapers deny that they behaved in any way other than as professionals. The banning has been protested to Williams, who has promised to investigate.

Journalists have also raised doubts about Pentagon requirements that reporters qualifying for combat pools pass military-run physical examinations, including pushups and a timed run. The Pentagon said this week that it was unsure whether those examinations would continue.

The proposed military escorts also raise questions. Is their job to help with logistics and interpretation, or to keep the press away from the news and to intimidate soldiers and officers from speaking freely?

Journalists have no quarrel with most of the escorts, but there are exceptions. They charge, for instance, that Marine Maj. James McClain of the 3rd Marine Aircraft Wing has interrupted interviews on even seemingly innocuous subjects.

When a Marine complained to one journalist that the food was too starchy, for example, McClain interrupted to say, “You’re not an expert on the components of food. Keep to your area of expertise.”

Earlier this week, NBC correspondent Gary Matsumoto had his interview stopped and his videotape confiscated after he asked a chaplain about troop morale.

In general, because of the volume of coverage it has received, the public may feel that it is getting a full picture of events in the gulf. But some journalists admit that may not be the case.

The restrictions and the way they are being interpreted mean that “it is difficult to get an honest assessment of such matters as how troops are performing and the condition of equipment,” said Tim Russert, Washington bureau chief of NBC News. “In large part it is because you have to stay in the company of your official minders (the military escorts).”

“What I find frustrating here, more than the limited access to units and troops in the field, is that you don’t have access to middle-level officers, to intelligence people, to people who can give you an overview of what is going on,” said Ray Wilkinson, who was in Vietnam both as a Marine and a correspondent for United Press International and now is in Saudi Arabia for Newsweek.

“There’s just no one you can sit down with and say, ‘OK, what does this mean? What is the big picture?’ ” he said.

Like much of what causes friction between soldiers and reporters, that may be a combination of accident and design.

“On one level it’s just our own ignorance about the press,” said one high-level Pentagon aide. “Frankly, the vaunted Pentagon PR machine is more like the Keystone Cops.

“But on another level, the last thing we want you to know--or Saddam Hussein--is our overall strategy.”

Rosenstiel reported from Washington and Lamb from Saudi Arabia.