Last year I read Partners in Command, a book by Mark Perry. It is an account of the unique relationship between General Dwight D. Eisenhower and General George Marshall, and how they played a significant role in the American victory in World War II and laid the foundations for future success in the earliest years of the Cold War. Eisenhower and Marshall are, of course, icons, legends etched in granite. Their portraits hang in my office.

The close relationship that once existed between Moscow and Pyongyang is a relic of the Cold War. In fact, there is reason to believe that the two neighbors now share little in common. Yet decades ago, the Soviets exercised tremendous influence over the North Korean regime, anecdotally evidenced by Kim Il-sung's fateful request to Josef Stalin asking to invade the South in 1950. Stalin, after much consternation, finally gave his approval.1 By deferring to Stalin, Kim Il-sung sought continued Soviet support, which he received for roughly 40 years until the breakup of the Soviet Union. In the early 1990s, however, this partnership changed significantly.

In this type of war you cannot - you must not - measure the effectiveness of the effort by the number of bridges destroyed, buildings damaged, vehicles burned, or any of the other standards that have been used for regular warfare. The task is to destroy the effectiveness of the insurgent's efforts and his ability to use the population for his own ends. - General Curtis E. Lemay Chief of Staff, U.S. Air Force

After this most recent deployment, Hertling convened an after-action review conference in Garmisch, Germany, and invited Shanker to attend. During the conference, the two had an opportunity to continue their ongoing dialogue on military-media relations. Their conversation shows the relationship becoming increasingly complicated, as these two men from different professions debated the contentiousness-and the common ground that exists between the military and the media during this time of conflict and expansive news coverage.

My shoes were shined, my greens had a razor crease in the trousers, and I believed I was looking pretty sharp as I reported to my battalion commander as a brand new second lieutenant. But my palms soon became sweaty after hearing what he had to say the first morning I arrived in Germany back in 1976.

Gulf Arabs are increasingly taking measure of Iran's capabilities to wage war. Military power is relative, not absolute, and to gauge Iran's capabilities to wage war and threaten the Persian Gulf, one must compare Iran's power against that of its regional rivals. A rough net assessment of strategies and military forces in the Gulf needs to weigh Iranian conventional military power-both in its regular military and Revolutionary Guard forces-against the conventional militaries of Saudi Arabia, the other Arab Gulf states, and the United States. By this scale, Arab and American forces are heavier than Iranian capabilities. But because they are, Iran is likely to turn to its time-tested unconventional ways of war to exploit Arab Gulf state and American vulnerabilities in future conflicts.

Today's complex, fluid, and unpredictable operational environment both demands more from the military in terms of mission requirements and exposes troops to more stressors and potential trauma than ever before. On the one hand, situational awareness, mental agility, and adaptability are characteristics that the military wants to cultivate to succeed in such complex environments. In part, this complexity comes from the number and nature of the different missions the military must concurrently fill. The military needs to be able to mix offensive, defensive, and stability operations conducted along multiple lines of operations, without the benefit of a clearly demarcated "frontline." Many Soldiers liken this complexity and unpredictability to "the faucet," that is, needing to adjust to situations that could change from cold to hot instantaneously. Moreover, Servicemembers must navigate morally ambiguous situations with balance and nonreactivity, while drawing on stores of cultural awareness to "win hearts and minds." Finally, these missions require that decisionmaking be pushed down to the most junior levels, as the doctrine of "distributed operations" makes clear. Such challenges require a tremendous amount of attentional capacity, self-awareness, and situational awareness.

With less than one half of one percent of the U.S. population in the Armed Forces, it is not surprising that many Americans know little about their military or the sacrifices military members and their families make for the Nation. The professional military is often viewed as a breed apart, a closed hierarchal organization resembling a monastic order. Indeed, some scholars have identified not just a cloister wall, but a growing chasm between the military and American society as a whole. Meanwhile, the necessity for operations security and an institutional penchant for controlling information...