The Pentagon press corps has left the building, along with the vast majority of reporters hand in their identification details rather than agreeing with Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth’s policy of cracking down on the solicitation or publication of information not approved by the government for public release.
Reporters, including those from NBC News, will continue to cover the Defense Department from outside its iconic headquarters in Northern Virginia.
Hegseth framed the policy as an attempt to stop the leaking of classified information.
“[I]“If they sign the recognition, they will not try to get soldiers to break the law,” he said at the White House earlier this week.
Trump also framed it as a policy that would ultimately protect military personnel.
“I think it bothers me a little that soldiers and even high-ranking generals walk around with you on their sleeves and ask them questions, because they can make a mistake and a mistake can be tragicTrump said.
The Pentagon did not return a request for comment.
Most unauthorized leaks and other disclosures of internal defense information do not involve classified information, but they can expose wrongdoing — and embarrass Pentagon leaders. In many cases, reporting in recent years has exposed substandard treatment of troops and veterans that might otherwise not have been exposed or addressed if not for reports based on unauthorized disclosures or the access journalists had to military officials in the higher ranks.
Here are a few examples:
The Walter Reed Medical Scandal
In 2007, when American troops were deployed to Iraq and Afghanistan, The Washington Post published a series of stories about it the cruel conditions troops were confronted not in war zones, but when recovering from wounds at Walter Reed Army Medical Center.
They revealed conditions of black mold, cockroaches, mouse droppings and substandard care.
The Post reported that its sources included dozens of soldiers. But some sources declined to give their names because “they feared retaliation by the military if they complained publicly.”
Then Secretary of Defense Robert Gates visited Walter Reed in the immediate aftermath of the revelations, thanked reporters for exposing the problem and promised that responsible parties would be held accountable.
“This is unacceptable and it will not continue,” Gates said. He requested and accepted the resignation of then Army Secretary Francis J. Harvey.
Vulnerable Humvees
In 2004, then Secretary of Defense met Donald Rumsfeld during a trip to Kuwait more than 2,000 troops in an airplane hangar.
He was questioned by soldiers about the government’s inability to provide armored Humvees to protect against roadside bombs in Iraq, an issue that extensively covered throughout the year in the media, speaking to soldiers who were frustrated about not receiving better-equipped vehicles.
At the time, reporters were embedded in military units, which the Pentagon saw as a way to build trust between the department and the media. A reporter at a newspaper in Tennessee later claimed credit in a private conversation for working with a soldier on questions for Rumsfeld, noting that journalists were not allowed to ask questions during the event.
“You go to war with the army you have, not with the army you might want or want to have at a later date,” Rumsfeld said, pushing back. He further argued that more armor would not make vehicles impervious to attack.
NBC’s Nightly News reported the next evening that the company that supplied the fully armored Humvees to the military had the capacity to make another 100 per month. The day after, the military said it would order many more.
MRAP delays
An internal Pentagon report leaked in 2007 found that Marines had been killed by explosives because of a delay in delivering blast-resistant vehicles known as MRAPs — an acronym for “mine-resistant, ambush-protected.”
“If the massive procurement and deployment of MRAPs had begun in 2005 in response to then known and recognized threats, such as [Marine Corps] does now, hundreds of deaths and injuries could have been prevented,” wrote the report’s author, a Marine Corps civilian adviser named Franz Gayl.
The report, which the Associated Press said it had obtained from a non-governmental source, rocked Washington.
Even as the Pentagon ramped up orders for MRAPs, a bipartisan group of senators has put pressure on the Ministry of Defense to investigate allegations in Gayl’s report about procurement delays occurring despite military officials’ knowledge of the superiority of MRAPs.
Sexual violence
In 1992, Navy Lt. Paula Coughlin came forward to report that she had been sexually assaulted at an annual convention for “Top Gun” airmen. Her story led to what would become the “Tailhook” scandal, revealing the larger problem of sexual abuse that plagues both men and women in the ranks of the military. Coughlin, an admiral’s aide, first opened up about being put through a “gauntlet” — in which she said she was groped by male colleagues — in an interview with ABC News.
Within days she was invited to the White House to meet with President George HW Bush and First Lady Barbara Bush. Then-Secretary of the Navy Lawrence Garrett resigned. Two years later, Coughlin himself would resign citing ongoing harassment about her whistleblowing, in a private letter obtained by NBC News and other organizations.
There have been stories about it over the past thirty years sexual abuse in the military to have been legionand the The Ministry of Defense’s own investigations estimate that there are tens of thousands of victims every year.
Over the course of several administrations, both Republican and Democratic, Pentagon officials have opposed a series of proposed policy changes, including taking over oversight of sexual assault cases outside the military chain of command.
In late 2023, after Congress and President Joe Biden took action to pass an annual defense policy bill, the military established a new program: the Office of the Special Trial Attorneys – in each of the service branches, which took cases involving allegations of sexual assault, murder and other crimes out of the traditional chain of command.
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