It helps that the conflicts covered are all the more recent ones, such as the Gulf War, Rwanda and Bosnia, so that the reader is instantly able to compare the analysis with his or her own handy recollection of what the media were reporting at the time. Although the focus is overwhelmingly British, because of the nationality of virtually all the contributors, it is of more general relevance because it features conflicts in which not only the British army but also the UN and NATO have been involved. Nonetheless, our understanding of the role and responsibility of the media and armed forces to each other in modern conflicts would be even more enhanced if foreign perspectives were included. Many contributors acknowledge the role of the Pentagon in pioneering modern military communications techniques, but the US experience, say in Somalia, is not notably featured, despite its influence on the PR and information strategies of the UK and other European armed forces. Equally a French perspective would be useful given that France has contributed more troops and aircraft to recent UN and NATO humanitarian interventions than the UK, and has certainly paid a higher price in terms of loss of life. These remarks are not intended as criticism but rather as encouragement to the Sandhurst team to continue their exploration of the topic, perhaps through the organisation of another conference, and to widen their international scope.

At all events, The Media and International Security is useful not only as a good study of how the UK armed forces and the media have dealt with each other in recent armed conflicts but also as a guide as to how they can do so better in the future. By giving as much space to war correspondents as to senior military officers (if now retired) the book ensures that journalist readers will learn as much about the culture of the military as the latter will learn about the modus operandi of the media. Kate Adie’s chapter is particularly educational in this respect when she warns military press officers that stories about “the good work that our chaps are doing” are almost never of any interest to the hard-nosed reporter in search of real news (ie, the dramatic, the scandalous or the spectacular). Nik Gowing, a journalist who, better than any other, has transformed a wealth of personal experience into theoretical analysis, is equally impressive in warning the military that they have to adapt their briefings to the “tyranny of real time” and the new media technologies if they want their views and operations to be properly covered. But to single out individual contributors would be invidious because all are prepared to “think outside the box”. Senior military officers, like General Sir Michael Rose, may not love the media, particularly a media which in conflicts like Bosnia is all too willing to take sides and to condemn, but they realise it is an inescapable reality of modern armed conflicts and has to be dealt with professionally.

On the other hand, the journalists show a welcome maturity in acknowledging the limits of their craft and the growing efforts made by the armed forces in Western democracies over the past decade to be more transparent and truthful in passing on information, even in the most sensitive conflict situations. Neither side may ever be fully satisfied with the other and perhaps never should be; but the hopeful impression that emerges from The Media and International Security is that gradually, from one conflict to the next, an accepted set of rules is emerging that will enable both to do their jobs and the public to be sufficiently well-informed to judge what is going on without lies, distortion or unwarranted sensationalism.

Just two regrets from this reviewer. First, the rapid establishment of free and fair media has proven to be critical in recent peace and reconciliation missions such as in Bosnia. The book rightly excoriates “hate media” like the infamous Radio Mille Collines in Rwanda (on which Richard Connaughton has many good observations) or the Serb SRT in Bosnia, but neglects efforts like TV-IN or Radio Fern to introduce a responsible, pluralist media in societies torn apart by the politics of ethnic hatred. Secondly, NATO’s Kosovo air campaign of March-June 1999 was such a seminal and much-discussed event in the importance of media campaigns to winning modern conflicts that its absence from the book strikes the reader at every turn. It obviously came too late for inclusion but it is yet another reason for the Sandhurst team to view their excellent book not as the final word, but more as the opening shot in what promises to be an increasingly important theme of contemporary international relations.