War in Iran showcases Pentagon's break from public affairs norms

WASHINGTON, June 10 (UPI) -- The Pentagon's top officials conducted far fewer press briefings and interviews during a period of major combat operations than the department has in decades, a Medill News Service review of five previous U.S. military flashpoints showed.

Instead, throughout the Iran war, Pentagon leaders have conducted much of their wartime messaging through a social media blitz -- but with few specifics.

"All of [the Pentagon's] policies right now are intended to create the least capacity for oversight, the least transparency and the least understanding of the American public," said Thomas Crosbie, an associate professor at the Royal Danish Defense College in Copenhagen, who is an expert in U.S. military-media relations. "It's just an attempt to strangle the message."

Such a shift in wartime messaging strategy comes as the Pentagon under Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth's tenure has made a number of moves that critics say turn the department more opaque and less accountable to Congress and the American people. In combination, the changes augur a new approach in the way the Defense Department informs the public about its operations.

When engaged in major combat operations, the Pentagon has traditionally sustained a regular pace of news briefings and media interviews. But this was not the case throughout the nearly six-week U.S. and Israeli joint bombing campaign of Iran, so-called Operation Epic Fury.

During that time, the Pentagon held eight press briefings. Hegseth led each one. In comparison, in the first five weeks of the 2003 invasion of Iraq, the Pentagon held 40 press briefings featuring various high-ranking officials, according to a Medill analysis of the Defense Department's archive.

On top of the briefings, then-Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld or one of his top deputies gave nearly 50 media interviews to make the administration's case for the war during that same timeframe. Hegseth did one.

"The information we get from [Central Command] is pretty bare bones," said Greg Jaffe, who has covered the U.S. military for nearly three decades, now for The New York Times. U.S. Central Command leads military operations in the Middle East.

"In past wars, when we're having a bombing campaign like this, we'd have daily press conferences with a uniformed military person, who would be talking about what they were striking, but also the strategy behind it and suggestions of whether they were making progress or not. And we don't get that," Jaffe said.

The shift at the Pentagon under Hegseth comes on top of new policies that the Defense Department has placed on media outlets that drastically restrict access, some of which a federal judge ruled to be unconstitutional in March. The government appealed that ruling and the litigation is ongoing.

Reports emerged June 1, first in the Washington Post, that the Pentagon had barred journalists from the building's press office and redesignated it a classified space. The press office was long a freely accessible room that reporters could stop by to pose questions to military public affairs officers.

Acting Pentagon Press Secretary Joel Valdez said in a social media statement that the change was due to the department's speechwriters, whom he said routinely handle classified material, sharing the facility.

"This is the most transparent War Department in history," Valdez said, using the Trump administration's preferred name for the department. "No amount of spin from the fake news media will change that."

The Pentagon did not respond to a detailed request for comment about Hegseth's availability during the Iran war and the department's communications strategy. On Wednesday, he was reported to be at the U.S. naval base in Guantanamo, Cuba, as tensions between that island nation and the United States remain high.

In total, the messaging shift at the Pentagon reflected a "seismic shift" toward insulating itself from public view, professor Crosbie said.

"The whole goal of this administration is to create maneuver space. So, any type of norm that exists that limits the behavior of principals is viewed as a negative thing," he said, referring to the Pentagon's top decision-makers.

"I think it is undemocratic in the sense it's intended to limit the capacity of American voters to observe what's happening in the work of the military," he said.

Chris Meagher, chief Pentagon spokesman under President Joe Biden, outlined why he thought the Pentagon should be as transparent as possible even when politically difficult. For one, the Pentagon is fueled by massive sums of taxpayer dollars.

"The taxpayer has a right to know what that money is going toward," Meagher said. "Number two, the decisions in that building are literally life-and-death decisions."

Over the first 38 days of Operation Epic Fury, before a cease-fire took effect, U.S. forces sustained more than 400 casualties, including 13 dead. The $29 billion price tag given by Pentagon officials did not include the cost of repairs to U.S. bases damaged by Iranian retaliatory strikes.

In response to the bombing, Iran closed the Strait of Hormuz, a key commercial passageway off the country's coast. That move roiled the global energy market and sent the price for regular gasoline in the U.S. over $4.50 per gallon in May. Just 24% of Americans said that considering both the costs and the benefits, the decision to take military action in Iran was worth it, according to an April Ipsos poll.

While the bulk of the fighting stopped after the April 8 cease-fire, U.S. forces continue to enforce a naval blockade of Iranian ports and have fended off sporadic Iranian drone and missile attacks.

On Tuesday, President Donald Trump said on social media that Iran was responsible for downing a U.S. Army helicopter while it was patrolling over the Strait of Hormuz a day earlier. In the post, Trump said the U.S. "must, of necessity, respond to this attack."

The United States and Iran then traded a series of attacks. U.S. Central Command said that it carried out strikes in southern Iran, and Iran fired a barrage of missiles and drones across the Gulf that the militaries of Jordan, Kuwait and Bahrain claimed to have intercepted.

Trump said Wednesday morning on social media that Iran had "taken too long to negotiate a deal that would have been great for them, now they will have to pay the price!!!"

When asked about that post by reporters at the White House, he said "we hit them hard yesterday and we'll be hitting them hard again today."

Trump's warning came after the United States launched new attacks against Iran after the U.S. said Tehran "shot down" an American Army helicopter that had been patrolling near the Strait of Hormuz. Iran then struck U.S. targets across the Middle East, including Jordan, Kuwait and Bahrain.

Senior U.S. military leaders and Pentagon officials have painted the war as a success, insisting that it would take Iran's military a generation to rebuild. But mediareports have suggested that despite the United States' more than 13,000 strikes targeting Iran's military equipment and infrastructure, the Iranian regime retains significant military capacity.

During the Iran war, the Pentagon scaled back traditional channels of information -- news briefings, media interviews with officials, reporters embedded with American troops. But it adopted a new primary means of conducting its wartime communication: social media.

The department took to X throughout the war, where its posts often featured violent imagery of U.S. strikes on Iranian targets accompanied with triumphalist commentary heralding the destruction.

One post from an official Defense Department X account simply had the words "NO MERCY" overlaid on an image of a missile in flight.

The Pentagon's current chief spokesman, Sean Parnell, has not held a live news conference since before the start of the war. But throughout the fighting he could be found on X cheerleading the air campaign with posts scant in detail, but replete with bravado.

"THE IRANIAN NAVY IS DECIMATED," the text of one of his posts read above a cartoon illustration of an exploding ship.

In contrast, during the final three weeks of the U.S.'s chaotic withdrawal from Afghanistan in August 2021, in which 13 U.S service members were killed, the Pentagon's then-chief spokesman, former Navy Adm. John Kirby, briefed reporters more than 20 times, often twice a day.

"I think what you're seeing now is messaging that is overtly political," said Meagher, the former Pentagon spokesman and Kirby's successor, "and more intended to position the president in a position of power and strength rather than provide information in a transparent manner to the American people."

Copyright 2026 UPI News Corporation. All Rights Reserved.