COUNTERCOLUMN: All Your Bias Are Belong to Us

...but maybe not quite as badly as some people think.

Several alert readers wrote in pointing out this piece from the Washington Times, including this howler:

Within days, a four-tank squadron was rumbling toward the eastern city of Kut.

Now, as any first year tanker can tell you, four tanks do not a "squadron" make. Four tanks make up a platoon.

And as any first year tank officer can tell you, there are generally no "squadrons" at all in an armored division. Tank units have battalions, not squadrons. Only the air force and cavalry units have squadrons.

Then an 18-tank battalion entered Karbala, a holy city where precision operations were needed to spare religious shrines.

Suspect. Battalions normally have a lot more than 18 tanks. A full strength, pure tank battalion has three companies of 14 tanks each, plus a tank each for the S3 and the Battalion Commander.

But tank battalions almost never operate pure. They'll detatch one or two companies of tanks and in return pick up one or two companies of infantry.

In addition, tanks aren't worth a whole lot for most operations in Iraq. They are vulnerable in the cities, they chew up road surfaces and pavements, pulverize sidewalks, get stuck in blind alleys, have poor observation unless the TC sticks his head out the top (and renders himself extremely vulnerable to sniper fire), they burn too much gas and they're too hard to tow for convoy escort duties, they take up too much cargo space, and its too hard to bring their 120mm main guns to bear against a target in the cities without causing an obscene amount of collateral damage.

So the practice has been to take the tank crews out of their tanks and stick them in Humvees. So it's quite possible that a Battalion sized unit would be down to 14-18 tanks.

So I'm not ready to call 'gotcha' on that particular point. But any group of four tanks operating together I'd still call a platoon. The army wouldn't break up a platoon.

Rowan Scarborough's been on the beat a while. I would have thought he would have developed a grasp of rudimentary military terminology by now. Apparently not.

But we can't expect every reporter to be Ernie Pyle. Military reporters should come from a variety of backgrounds and disciplines. But, still, there ought to be someone on the fact-checking staff with enough experience and subject matter knowledge to catch something like this.

Newspapers just routinely make zero effort to recruit veterans onto their staffs. Indeed, the way newspapers recruit, military veterans who get their college degrees tend to get locked out of the industry.

Here's why:

When looking for new reporters, newspapers almost invariably want daily experience. Experience in magazine writing or in other fields typically does not count for much.

The way young people break into the newspaper business is through internships at newspapers during their college years.

But if you're going to college on an ROTC scolarship, or you have reserve commitments during college, then bang! Your summers are spoken for. There's no breaking in.

The effect is a marked underrepresentation of veterans in the newsroom.

With predictable incompetence when it comes to studying the institution.

Who loses?

Newspapers, veterans, and readers.

Who gains?

J-school types who haven't done anything else, and bring nothing to their beats, but who appreciate the job security.

Splash, out

Jason