Disclaimer: This article is based on actual news from the real world – honestly! However, it has been sprinkled with a healthy dose of satire.
The United States military can put a two-thousand-pound bomb through a chosen window in another hemisphere. It runs submarines built to vanish for months at a time. It has a constellation of satellites capable of reading license plates from orbit. It fields eleven aircraft carriers and something on the order of 5,000 nuclear warheads. This week, it announced that the one threat it cannot manage is a reporter walking down a hallway without a grown-up.
The Pentagon's latest perimeter defense strategy involves keeping journalists several hallways away from journalism. (Bumble-Dee/depositphotos)
Effective Monday, the Pentagon press office is a classified space. Per the designation, the office responsible for releasing information to the public is now prohibited from releasing information to the public. Journalists seeking comment may no longer enter the room where comment is provided. The room remains staffed, for some reason. Joseph Heller never managed anything this clean in Catch-22.
The campaign started last September, when Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth circulated a pledge for reporters to sign. It asked them to promise not to collect any information that the Pentagon had not approved for release. The fine print: not just classified information, all information. A reporter who learned an unauthorized fact by accident, by overhearing it in an elevator, or through the simple misfortune of having functioning ears, would be in breach. Around 30 news organizations, including Fox News and Newsmax, declined to sign and were asked to hand back their credentials.
In March, a federal judge ruled the pledge unconstitutional. The Pentagon executed a tactical withdrawal to a new policy: relocate the press to a forward annex and assign each reporter a security escort. It is the way you would handle a prisoner transfer or a visiting head of state, except the asset under guard is a man trying to reach the vending machine down the hall. By May, the perimeter had expanded to the whole building.
Officials describe all of this as a security measure. To date, no foreign adversary has breached the Pentagon by lanyard. The Pentagon has identified the written-down fact as its deadliest enemy. A military that can flatten a city block from orbit has decided it cannot withstand a follow-up question.
