Media: the reality gap

By Richard North - December 13, 2025

Despite all the war talk, the Ajax issue has not been settled, the uncertainty hanging over the Army’s readiness plans like a blanket of London smog before the introduction of the Clean Air Act.

However, while having been up-front in reporting the technical problems with this ill-fated project, The Times has now delivered its considered view of the controversy in an editorial headed: “Botched Ajax project is more proof of MoD incompetence”, with its sub-head declaring: “Even in a crowded field of procurement disasters, the saga of these armoured fighting vehicles stands out”.

I’m not sure that the Nimrod disasters didn’t go one better, though, collectively costing about £10 billion compared to the £5 billion or so liability that the MoD faces if it now cancels the contract with General Dynamics. As I remarked earlier, compared to that, not having the Ajax is relatively good value.

That aside, it is all very well for this newspaper to pontificate about the MoD’s “consistently awful performance” – a chorus joined with gusto by the rest of the legacy media – but, if anything, the very fact that this project has got this far represents an equally awful performance on the part of the legacy media – to say nothing of the self-appointed defence commentariat which holds court on social media and elsewhere.

The media frequently positions itself as the “Fourth Estate” – a description coined by Edmund Burke around 1787 – an independent pillar alongside the executive, legislative, and judicial branches, essential to democracy through accountability, transparency, and informing the public.

This role, self-evidently, extends to defence and national security issues, where coverage is often framed as a safeguard against government overreach, secrecy, or misuse of power – indirectly making an important contribution to the nation’s defence by preserving democratic freedoms and preventing abuses that could undermine security from within.

It is fair, therefore, to assert that the legacy media’s role encompasses “watchdog” journalism over uncritical support for defence policies, with journalists and editors theoretically encouraging aggressive, sceptical reporting on defence matters, exposing waste, illegal actions, or flawed strategies as a patriotic duty – even if “patriotism” these days is something of a tarnished concept.

However, to make a worthwhile contribution to the media function, it is essential that its journalists are knowledgeable and given the scope to write detailed analytical critiques of military strategies and related matters.

In this, one recalls the cutting-edge journalism of Captain Basil Liddell Hart (as he was then) who served as military correspondent for The Daily Telegraph from 1925 to 1935 and then for The Times from 1935 to 1939.

Liddell Hart critiqued the high-cost attritional warfare of World War I and promoted innovative alternatives. He advocated the “indirect approach” -dislocating the enemy psychologically and logistically rather than through direct confrontation – and early mechanized warfare, including fast-moving armoured forces supported by infantry (“tank marines”) and air power.

As a writer, he was highly influential in the interwar period, particularly in the late 1930s and served as personal adviser to War Secretary Leslie Hore-Belisha (1937–1938), helping implement army reforms, including mechanisation efforts.

His ideas shaped Neville Chamberlain’s policy of prioritising air power and imperial defence over a large expeditionary force for Europe, contributing to the appeasement-era focus on deterrence without massive ground commitments. Contemporaries regarded him as Britain’s foremost military critic, and his writings reached politicians, officers, and the public through prestigious newspapers.

Post-war, notable figures include David Halberstam of The New York Times who was a leading sceptic of the US strategy in Vietnam. He arrived in Vietnam in 1962 and quickly became a leading sceptic, criticising the overreliance on body counts, air power, and a corrupt Saigon regime, arguing the strategy ignored the political nature of the insurgency.

Another giant was Clare Hollingworth, the first woman defence correspondent for The Guardian (1963–1967) and later for The Daily Telegraph (returning in the 1970s–1980s). She deliberately focused on military operations rather than “soft stories” (e.g., hospitals or orphanages, as often expected of women journalists), writing in May 1965 a dispatch from Saigon which described a military stalemate despite US bombing of North Vietnam and the risk of escalation into a major war.

This analysis influenced British policy debates under Harold Wilson’s government, highlighting the futility of certain tactics and contributing to sceptical views of US strategy.

Currently, though, it is hard to think of a contemporary defence correspondent (as they now prefer to call themselves) of such stature. Through the Iraq and Afghan conflicts (the coverage of which I followed closely), they seemed mostly sock-puppets, endlessly parading British troops as “the best in the world”, failing to provide anything like an adequate commentary on why both operations ended up in humiliating failure.

So it is with the current coverage of military issues – especially in respect of the Army. While the likes of the The Times and others will go for the easy hits, such as the noise and vibration issues of the Ajax, neither this newspaper nor any other media source has ever questioned the operational role that this vehicle is intended to fulfil.

The best we get from the Telegraph for instance, is inimitable Hamish de Bretton-Gordon who reminds one of that anonymous review where a commanding officer wrote of his subordinate: “this officer is so stupid that even his brother officers have noticed”.

As a “veteran tank soldier”, he believes “there is a way to fix the struggling Ajax”, grandly declaring: “The concept is sound, and so is the top half of the vehicle. We just need to sort out the bottom half”, suggesting that: “without Ajax and with only 70,000 soldiers, we send a message of weakness to our adversaries, many of whom are all too eager to exploit our vulnerabilities”.

The concept, of course, is not sound, as I have explored elsewhere at some length and one can draw some critical inferences from Jack Watling’s book “The Arms of the Future”, published last year, an extract from which I posted on X.

Watling’s writing was heavily influenced by experiences of warfare in Ukraine (and even then he is out of date), but, while we see reporting from that conflict in the legacy media, too much of it is of the “soft stories” variety eschewed by Clare Hollingworth.

Thus in today’s Times, we have two reports, one headed “War diary: the defiant and the damned on Ukraine’s front line”, and the other “No front line, just a chaotic mishmash of two opposing armies”, which tells of the city of Pokrovsk where “territory is constantly changing hands” and “amid the ruins, Ukrainian troops risk their lives to deliver supplies and rescue comrades”. Both focus on the “human interest” aspects with a heavy emphasis on colour writing which verges on prolixity.

Even where a report offers operational detail, as in a recent Telegraph article which tells of: “Entire Russian column destroyed entering Pokrovsk”, the journalists don’t join the dots.

However, link this with a thread on social media and it makes much more sense. This is a summary of comments by General Syrskyi, C-in-C of the Ukrainian army on “the transformation of modern warfare”, where he remarks that “We are witnessing a rapid and fundamental shift in the very paradigm of warfare”.

It is now impossible to imagine warfare without drones, he says, remarking that, at present, drones account for roughly 60 percent of all firepower on the battlefield. Previously, he adds, artillery was responsible for up to 80 percent of enemy losses.

As a result, the large-scale use of heavy equipment has diminished sharply, he states. Any vehicle must be equipped with full protection – dynamic and mechanical – yet even then its life cycle on the battlefield is extremely short.

Away from the legacy media also is an admirable article in Small Wars Journal which cross-links to a number of other reports, such as this.

Such sources point to the inexorable fact that British (and Nato) so-called “stand-in” reconnaissance doctrines have been rendered obsolete by developments in Ukraine and that, as a result, there is no place on the modern battlefield for a lumbering, over-priced monstrosity such as the Ajax.

This, at last, is beginning to provoke some comment on social media, but nothing of this has touched the thinking or writing of the smug, self-satisfied cadre of defence correspondents in the legacy media.

This really isn’t good enough. The legacy media are quick to tell us how important they are, bestowing awards on their journalists for their fine writing and adventurous stories, but it is time they lived up to their own estimations of their worth. At the moment, they are trailing behind, leaving a huge reality gap between what they tell us and what is happening on the ground.