ON first visiting Southeast Asia, a reporter, or any other designated VIP, usually undergoes a ritual of purification. Arriving at the Hawaii headquarters of the Commander in Chief Pacific Forces, he is led to a closely guarded building. Within its cavernous, arctic-cool auditorium, he is guided to a leather swivel chair beating a plaque with his name. On a table is a plump leather notebook full of blank paper awaiting his use. Standing in front of him, as august as an altar, is a divided projection screen. Above the screen, a row of clocks record the time in distant parts of the world. Then bemedaled officers march briskly front and center to a lectern, there to deliver, like preachers, resonant, reassuring explications of the U.S. military role in Asia. The visitor, like a churchgoer, may be awed. But he is more likely to be bored, and to feel that he has not learned much he did not know before.
But then that may be the unadmitted purpose of the CINCPAC briefing. Like all similar productions sponsored by the military, it is more a reaffirmation of faith than a revelation of fact. Such is the notoriety of the presentation that some reportorial wits rate briefings on a scale: CINCPAC equals zero. Not that many other briefings rank much higher; correspondents in Viet Nam, for example, long ago dubbed their daily briefings in Saigon the "5 O'Clock (now 4:30) Follies." To the press, military briefings have become more show than substance—a bewildering melange of abbreviations and acronyms, of charts, maps, slides and the ubiquitous collapsible pointer that briefers wave in military rhythm. All that is missing from this mixed-media presentation is a rock background, and maybe the reason is that no one has thought of it yet.
To Make a Case
The theoretical purpose of a briefing is to convey necessary information in as concise and clear a manner as possible. As the sheer volume of information has multiplied, it has become essential to provide those who need to know with comprehensible summaries. Not just the military, but much of the Federal Government and many big corporations use the briefing as a convenient tool to make a case or sell a product. Nowhere, though, has it become more a way of life than in the U.S. armed forces; the military has subjected the briefing form to all the spit and polish of a full-dress parade. Simplification, indeed oversimplification, has been ritualized, and the military sometimes gives the impression of enjoying the ritual more than its purpose, which is to communicate.