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Wars tend to be very public things, they are visible. There are correspondents traveling with the troops and you get daily dispatches.

The Defense Department's plan to ban newspaper reporters from pool coverage of military operations is incredible. It reveals the administration to be out of touch with journalism, reality and the First Amendment.

If we were in a similar circumstance in the future I would want to make sure that our reporting was at least as diverse as it was during this most recent war.

We have increasingly fewer and fewer journalists who have any military experience and understand what life is like in the military and in combat.

We journalists are a bit like vultures, feasting on war, scandal and disaster. Turn on the news, and you see Syrian refugees, Volkswagen corruption, dysfunctional government. Yet that reflects a selection bias in how we report the news: We cover planes that crash, not planes that take off.

It's always the generals with the bloodiest records who are the first to shout what a hell it is. And it's always the war widows who lead the Memorial Day parades.

You know, the commander-in-chief's first responsibility is look out for those in uniform who fight the wars.

In the re-creation of combat situations, and this is coming from a director who's never been in one, being mindful of what these veterans have actually gone through, you find that the biggest concern is that you don't look at war as a geopolitical endeavor.

Probably the best advertising jobs of all are done by governments to convince people to go to war.