Military Intelligence
Alum DeFrank directs press operations in Pentagon
By Will Ryan

Col. Jay DeFrank III

Frontline war coverage of the U.S. military has returned with a vengeance after a conspicuous 30-year absence. Unedited images and accounts of what's been labeled "Operation Iraqi Freedom" – from the daringly dramatic to the deeply disturbing – have been beamed instantaneously from the battlefield to the world. And U.S. Air Force Col. Jay DeFrank III (Ph.D. '98), the Pentagon's director of press relations, said he wouldn't want it any other way.

DeFrank is one of the architects of the media "embedding" program, from which 600 international journalists were trained in the basics of combat readiness and assigned to American and British units in Iraq.

"It is a grand experiment," DeFrank said during a telephone interview two weeks after those journalists had entered Iraq with coalition ground forces. "It's never been done to this scale. During the Normandy invasion of World War II, there were only 30 journalists with U.S. forces, and every one had submitted to complete censorship."

By comparison, the 600 journalists traveling and living in Iraq with military units have been free to report on whatever they choose, so long as they do not disclose operational details that could jeopardize the safety of coalition troops. Save for a few incidents, DeFrank said, journalists have handled the responsibility to his satisfaction.

With the advent of the embedding program, U.S. military communications strategy has done an about-face from the limited-access philosophy of the post-Vietnam era. DeFrank attributed this to a realization by U.S. military and political leaders that modern warfare is composed of battles not only for territory but truth.

"We face adversaries that are experts in deceit and propaganda," DeFrank said. "One of the best ways to counter this is to have a credible third-party observer."

This philosophy was battle-tested during "Operation Enduring Freedom" in Afghanistan, DeFrank said. After U.S. air strikes helped Northern Alliance soldiers overrun Taliban positions, accusations surfaced that U.S. Special Forces may have been complicit in the so-called Death Convoy of Afghanistan. Northern Alliance soldiers reportedly had forced hundreds of Taliban prisoners of war into sealed cargo containers, where most died of asphyxiation or dehydration. In ensuing weeks, there was speculation that U.S. soldiers knew of the atrocity and had not intervened.

"We were pretty much able to put that to bed because we had journalists who were with our soldiers at the time and who said, 'No, we were there, and that didn't happen,' " DeFrank said.

DeFrank added that placing journalists with troops also creates a much-needed window through which the public and elected officials can glimpse the daily rigors of combat soldiers' lives.

"We ask our men and women to do absolutely extraordinary things," DeFrank said. "And by that, I mean everything we ask of them is beyond the ordinary. We put them in surreal circumstances. We ask them to do heroic things every day. To have somebody there that documents what they are doing turns out to be a big morale boost for our forces."

DeFrank enlisted in the Air Force in 1974 and served for three years as a weather specialist in Homestead, Fla. After his enlistment, he completed his undergraduate degree in journalism at Southern Connecticut State University. He then rejoined the Air Force as a commissioned officer, serving as a public affairs officer at bases in South Carolina and Alaska.

In 1985, DeFrank received his master's degree in managing communication from the University of Southern California, after which he performed a variety of Air Force public affairs duties in Washington, D.C., Germany and Dayton, Ohio.

In 1994, DeFrank enrolled in the doctoral communication program at the University of Colorado at Boulder. Air Force policy would allot him only three years to complete the program, so it was recommended by his commanders that he bypass the typical teaching and research duties of doctoral students to get an early start on his dissertation.

Willard D. Rowland Jr., dean of the school at the time as well as DeFrank's adviser and dissertation committee chair, persuaded him otherwise, DeFrank said: "He told me, 'This is your doctorate; your peers will have taught and worked as research assistants, and if you don't, you'll end up with a compromised doctorate. You have to find a way to do it.' "

In addition to his own studies and research, DeFrank taught undergraduate classes in public relations, served as an editorial assistant to Professor Robert Trager on the journal Communication Law and Policy, served as a liaison officer to Air Force graduate students at the University and even found time to volunteer several hours a week at The Nature Conservancy.

DeFrank is philosophical about the benefits he has gained from his years of postgraduate study at the University.

"You get a depth of thinking and a level of analysis that you can bring to bear on different subjects," DeFrank said. "It's almost a cynicism that becomes a part of life. I found some processes and some ways of thinking about things more broadly or deeply – an ingrained skepticism and cynicism when looking at phenomena."

Since his days in Boulder, DeFrank has become a leading public affairs strategist at the Pentagon. As director of press operations, he has responsibility for a wide variety of public affairs issues, including managing news conferences and briefings by the secretary of defense, advising senior defense officials on the public-affairs impacts of policy decisions and military operations, managing the dissemination of department information to the news media and providing public affairs guidance to U.S. military commands throughout the world.

DeFrank said he stresses a proactive, results-oriented approach to public affairs, adding that he believes the airing of bad news, however painful it might be for an organization in the short term, will most often lead to the solving of problems within that organization, making it stronger in the long run.

"Public affairs is not about good news or bad news. It's about what you're trying to achieve," DeFrank said. "You need to have the courage to make a tough stand because often you are the one to tell the leadership they need to do things they don't want to do or things that all their instincts are telling them not to do."