As the sky over Yugoslavia cleared intermittently, rhetorical fog in the briefing rooms of Washington and Brussels began to disperse a bit, too. Signs of progress in the air campaign have encouraged officials to be more open. But they have yet to disclose numbers of hits and misses or discuss likely percentages of success, and for reasons that go beyond the conflict at hand. Controls on war information are being tightened in response to a perception that military secrecy generally has gone lax since the Cold War. There certainly is some cautious withholding.
Critics call a restrictive policy self-defeating.
In today's world, it seems there's information out there one way or another. John Warden, a planner of the Persian Gulf War air campaign. When you try to hide it, you create a bad impression, in this case raising significant doubts about strategy. NATO and U.S. officials have given examples of targets destroyed and shown video, detail that has become more plentiful in recent days. The limits resemble or are even tighter than those during the Gulf War, which far exceeded those that existed during the Vietnam War.