Actually, the Pentagon was where most of my information came from. Planners and analysts are allowed to publish a surprising amount of what they do in scholarly journals like Naval Institute Proceedings, Foreign Affairs or Wilson Quarterly among many others (those are three of my favorites).

Something happens between those people who know what is going on and the flacks that distill it for public consumption. Then the news media gets it and performs unnatural acts on the distillation and you get what the popular press provides you. Nuggets of information stuck together by human interest paragraphs and lived-up with the butcher's bill.

B