War & Peace Quote by Bruce Jackson

War doesn’t just conscript bodies; it drafts narratives. Bruce Jackson’s line is blunt about a reality democracies prefer to dress up in press-conference civility: once the shooting starts, information stops being a public good and starts being treated like a weapons system. The phrasing “instrument of war” is doing heavy work. It collapses the comforting separation between battlefield and newsroom, suggesting the media can be aimed, calibrated, and deployed. If it can’t be deployed, it must be “controlled” - not merely managed or persuaded, but governed like territory.

The subtext is less about villainy than about incentives. In wartime, governments are judged on outcomes and morale, not on epistemic openness. Bad optics can translate into wavering alliances, recruitment problems, collapsing public support, market panic. So the state’s appetite for secrecy and message discipline expands, often with a moral alibi: unity, security, troop safety. “Element in war” is the more chilling clause because it implies media isn’t just a tool governments wield; it’s an active factor that can change the course of conflict, which makes control feel, to officials, like strategy rather than censorship.

Jackson’s professional vantage point matters. A public servant isn’t performing media theory; he’s describing operating conditions. The quote reads like a field manual for the modern “information environment,” where embedded reporting, classification regimes, psychological operations, and selective access all coexist with the rhetoric of a free press. Its power lies in refusing the sentimental version of wartime transparency and naming the transactional truth: in war, governments don’t simply communicate. They compete.