Defense Reporting with POLITICO’s Paul McLeary

Defense reporter Paul McLeary discusses what it’s like to be a defense reporter and how it can affect the overall approach to journalistic storytelling.

The field of defense reporting is not one for the weak-minded, especially if you’re going to be embedded with a troop in a conflict zone. Paul McLeary is a defense reporter at Politico, an online publication that focuses on domestic and international politics, including topics such as armed services, the U.S. Department of Defense and the defense and military industry — areas in which McLeary specializes.

Here’s how the conversation with McLeary went.

What do you currently do?

I've been doing a lot of Ukraine for the past two years because of all that stuff and how local weapons transfers happen, how the U.S. government funds this sort of thing, how they were going to work with allies to fund different projects and work on the industrial base to kind of ramp up the industrial base to meet these challenges.

How did you first get into defense reporting?

Well, I was living in New York…writing about politics and media, doing a lot of kind-of book reviews and cultural writing and things like that. And then 9/11 happened. I was living in Brooklyn, and the stuff I was doing didn't seem as important. So, I kind of started to focus a little more on national security. I was working for a place called the Columbia Journalism Review at the Columbia Journalism School and doing more on the military to convince them to send me to Iraq a couple of times to do some stories. And then Afghanistan later on. 

That was my path that just seemed more important, more urgent, nuclear, ambulance…There was an opportunity at the time with the embedded reporter program that the DoD did with a lot of reporters to go around and live with troops in Iraq and Afghanistan, and you just follow them around and then did what they did. And it was a way for people like me who…never studied journalism…to kind of kick in the door and do that sort of reporting because a lot of people want to do it. Then that kind of just spawned from there. 

What was it like being embedded with U.S. troops in Iraq, Syria and Afghanistan?

Honestly, it was a lot of fun. I know it sounds weird to say but it was. You know, it was scary at times. The difficult part was that you just show up…and it is hard to build trust because if you stay, the trick would be to stay with a unit for a week or two or a little bit longer. But because you just show up for like two or three days, you're not going to get to know anybody, and they're not really going to trust you, which I totally get. They're doing a very dangerous job. 

They're scared, they're tired, they're away from their families, and then you parachute in and start asking questions — people bristle at that…but if you stayed with the unit for two weeks, with some time, you got to know the guys, and they started to open up and to trust you a little bit more and just kind of sharing the danger. If they were going to go out and say, “Hey, you want to come?” you have to say yes every time because what's the point just sitting on the base? Then you can kind of build that trust, so it was fascinating. It was fascinating to look into the machine of war at that scale; something that I feel would be helpful to see, what the U.S. can do and how quickly they can do it. It's amazing. 

I think everyone who did it changed…I think it forced a generation of reporters and editors…to go to war and see what it looks like. And it's something we hadn't had in a long time — since Vietnam really, where reporters could see that and touch it and understand the brutality of it and not be flippant…having that perspective on it changes how you cover it, and changes how you cover even politics, I think, afterward because you know what it means…It opened my eyes in ways I didn't expect it to. And I think it's changed a lot for national security reporting, as those guys like me are now involved and still doing this sort of thing…you have a better appreciation for the humanity of it.

What would you say has been the hardest thing for you to cover throughout your career?

The hardest emotionally was during Hurricane Katrina in New Orleans. I went down there and drove from Baton Rouge to New Orleans with this guy, Matt Power, who passed away a few years after that…he was amazing…anyway…I'd been to Iraq, but seeing that kind of destruction in an American city kind of shocked me. It’s different seeing dead bodies in American cities and things like that. That was tough…that was probably the emotional hard part. I think. 

The hardest thing I've done reporting-wise is when I started covering the Pentagon…every reporter deals with this, whether you work in courts or whatever, but it's just when you start from nothing, building those relationships and even trying to understand the subject matter. And I think every young reporter deals with that. Because you want to get the big story, and you want people to talk to you, but they're not going to want to for a while. 

So I think it's having the patience and the maturity to do the small stories, and wait until you can get the big ones. I mean, you always try to get the bigger ones, but it's going to take some time…and I think that that's the hard part. It's just like the first year kind of grinding away trying to get there…starting is tough, especially if it's something that you're not already conversant in, you know; something that's relatively new, or something intricate, or whatever niche thing — that's tough, kind of ramping up to it. But it's also fun because as you build you can feel it, you start to understand things, and you start asking better questions and people start responding and then trusting you and things like that. So it's a process.

How hard do you think it is now for budding journalists to get their foot in, regarding defense reporting?

Honestly, I feel like for national defense reporting, there is a pretty good path. You know, there's a bunch of smaller websites — Defense One, Breaking Defense, Inside Defense; a bunch of places in D.C. where they mostly hire young. Defense scoop mostly hires young reporters without a lot of experience, but then they give a very specific beat, and you kind of be like Army Aviation or something, which was exciting, but two feet in the door. I think national security and defense reporting may be a little bit easier than some others because we have a $900 billion defense budget, massive. It's all-encompassing for industry and things like that. So there is, I think, more opportunity there. Doesn't mean it's easy, but I think there's a lot of opportunity in the national security space to get in there.

What is one thing you wish you knew about defense reporting before you started?

Taking the big swings is very difficult. And you're not going to land, you know what I mean? It's the building-up part that’s like, ‘Okay, I'll do the small story. I'll meet this person, I’ll get to know them. And then we'll build on that.’ It's kind of the ladder, right, because everyone wants to go big at first, but then you probably have to write something you don't even fully understand right then. So I think it's the process that I didn't understand or appreciate that does take some time. And people aren't just going to open up the doors for you two weeks in. But yeah, I think it's just that the process takes time. It takes some humility and writing boring stories they are not very interested in, but that's part of the process too.

What is your favorite thing about defense reporting?

Being able to travel; it's somewhat rare in journalism that you can do this sort of thing. I was just at the Munich Security Conference…and that was fascinating. There is this conference in Halifax, Nova Scotia, which is a big NATO thing, and that's amazing because everyone’s in one hotel, and you can just grab people in the hallway. It's kind of like being able to do the embedded reporting that I've done traveling with DoD officials. So I mean, being able to get out there and talk to people and experience the world in a way that you're just not able to otherwise. 

A lot of it can be somewhat impersonal stories, but you can still do the people's stories. And those stories are really important; those stories hit people in a very different way. And you can't do as many of those stories to do in politics…and I think we've seen with, you know, Ukraine and things like that, even if it's a story about bureaucracy, it affects people, and there's nothing abstract about national security reporting because it affects people in a very real way, in a very personal way, in a way that maybe some other things really don't.

So I think that's been the most interesting and that was not something I expected when I started it. I think that no matter what you do with it, that's humbling, as in sometimes you meet people like that, and that makes you a better person, but it makes you want to honor what they do and tell their story in an impactful way that, hopefully, other people will also want to have that too.

You can learn more about Paul McLeary’s recent articles here.