Stop Listening to the Wrong Experts

Every night for the past six weeks, cable news has assembled its panels — retired generals and decorated pilots breaking down the U.S.-Israel strikes on Iran, the missile exchanges across the Gulf, China’s shadow role in arming Tehran’s defenses. Confident. Credentialed. And often missing the most critical part of the picture.

I know, because I have been one of them.

Since 1993, I have provided military analysis on television — cable news, network programs, the full circuit. I know this world firsthand: the green room, the earpiece, the producer counting you down to air, the certainty expected of you in 90 seconds on a situation that took years to develop. In early 2003, I sat in a Pentagon briefing on Iraq’s alleged weapons stockpiles, looked at satellite photographs and classified assessments, and walked out certain that the analysts present — myself included — were being steered toward a conclusion the evidence did not fully support. I said nothing.

The New York Times later exposed it in David Barstow’s Pulitzer Prize-winning 2008 investigation. I am not proud of that silence. The problem I was part of hasn’t been fixed. The Iran war has made it urgent.

The Mismatch Nobody Names

Since the strikes began February 28, television audiences have watched combat veterans describe operational details — carrier strike group movements, strike package composition, air defense suppression. That analysis matters. But the questions consuming Washington right now are different: Why did Iranian missile accuracy surprise U.S. planners? What is Beijing doing — intelligence support, spare parts, diplomatic cover — and why? What drove Tehran’s calculus on the Strait of Hormuz? What do the April 7 ceasefire terms signal about the next phase?

Those are not military operations questions. They require people who have lived inside those societies, learned those languages, and spent their careers reading those political systems. Researchers at War on the Rocks and investigative journalists at The Washington Post have spent years documenting how systematically television fails to make this distinction. The current crisis is why that failure matters.

The Experts Nobody Books

The U.S. military has built exactly the right people for this moment. They are called Foreign Area Officers (FAOs) — Functional Area 48 — the most rigorously trained regional specialists in uniform.

FAOs spend three to four years in a structured pipeline before advising anyone: intensive language training at the Defense Language Institute, a fully-funded graduate degree in their assigned region, and up to 12 months living and working on the ground inside the country they will spend their careers analyzing. They serve as defense attachés in U.S. embassies and as political-military advisors to combatant commanders. They bring the cultural, historical, and religious context that no amount of combat experience can substitute for.

The George C. Marshall European Center for Security Studies calls them “strategic scouts” — officers who read political and military terrain from the inside out. There are roughly 1,200 Army FAOs either qualified or in training right now. Almost none of them are on television explaining why Chinese satellite systems enhanced Iranian targeting accuracy, or what a ceasefire brokered through Pakistan means for Beijing’s influence in the Gulf. That is not an oversight. It is a failure with consequences that show up in body counts.

What Philip Tetlock Knew

The political scientist Philip Tetlock put hard numbers to this problem in his landmark study “Expert Political Judgment”: credentialed experts’ geopolitical forecasts are barely better than chance. Worse, the analysts who television values most — those who deliver the most confident, unqualified assessments — perform worst of all. Confidence reads as authority. Authority generates bookings. Bookings generate more perceived authority. Accuracy gets crowded out.

As Task & Purpose has reported, members of Congress and their staffers watch the same cable news as everyone else. The experts assembled nightly shape legislative priorities, budget votes, and policy judgments. In the run-up to Iraq, voices like mine made a contested decision look more settled than it was. Right now, with U.S. forces committed in the Gulf, a fragile ceasefire holding on borrowed time, and Beijing watching whether American attention has drifted far enough to move on Taiwan, getting the analysis wrong carries a cost that doesn’t show up in ratings.

What to Demand

Combat veterans belong in the public square. Their expertise on operations, readiness, and the human cost of war is irreplaceable. That is not what’s in dispute.

The point is simpler: rank is not regional expertise. Before accepting an analyst’s authority on Iran, China, or what comes next, ask whether this person has studied this country in its language and on the ground — and whether they have financial ties to defense contractors with a stake in the policy being discussed. Then ask whose expertise is missing from the panel entirely.

We would never accept a general practitioner’s opinion on a surgery he has never performed. The men and women in uniform — and the families who send them — deserve at least that same standard from the voices shaping the decisions that put them in harm’s way.

Proverbs 11:14 says there is safety in a multitude of counselors — but only when those counselors are honest and qualified to speak. Six weeks into a Middle East war with no clear off-ramp, the gap between the experts we are hearing and the experts we need has never been more visible or more costly.

The wrong experts are still talking. Someone should stop listening.

AUTHOR

Robert Maginnis

Robert Maginnis is a retired U.S. Army lieutenant colonel, senior fellow for National Security at Family Research Council, and the author of 14 books. His latest, “The New AI Cold War,” releases in April 2026.

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