Joan Bundtzen - It's because the government realized that you can convince people that war is bad by giving them daily briefings about how bad war is. Vietnam taught the government that. And, although the media likes to pretend that it doesn't report what the government wants and doesn't report what the government doesn't want, that's not entirely true. Under the Obama administration, the media didn't want to be perceived as hostile, so it didn't pursue military briefings to a strong degree. Now, because they are perceived as hostile, the Trump administration is not releasing a lot of military briefings and the media lack reporters who have a background in those sorts of stories. They'd all rather be "making their bones" attacking the political structure than focusing on Afghanistan and Iraq. But mostly, the military doesn't want to be in the news everyday because that might cause we the people to demand defunding and "war is the health of the state".