When I first began covering the Pentagon in 1992, I took time to view the official orientation movie shown to visitors on tours of the building. In a stentorian voice evoking the newsreels of a bygone era, the narrator said the Pentagon was known as “the building that speaks” for its many public pronouncements prefaced by the phrase “The Pentagon said …”

From the Vietnam War years through the 1991 Persian Gulf War and on through the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq, the Pentagon held regular briefings for reporters to ask questions in a public forum on behalf of the American people.