I was in Lebanon on a research trip the week before last and nearly coughed up my foul at breakfast when I opened up the Beirut newspaper and read about the 60 Minutes crew being arrested over a bungled snatch and grab operation of two children. Much has been written about this, including the inevitable discussion about the morality of the deed, its potential effect on wider bilateral relations, and myriad other issues that fill up the entertainment, news and editorial spaces of our media. But, as a former military planner and student of the region, I was aghast at one aspect and realistic about another.
The reason I nearly coughed up my foul that morning was disgust at the jaw-dropping amateurishness of the execution and, more particularly, at the near complete lack of risk management exhibited by the decision-makers at the television network concerned.
I'm not a media professional but I do have years of operational planning experience so I assume that someone had to develop the idea and pitch it to a person in authority who then had to approve it and allocate resources. There is a saying in the military that sometimes a poor plan well executed is better than a good plan poorly executed. This fiasco had all the hallmarks of a bad plan badly executed.
When the television network dispatched a four-person TV crew to Beirut, the network accepted the risk on the crew's behalf. Planners try to control what they can control, and risk mitigate what they cannot. Neither appears to have been at play here. To start with, why did the crew have to be in Beirut at all ? Why weren't they in Cyprus, the logical destination for the getaway yacht moored at the Movenpick. If the operation was compromised (which it appears to have been from the start), then at least the TV crew would have been out of harm's way. Is the risk associated with getting a live interview a few hours earlier in Beirut than from the yacht in Cyprus worth it? I'm not in TV but I do know something about operational risk and return and there was no way the risk of having the crew in the same country, let alone the same city, in any way justified the minimal return expected. [fold]
There didn't appear to be any operational urgency to organising this infotainment abduction, which raises even more questions as to why it was so appallingly amateurish. Nobody was going anywhere any time soon, so there was plenty of time to construct a well thought-out plan, have the legal department look at the legal framework in Lebanon to understand the legal risk the crew was being asked to accept, understand the country the crew was flying into, and do due diligence checks on the 'child recovery' agency. That agency should have been required to brief the network on the plan for the sake of co-ordination, and so the network could be assured the abduction plan was sound, operational security was tight, and it was legally covered. Sometimes plans in the military are rushed because there is a time sensitivity, but when they aren't rushed you have the luxury of time. The Nine Network appeared to have had luxury of time to plan and either ignored it or squandered the opportunity. Or that's just not the way it's done in current affairs television.
In regards to the bilateral relationship, the incident, although bad for the crew concerned and their families, is unlikely to have any real impact.
Firstly, this is not the first time media have acted badly so it's not without precedent. Secondly, despite the rather large hoo-ha being generated in Australia (particularly given it's a high-profile media crew incarcerated in a Beirut jail), Lebanon has got other, rather more newsworthy issues to deal with at the moment. To name just a few: a quarter of its population consists of Syrian refugees; there is a deadly five-year long civil war on its border that occasionally spills over; it has been without a president since May 2014; it is recovering from a nation-wide 'garbage crisis'; the Saudis have recently withdrawn $4 billion in military and security aid; and the French president is currently touring. Amongst all this, a ham-fisted child abduction abetted by a foreign TV crew is titillating but hardly ranks as a first order issue.
Opinions voiced in The Australian that this could be solved with the intervention of Iran are well wide of the mark and assume that Tehran is even vaguely interested in this overblown domestic dispute gone wrong. The fact that this is a second or third-order issue in Lebanon is a good thing in the long run. It means there is a better chance that it will be dealt with for what it is — a domestic dispute into which parties who have no right to do so have inserted themselves in a seriously amateurish fashion. Apart from the families of those incarcerated, who are paying the price for the television network's inability to understand the operational environment, planning or risk mitigation processes, we should also spare a thought for our mission in Beirut, some of whom have undoubtedly had to shift efforts from their normal job of understanding a complex country in a complex region to looking after the personnel of a media company behaving badly.