The United States is the world's policeman, and insists upon fighting and engaging in armed conflict with nations, nation-states, and terrorists throughout the entire world; so that it is fair to say that since the 9/11/2001 terrorist attack on United States soil, the United States has been involved in armed conflict with at least one nation or nation-state continuously. Despite all the current armed conflict, which involves killing enemies, killing enemy combatants, destroying infrastructure, along with the quite regrettable attendant civilian deaths and injuries from such warfare; we have, unlike the Vietnam War which truly was brought into the living rooms of all Americans, instead have armed conflicts that are almost never front page news.
It would seem that when it comes to warfare, that most Americans should want to know about it, but for the most part, it seems that what is going on overseas is just a sideshow, and disappointingly ignored by the public as well as the mass media; though there is coverage, but that coverage would appear to be managed in a way that seems to stipulate that continuous war and warfare really isn't a sort of hell. While, this could be chalked up to general indifference, it would be fairer to state, that those that control the narrative, are able to also control what is or is not disseminated to the public at large.
So that, in point of fact, while the killing of anybody, enemy or not, is an especially nasty bit of business, one might think that in an era of hi-resolution cameras, along with drones that are quite capable of providing excellent footage of the devastation and destruction of war, that there would be far more images of disturbing content that would be readily available, from those wars and armed conflicts, but surprisingly there really is not.
Unlike, domestic insurrections, in which citizens and news crews do a commendable job of recording incidents; when it comes to the warfare that we conduct overseas, independent journalists as well as mass media journalists, are often shackled as to what they can or cannot see and record, by being essentially chaperoned by US military personnel. That is to say, to get to an authorized area of conflict, a given reporter needs transportation, and that transportation is going to come from the military. So too, when interviewing soldiers out in the field of action, a military escort must be present, which quite obviously impacts what a given soldier will say in response to a question. Also, often times, the actual proposed dispatches of reporters are first reviewed by military personnel, in order to amend, delete, or edit any dispatches which purport to contain military sensitive information. Additionally, those reporters that are unable to consistently conform to military desires are simply subject to being removed as being authorized military reporters with their appropriate credentials revoked, pending any appeal.
In short, when the military is permitted to subvert the freedom of the press, by invoking national security or things of that nature, and thereby the filming and pictures produced, are essentially edited by that military, then the resulting picture for the public at large is not a true picture, but instead has been replaced by a managed picture per military dictates. When the press is managed by the military, then that military is going to be in control of the narrative, and a country that does not allow its press to have fair freedom of movement to report upon the military excursions of their country, and further are not allowed to report unobstructed what they see, hear, and record, then you are going to inevitably have some very bad things happen because evil and wrong doing fear the illuminating light of truth, and prefer the darkness and shadows which allows such to ply well their trade.