Operation Sovereign Borders, the lofty-sounding title for a military-style campaign to stop leaky Indonesian fishing vessels, is no Charge of the Light Brigade or Battle of Omdurman.
But the way the Abbott government wants it covered by the media has its genesis in two of the most infamous engagements in British military history.
And for that we can probably blame William Howard Russell, a reporter with the London Times, whose dispatches from the Crimean War are regarded as the first example of the often fractious relationship the government and its military have with the media.
In other words, the tension between what the public has a right to know and what the government would prefer them not to know in the name of the national interest.
Russell's extraordinarily graphic, almost shocking, account of the Charge of the Light Brigade infuriated military commanders of the mid-19th century.
"A more fearful spectacle was never witnessed than by those who, without the power to aid, beheld their heroic countrymen rushing to the arms of sudden death," he wrote of the brave 600, immortalised later by Alfred Tennyson's epic poem.
"The plain was strewed with their bodies and with the carcasses of horses."
Toward the end of the charge, Russell wrote that what took place then was "an act of atrocity without parallel in modern warfare of civilised nations".
He was referring to the decision of Russian gunners who, seeing their own cavalry mingled with the British, "poured a murderous volley of grape and canister on the mass of struggling men and horses, mingling friend and foe in one common ruin."
The report embarrassed the British government and its hitherto untouchable military generals. The response of Lord Raglan, British commander in Crimea, was to order his officers to blacklist Russell.
Lord Kitchener went further at the Battle of Omurdman, a famous but controversial British victory he led in central Sudan in 1898.
One eyewitness described it as "not a battle but an execution". A young Winston Churchill, in his account of the campaign, thought Kitchener was too brutal in his killing of the wounded.
Kitchener, for his part, threatened to shoot the first reporter who wrote anything about his campaign.
Australian governments, generally, have used more subtle methods to influence the way news is reported from the battle front.
The first account of the Gallipoli landings on April 25, 1915, for instance, did not appear in Australian newspapers until May 12.
The official account, by Charles Bean, was published in the Commonwealth Government Gazette on May 17.
The sinking of HMAS Sydney in November 1941, with all its 645 crew, was withheld from the public for 12 days - so concerned was the government of its impact on the country.
Even when prime minister John Curtin made the first of two public announcements he did little more than confirm rumours that the Sydney had been sunk.
A suspicion that information was being concealed was strengthened by the delay in making the official announcement, by the lack of any real explanation when it did come, and by the secrecy which surrounded the official investigation of the disaster.
Adrian d'Hage, a former chief of Defence public relations and decorated veteran of the Vietnam War, recalled this week how the military attempted to control the media during the first "television war" with daily briefings in Saigon.
The fourth estate was right to be wary, as they were treated to charts of "dazzling numerical progress", which often hid the truth behind incidents the military and the government would rather not have had reported.
And d'Hage sees a similarity with the weekly media briefings for Operation Sovereign Borders.
They are "unnecessarily confrontational, unnecessarily secretive, and already considered by many journalists to be a waste of time".
"Border protection may sound as if it needs a high-security classification, but these are leaky boats, not an armada of Russian nuclear submarines assembling off the coast of Western Australia," the retired brigadier wrote in The Australian.
When rescuing people from disabled boats, general locations of Australian ships, accompanied by a broad description of the activities of their crews, is entirely appropriate, d'Hage argues.
Not according to Morrison and Operation Sovereign Borders commander Lieutenant General Angus Campbell.
Both men contend that providing details is fodder for people smugglers, threatening the very aims of the operation.
"They use official announcements of vessel interceptions to persuade people that the way to Australia remains open. It does not," Campbell said as he denied he was involved in "secrecy for secrecy's stake".
Morrison's standard "that's an operational issue" response to requests for timely details of on-water incidents has now extended to just about every aspect of Operation Sovereign Borders.
His catchphrase answer to a question about the number of Indonesian fishing vessels purchased by the government - a coalition election policy - provoked howls of derision from Labor MPs in parliament this week.
But the government's strategy went off the rails this week because of media it could not control.
The Jakarta Post, like other non-Australian news outlets, reported in depth on what the government regarded as secret on-water issues.
Eye-witnesses, armed with basic telecommunications technology such as mobile phones, and access to the internet can reveal, for instance, that an asylum-seeker boat reached Darwin on Monday.
The rest of us had to wait until Friday for official confirmation, but without any detail.
"I am not going to talk about the procedures, the events so forth of vessels that we intercept," Campbell told inquisitive reporters at the weekly briefing.
d'Hage argues the Australian public clearly has a right to know the broad details of naval operations.
"Instead, we've gone back to the 19th century."
That means "speaking in hushed tones" to convince the average Australian the navy's role in assisting leaking boats was "above TOP SECRET" and that "loose lips sink ships".
"Lord Kitchener would be pleased," d'Hage says.
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