I can understand why they would. You don’t want your enemy knowing you are unprepared. And in the military every day is a dress rehearsal for war.
What appears so obvious to FReepers is a mystery to the media.
On a similar note, a soy pod named William Arkin has a piece at Newspeak, in which he appears puzzled by the military, treating almost as an anthropologist might look at a newly discovered group of isolated natives.
This quote from that piece just summed it up for me:
“But Crozier’s firing is also an opportunity to learn that the military operates by its own set of rules, enforcing strict discipline and order, precisely because it is the military.”
None of these soy-based creatures in the media seem to even know anyone who’s ever served in the armed forces.