War Artists

The US war machine only has three war artists. That's surprising, considering how thoroughly they normally cover all media, even including strip cartoon books. (In the linked picture, only an artist is able to insert Mohamed Atta where officialdom asserts he was, since no other evidence exists.)
The drawing here was sketched by Michael Fay. He told the BBC he was "inspired by the golden light and purple shadows as marines set a trap for Taleban snipers who had been shooting at them near Kandahar, Afghanistan."
Kandahar region happens to be where no fewer than eight Canadian troopers died last week, six of them in one explosion, two in the other. Does war get dirtier than this? Only an artist could evoke the "golden light and purple shadows" to describe the sordid scene he is depicting: grown men setting deadly traps for each other in a devastated village.
I met Leonard Brooks a few weeks back, a gifted Canadian water-colourist who served as a Canadian war artist in the world-war-two part of the 75-year war. He was a dutiful believer and fully embedded: he even took charge of a captured U-boat and (courageously) held a gun on its fanatical crew members.
Graham Sutherland made a more objective witness of the same war, perhaps because he depicted its brutal effects on the streets of Britain.
The Pentagon probably retains war artists to adorn the walls of its own scores of miles of corridors in its 500 bases world-wide. Its intelligence branch has plenty of ways of fixing pictures of its own, including Photoshopping them for their war-making propaganda, e.g. the "future force".