It was great while it lasted, wasn’t it? The US military has effectively ordered an end to milblogging.
Army Squeezes Soldier Blogs, Maybe to Death
The U.S. Army has ordered soldiers to stop posting to blogs or sending personal e-mail messages, without first clearing the content with a superior officer, Wired News has learned. The directive, issued April 19, is the sharpest restriction on troops’ online activities since the start of the Iraq war. And it could mean the end of military blogs, observers say.
No big deal, we can rely on the MSM to give us our news from now on…sigh.
As great as our military is, we suck at Information Warfare in the Information Age. We’ve told you about Michael Yon’s repeated problems with the military, and now this.
Matt Burden, aka Blackfive, chronicled the golden age of milblogging in his awesome book Blog of War: Frontline Dispatches from Iraq and Afghanistan. If you haven’t read it, I highly recommend it. Especially now.
Matt has a great post on the end of milblogging,
Operational Security is of paramount importance. But we are losing the Information War on all fronts. Fanatic-like adherence to OPSEC will do us little good if we lose the few honest voices that tell the truth about The Long War.
I will be attending the 2007 Milblogging Conference this weekend in Washington DC. Good thing, because it is probably the last. I will have plenty of interviews with all of your favorite milbloggers, like Blackfive, Bill Roggio, John Noonan, Uncle Jimbo, Michael Fumento and many others. I also have a few surprises up my sleeve. Stay tuned.
UPDATE: In the comments, Michael Fumento reminded me of something he wrote earlier this week. At the end of a lengthy post about his recent embed in Afghanistan, Michael unloaded on the Army Public Affairs Office,
The more I get to know Army PAOs, whether in Iraq or Afghanistan, the less respect I have for them. They always seem to have something better to do than their jobs. I’m told the Marines take this business much more seriously and in fact the best PAO I had was Marine Maj. Megan McClung. But she’s dead.
Michael wrote a series of moving articles about Maj. McClung here, here and here. He continued,
I strongly suspect (actually I know), that if I worked for the MSM — the folks the soldiers are always complaining about to me, including on this trip — I wouldn’t receive such shabby treatment. But you have to have priorities. If you’re dealing with a reporter whose organization makes a point of portraying the troops as a bunch of thugs and the Iraq war as hopeless, you give him first class treatment. Thank goodness the government of Iraq banned Al Jazeera, else the Army’s PAO staff would be absorbed in kissing their feet.
If you’re dealing with somebody paying out of his own pocket because of his conviction that the American people deserve the truth and aren’t getting it and that the soldiers deserve an even break and aren’t getting it — you dump on him. You give him crummy assignments, such as when Lt. Col. Garver and his Combined Press Information Center tried to foist 12 days of ho-hum Tikrit on me, and then when he needs to go home you make plot his own way out of a country he’s never been in that’s on the wrong side of the planet.
It helps explain why there are so few citizen embeds still going to the two wars. We thought the bad guys comprised insurgents and terrorists and those in the MSM who provide them aid and comfort. We did not think it would be our own military public affairs.
Here is another PAO classic from Michael Yon,
Mr. Yon;
I do not recognize your website as a media organization that we will use as a source to credential journalists covering MNF-I operations.
LTC Barry Johnson
Director, CPIC
www.mnf-iraq.com
Say what you will about Rumsfeld, but he was spot on when it came to the media,
Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld declared today that the war on terror is not only being fought on the battlefield, “but in the newsrooms — in places like New York, London, Cairo and elsewhere.” At a speech before the Council on Foreign Relations in New York, Rumsfeld outlined a strategy for the U.S. to become more aggressive in conducting “information warfare” in the modern era of satellite TV and the Internet.
Like many of Rumsfeld plans, that never materialized.
To summarize: We have a completely inarticulate commander-in-chief and we just silenced our greatest asset in the information war, the troops themselves. Yon, Fumento and other citizen journalists who are willing pay their way and work independently are treated like second class citizens.
When I look at presidential contenders for 2008, one of the biggest factors for me is the ability to articulate a clear rationale for our actions in this Long War.