They don’t get the attention they deserve, but there’s a thriving community of military blogs (milbloggers) led in part by active-duty troops who update their sites from Iraq and Afghanistan, sometimes literally from the front lines.
But as Noah Shachtman noted today, these blogs may soon be a thing of the past.
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.
Military officials have been wrestling for years with how to handle troops who publish blogs. Officers have weighed the need for wartime discretion against the opportunities for the public to personally connect with some of the most effective advocates for the operations in Afghanistan and Iraq — the troops themselves. The secret-keepers have generally won the argument, and the once-permissive atmosphere has slowly grown more tightly regulated. Soldier-bloggers have dropped offline as a result.
The new rules (.pdf), obtained by Wired News, require a commander be consulted before every blog update.
“This is the final nail in the coffin for combat blogging,” said retired paratrooper Matthew Burden, editor of The Blog of War anthology. “No more military bloggers writing about their experiences in the combat zone. This is the best PR the military has — it’s most honest voice out of the war zone. And it’s being silenced.”
If there’s a reasonable defense for this, I can’t see it. It’s not as if the soldiers are giving away classified information about troop movements or military plans; they’re writing about their experiences in the midst of war.
Occasionally, these bloggers have criticism to share. Apparently, that’s too much for Bush’s Pentagon to bear.
Ed Morrissey explained quite well what a mistake this is from the perspective of a conservative war supporter.
The Army gets paid to protect operational security. In this war, more than any other, the enemies of our troops use the Internet to their advantage, both in their own communications and to scope out their enemies — the American military and government. If troops have leaked classified information either deliberately or inadvertently through their on-line communications, this would be a large area of concern to the Pentagon. However, no one has any evidence that milbloggers have violated Opsec orders in their communications. […]
Milbloggers have provided a vital voice in this war, reporting from vantage points unattainable elsewhere. We have learned about the successes in this war, such as rebuilding efforts and the enthusiasm of Iraqis in neighborhoods protected by American forces, that we do not get in our mainstream media since the embed program ended. Nothing appears ready to replace it except for official Pentagon statements, which carry less weight with the reading public than the soldiers on the front line.
The Army should be concerned about the operational security of the mission — but without those voices engaging the American public, the mission may be lost here at home.
The Pentagon will no doubt respond by noting that the new policies won’t ban milblogging, but will only add a layer of regulations. The reality is that troops a) will be less likely to criticize their mission or leaders if they have to get approval for their speech; and b) will blog less if they have to wait for a bureaucracy to approve their writings.
This is senseless. I realize the administration literally fears dissent, but these men and women want an outlet for a free exchange of ideas, and their families enjoy reading about their perspectives. Many, if not most, of these milbloggers are conservative, which you’d think the adminstration would like. Why insist on silencing them?