Posted on 05/03/2007 3:12:14 AM PDT by Kaslin
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“The Enemy Has Successfully Denied The Western Media Access To The Battlefields”: The Case For Milblogging When Marine Corps General James Mattis remarked to a reporter on December 23rd of last year that the enemy had “successfully denied the Western media access to the battlefields” of Iraq, he was right. But the enemy had not denied the homefront information from those battlefields because of the vast network of computers and blogs operated by the men and women in uniform serving in the theater who kept pumping out crucial information to their families, friends and admirers back in the States.
When four months earlier General John Abizaid had told me in an interview that “it would be a huge help for everybody if we started talking about our enemies out here, what they stand for, what they want, what their vision of the world is, why they're dangerous, and how this is a worthy fight to fight at this level now, rather than letting it wait to get worse,” I realized that thousands of soldiers, sailors, airmen and Marines were doing just that via their milblogs such as MudvilleGazette and their e-mails to civilian bloggers such as Powerline, Instapundit, CaptainsQuarters, Michelle Malkin and me.
The MSM might have been denied the battlefield because of the risks involved –though some like Michael Yon, Bill Roggio, and John Burns were not deterred—and the anti-Bush media might have refused to talk about our enemies or the worthiness of the fight, the men and women of the American military never stopped reporting on the war or describing in detail the nature of the enemy or the ebb and flow of the battle.
It was the first war in which the military itself was providing the data, and not through the press officers though they have mostly tried to help the public understand the stakes, but via the privates and sergeants as well as the officers at the lower ranks. The milbloggers, in short, have done an extraordinary job of keeping the home front not only safe but also informed. I cannot imagine what the public would think of the war if this vital flow of information –solid, reliable, realistic information—had not been flowing back to the homefront for relay and rereading by the millions of Americans skeptical of the MSM’s ability or willingness to report on the war in anything approaching an objective fashion.
Now, in a stunning admission of almost impossible to believe incompetence, the Army has announced henceforth the blogs will fall silent unless the entry has been preapproved. E-mails to civilians as well. In short, the Army is abruptly ending operations on a key portion of the battlefield –the fight for American public opinion.
Matt at Blackfive has been most eloquent about the absurdity of this policy, though the posts denouncing it across the blogosphere have been growing by the hour. Appearing on my program, Alabama Senator Richard Shelby declared the obvious reaction of most people when he said “I think we ought to hear from the soldiers.” “We should not try to shut up our soldiers,” he added. “They’re in harm’s way, they’re carrying the brunt of this, and their families, and we should support them, and we should listen to them.”
“Operational Security” concerns are said to be behind the ban, but I know of no breach that has led to an injury or a death, and as retired Marine Corps Mike McBride said on my program, some casualties would be acceptable in light of the huge benefit the milblogs and e-mails are bringing to the war effort. That’s for the professionals to decide, but an out-of-the-blue lightening bolt of censorship just doesn’t strike those of us who have been reading the milbloggers since before the war began as an expression of concern over security. Rather, it seems to most of us to be an act of exasperation by senior military brass with a new development not encountered before. Troops have always grumbled, and troops have always written home, but troops have never had this kind of reach or volume before. It looks like the patience of someone grew too thin, and in a very ill-conceived and sudden move, a key bit of battleground was simply ceded to the bad guys.
The MSM isn’t going to stop misreporting the war. The anti-war left isn’t going to stop proclaiming that all is lost. And the enemy isn’t going to silence their propaganda mills out of a sense of fair play towards our soldiers.
No, the Army unilaterally disarmed itself, and appeared to do so in a sudden spasm. Hopefully its senior leadership will see the reaction and immediately suspend the new policy pending a thorough review that includes milbloggers, civilian information specialists, and military strategists and historians. The American military has never been in a war like this before, and it cannot possibly think it has the expertise to judge the importance of this troops-to-the-homefront information flow. Maintaining public support of the effort through the truthful accounts of the troops’ lives, or losing that support via the same, is a core value of the milbloggers.
Generating connection between, and support of civilians for the military are two other values. Groups like SoldiersAngeles, the SemperFiFund, the United Warrior Survivors Foundation, and Fisher House have sprung up and grown deep roots in the civilian world largely because the troops and families they serve have been able to communicate with the homefront, and have had their stories told and relayed through the blogosphere and on into MSM. Shutting down the milblogs and the e-mails from the military is an act of astonishing indifference to these connections.
For many reasons, the new Army policy is a serious mistake. Let’s hope the Army’s leadership recognizes this and moves quickly to reverse the new policy, or that the president or Congress will insist that they do.
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Hugh Hewitt is a law professor, broadcast journalist, and author of several books including A Mormon in the White House?: 110 Things Every American Should Know about Mitt Romney.
The recent car bombing in which a car was let through a checkpoint because there were kids in the back seat is a direct consequence of a breach in security concerning operations.
In times of war sacrifices need to be made to keep operational secrets, in our current state of ease of communication anything can pinpoint troop or material movement. People are going to have to get used to it because its the way it has to be. Whats wrong with sending a postcard to loved ones back home?
The ones crying the loudest are probably those that rely on passing sensitive info for reciprocal gains.
And how was that facilitated by milblogging?!?? I fail to see the relevance of your statement.
Apparently this censorship applies only to the Army. More here:
http://www.ncobrief.com/index.php/archives/power-and-control/
I believe that a week prior to that bombing I was watching a show on the Military Channel On Demand which showed the daily routines of a Marine company in Iraq. One of the Sargeants stated that they tended to let cars pass through road-blocks if there were children in the car to speed up the process.
I didn’t really take note of it at the time, but it came back to me forcefully a week later when car bombers drove their car through a check point and were waived through because there were two children in the back. The two men in the car then jumped out just before the car exploded.
This is the sort of tiny operational factoid that may seem insignificant to a soldier at the time he utters it, but which can have devestating consequences if it ends up in the wrong hands. And in today’s wired world, that is sure to happen sooner or later.
The milbloggers were one of the best weapons in the hands of the military, and they've abandoned it. Stupid, just stupid.
We're not fighting the Wermacht, we're fighting the American Media. Only the media can defeat the US Military, and milbloggers were one of the best defenses against their misinformation.
There is no bomb in Iraq that goes off in the hope of defeating the US Military in battle. That would be impossible. Every single bomb is for the purpose of getting ink on the front pages of the New York Times. That's the only hope Al Qaeda has, and milbloggers were one of the only effective counter attacks the military has mounted. The supply of whackos in Iraq capable and able to make bombs will never be stopped, just as Israel can never stop attacks against it. The route to victory in Iraq goes through the American media, and the military should never forget it.
Note that the factoid in question wasn't from a milblogger, but from a network television show no doubt cleared to shoot the video that was broadcast.
You are correct that vast amounts of intel can be gleaned from "ordinary" communications. But the problem is that this is an information war that has occasional battles with arms, not the other way round. Apparently the US military hasn't learned from it's "loss" in Vietnam that didn't occur during the Tet offensive, but occurred on the CBS Evening News with Walter Cronkite.
I agree completely. Maybe some of the old time WWII or Korea vets can fill us in on what military censorship was like in those eras (I know it vaguely from documentaries and movies). Back then, I believe that officers spent a lot of off-duty time censoring the letters of enlisted personnel.
That sort of thing can’t happen today, of course, but I think there needs to be some sort of control over what gets posted and into the hands of the enemy. After all, if US casualties dropped to zero tomorrow and stayed there, the rantings of the moonbats would have a lot less force and give the lie to their “support the troops by bringing them home”.
Once we begin to talk openly about the "C-word" the Liberal press will no longer be able to pretend/lie that Bush is squelching free speech more than earlier presidents did.
Six months (and 14,000 US deaths) into the Korean War, Harry Truman's administration placed the press under the jurisdiction of the army and everything was scrutinized. [You can see a list the many, many restrictions at the link] Among the many stringent regulations were two which said that correspondents could not criticize the war effort or send dispatches that were demoralizing!!!
I don't know what the answer will be, for protecting our people in the military from dangerous disclosures. Perhaps some ground rules should be spelled out and people who cross the line should be punished.
There has been next to no punishment for deliberate exposure of US tactics in the War on Terror. Has the press been punished for revealing the fact that the US was keeping track of Osama via his phone usage? That revelation was outrageous.
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