Goldfarb already linked this article from General William Caldwell on “changing organizational culture,” but it’s worth revisiting:
Appropriately enough, Caldwell posted the article on an excellent blog dedicated to insurgencies and low-level conflicts, the Small Wars Journal. He even followed unofficial milblogging protocol by assigning himself a blogging handle: Frontier 6. The Department of Defense is split into two basic camps on military blogging. One camp believes that in-theater blogging is too serious of an OPSEC risk, arguing that our enemies and their sympathizers can gain access to troop movements, deployment schedules, base defenses, etc., by reading military blogs. The reaction is to try and keep their finger in the information dike by banning sites like YouTube, Myspace, and Blogspot, separating soldiers from the New Media’s common tools. The other camp, of which General Caldwell and General Petraeus are members, views blogs as a tool that can be used to the military’s advantage. In an age where the United States finds itself engaged in a variety of smaller wars and counterinsurgencies, conflicts that will be won or lost in the halls of Congress instead of on the battlefield, Caldwell views the intensely personal war-stories flooding the internet as critical to the war effort, helping to sustain the American public’s stomach for a protracted fight. They’re also critical in fighting our media saavy enemy, who use contacts in global news outlets to widely and rapidly communicate their message of jihad to the world. Caldwell argues that:
The Caldwell solution–encourage, empower, educate, and equip–is the right one. Proper education can kill OPSEC violations before they happen, while the normally cumbersome military public affairs apparatus is brought down to the micro-level, bypassing the filtered layers of editing that is inherent in the military-to-media relationship. By atomizing public relations capabilities, we effectively negate an enormous advantage that the enemy enjoys over our forces: the ability to message on the global level. The blogging fight is an excellent example of the typically risk averse old-school style of military thought versus the daring, innovative 21st century approach to warfighting. To be honest, I couldn’t tell you who is winning. For every article like Caldwell’s I read, I’ll receive two emails from military types complaining that their base network has banned access to a certain milblog or journal-style website. I’m not sure what it would take to translate Caldwell’s proposal from vision to reality, but I do hope that metamorphosis occurs soon rather than later.
