US Military -v- Internal blogging & Access to WWW

[Eddie Beaver]

Upon reporting to my new aircraft carrier command, I noticed that a lot of blogs and forums were blocked 24/7. After about two months, all the few blogs and forums (including SWC) I could view previously were now blocked (certainly why I quit visiting SWC). After checking with the IT's about this, they pulled out a battle group regulation about no blogs, no forums and no "social networking" sites (i.e. the book site Shelfari or the PPT site SlideShare). Yet people at my old aircraft carrier can still (as I did) blog, visit blogs and interact on (SOME) forums. None of the regs match up in the Navy.

My fun now consists of pointing out hypocrisy with the blocked list, i.e. why can I visit FHM or Maxim sites but not DNI or Small Wars Journal? Or embarrassing them and pointing out that I can't visit Obama's site or read news on PBS but I can visit Rudy G's site and watch streaming video on Fox News?

The most offensive thing to me is the sheer idiocy of it all... I have a subordinate who is taking a physics college course and his professor posts assignment hints and further resource ideas on his university blog, but even with myself and the department master chief pushing the IT's to "unblock" just this one professor's blog, they refuse to do it.

Oh well.. Six months.....

[Eddie Beaver]

How could I forget? And this is the ship (The Abe Lincoln) that did tsunami relief in 2004-2005 and had several sailors who participated in the relief efforts and blogged about it on a regular basis at the time, often to the point where local hometown newspapers would highlight what Seaman Johnny was doing for his country and the world based on his blog posts (approved by his chain of command with their encouragement) and pictures (that were official Navy released photos).
Yet 2 years later, the positive experience of encouraging enterprising sailors who wanted to show a good side of a 10 month deployment at sea is easily forgotten.....

(commenting tonight from the freedom-soaked internet at my apartment)

[goesh]

- so I wondered to myself when I read the lead post on this thread, is this in anyway a reflection of any conflict and antagonism against the COIN philosophy? I wondered to myself given the open-house approach COIN has to the more closed-house approach traditionalists have. COIN sees civilian input and interfacing as a potential resource, traditionalists see it otherwise and more in the negative. I'm probably wrong, but if the troops are rubbing shoulders too much with civilians that means they are getting too many civilian ideas, which I don't think sits real well with some traditionalists.

[SWJED]

How could I forget? And this is the ship (The Abe Lincoln) that did tsunami relief in 2004-2005 and had several sailors who participated in the relief efforts and blogged about it on a regular basis at the time, often to the point where local hometown newspapers would highlight what Seaman Johnny was doing for his country and the world based on his blog posts (approved by his chain of command with their encouragement) and pictures (that were official Navy released photos).
Yet 2 years later, the positive experience of encouraging enterprising sailors who wanted to show a good side of a 10 month deployment at sea is easily forgotten.....

(commenting tonight from the freedom-soaked internet at my apartment)

EB,

Good example of what the majority of milblogs are attempting to do. The SWJ Blog has been quoted several times by the mainstream media and got across points of view and / or insights that otherwise would have been lost or printed below the fold on page Z-148 two weeks after the fact. This information rich high-speed environment is not going away and the military needs to embrace it - adding such things as milblogs to their IO toolbox or otherwise enabling milbloggers. Living in denial is not an option. The gun-analogy (posted earlier on this thread) is spot-on. The malcontents in our midst will still continue to post to the Internet and the well-meaning blogger will ride off into the sunset.

BTW - I sure do miss your blogging.

Fair Winds and Following Seas,

Dave

[Cori]

How could I forget? And this is the ship (The Abe Lincoln) that did tsunami relief in 2004-2005 and had several sailors who participated in the relief efforts and blogged about it on a regular basis at the time, often to the point where local hometown newspapers would highlight what Seaman Johnny was doing for his country and the world based on his blog posts (approved by his chain of command with their encouragement) and pictures (that were official Navy released photos).
Yet 2 years later, the positive experience of encouraging enterprising sailors who wanted to show a good side of a 10 month deployment at sea is easily forgotten.....

(commenting tonight from the freedom-soaked internet at my apartment)

What a perfect example of what I was referring to when I said there's a price to be paid in today's warfare when taking steps to ensure electronic OPSEC. This is the type of thing that has to be considered in the balance, something that just wasn't relevant ten, or even five, years ago. But it's why it would be worthwhile to accept some degree of risk on electronic OPSEC today -- unless there's hard evidence that the price we're paying there has just been exhorbitant.

Again, doctrinally electronic OPSEC has always fallen under IO's rubric. Those things we now think of as "IO" are, if not relatively new, relatively new in their importance. But the new policy (prior to yesterday's walk-back) was disturbing because it suggested a return to prior emphases without an understanding of the way this war demands, at a minimum, that IO take into account a delicate balance between all the concerns that fall under its purview.

All media are now in effect global media. So having those involved in the tsunami relief effort (something which helped our image among a Muslim population) tell their stories in an immediate and personal way was of tremendous use. Was it enough to in and of itself win over the hearts and minds of the Islamic world? No, no more than any single broadcast earned the credibility of the old Voice of America with its audiences behind the Iron Curtain. But this is a marathon, not a sprint. Looking at any single effort and judging it individually will allow any single effort to be judged less than necessary. Which is completely aside from the impact these efforts might have on the domestic population.

[VinceC]

Originally post by Carl,
It makes perfect sense from the standpoint of a mid to upper mid-level bureaucrat in the State or Defense Dept., somebody who is going to survive the upcoming change in administrations. This somebody has made the judgement that the change in administration will result in a precipitate bug out of Iraq that will not reflect honorably (to put it mildly) upon the US.

By shutting down the soldier bloggers, they prevent the most credible and direct observers of the disaster to come from reporting what they see as they see it. This reduces embarrassment to the bureaucrats and the politicos they serve.

There won't be enough mainstream media on the spot to make any difference and nobody in the US pays attention to Al-Jazeera. So figure the whole thing as an exercise in damage control before the fact.

I firmly believe this is true and it greatly saddens me.

This is an intriguing idea. But it implies someone with a deep understanding and strategic sense of Information Operations. Someone with that kind of insight would also know that the blogs ultimately can't be stopped and that cutting off e-commo would have its own negative public impact. At best, you'd be delaying the personal reports by a few weeks or months until the troops depart and start spilling their stories and photos from their home computers.

[wm]

The high level answer is risk management.

Risk management is tied very much to the personality of the risk managers and their levels of risk aversion. Folks tend to have varying levels of risk aversion—the guy who routinely trades on E-trade is probably much more financially risk tolerant than the guy (having lived through the Great Depression and lost a fortune in the stock market crash) who socks away his dollars into a 10-year certificate of deposit. The college freshman who use Face Book and IM every day to communicate with friends and family is much less risk averse to the threats of the World Wide Web than the child of the
1950’s who learned how to add and subtract without the benefit of a Texas Instruments pocket calculator. Likewise, some commanders are much less likely to accept certain kinds of unmitigated risks than others. The Cav officer who is used to running economy of force operations probably has much more risk tolerance than the Mech Infantry guy who was always part of operations that had a 3:1 force ratio against the bad guys.

The critical factor that I think that needs emphasizing is that we cannot really decide which risks to accept, which to avoid, and which to mitigate unless we fully understand what those risks are. We tend to fear (that is be risk averse to) that about which we know the least. (Am I right here, MarcT?) As an aside, I also think that we tend to try to regulate away the risks about which we know the least.

I suspect the latest effort to control the electronic environment , AKA AR 530-1, is really a well-meaning, but poorly informed, effort to manage risk by some very risk averse (because of their poor understanding of the true nature of the risk) senior leaders.

A couple of metaphors for the "problem" of the ubiquity of electronic communications come to mind. The first is Pandora's box. Another is the apple in the Garden of Eden. But one I really like is, in the words of the old song, "How you gonna keep them down on the farm now that they've see Paree?" Rather than compaining about folks who stick their heads in the sand, I'd like to know how we get those ostrich-like decision makers on the tour bus to France?

[marct]

Hi Vince,

This is an intriguing idea. But it implies someone with a deep understanding and strategic sense of Information Operations.

Why would you make that assumption? An a**-covering bureaucrat doesn't have to be intelligent when they are merely applying bureaucratic scripts that have worked in the past and are in "the book". Personally, I find it far more likely that the "philosophy" behind this action is a knee-jerk reaction.

WM notes that:

The critical factor that I think that needs emphasizing is that we cannot really decide which risks to accept, which to avoid, and which to mitigate unless we fully understand what those risks are. We tend to fear (that is be risk averse to) that about which we know the least. (Am I right here, MarcT?) As an aside, I also think that we tend to try to regulate away the risks about which we know the least.

and I think the key, in this case, is the level of institutional "fear" of that which cannot be controlled couple with the occupational fear of those who are responsible for controlling it (based on old technologies). I think we should be guided by the words of that great sage Anonymous:

Never ascribe to malice what can be ascribed to stupidity

Marc

[marct]

Hi WM,

The high level answer is risk management.

Yupper; especially when it is coupled in with a very strong organizational culture of bureaucracy.

Risk management is tied very much to the personality of the risk managers and their levels of risk aversion.....

The critical factor that I think that needs emphasizing is that we cannot really decide which risks to accept, which to avoid, and which to mitigate unless we fully understand what those risks are. We tend to fear (that is be risk averse to) that about which we know the least. (Am I right here, MarcT?) As an aside, I also think that we tend to try to regulate away the risks about which we know the least.

The hallmark of redistributive organizations, and the military is a classic example, is that they have an organizational culture meme that says "the organization knows best". Good (i.e. adaptive) redistributive organizations actually have organizational sub-units who are charged with producing updated pictures of the operational environment of the organization that will allow that organization to adapt (CALL is a good example of this). Poor organizations of this type reject any picture of the operational environment that disagrees with their internal picture.

This internal picture of the environment includes definitions of what is "known" and what is "unknown". That which is "unknown" is often treated as "dangerous", "taboo", or "polluted" (Mary Douglas has some great work on this see Purity and Danger and How Institutions Think, as does my colleague Aaron Doyle). This "unknown" zone is often viewed as the province of people who are "set apart" from the mainstream of he organization - the "ritual specialists", whether they be called witches, magicians, insurance adjusters or futurists. The "unknown" zone is the province of "magic", while the "known" zone is the province of "science" (at least for Malinowski).

I suspect the latest effort to control the electronic environment , AKA AR 530-1, is really a well-meaning, but poorly informed, effort to manage risk by some very risk averse (because of their poor understanding of the true nature of the risk) senior leaders.

Well, I'm more inclined to view it as an attempt to impose an internal image on an organizational operational environment (the Beltway). By showing how stringently they are trying to control the "unknown", the bureaucrat authors of this order have assigned priority to organizational "survival" (including their own personal careers) while downgrading operational survival, in terms of winning any particular conflict.

A couple of metaphors for the "problem" of the ubiquity of electronic communications come to mind. The first is Pandora's box. Another is the apple in the Garden of Eden. But one I really like is, in the words of the old song, "How you gonna keep them down on the farm now that they've see Paree?" Rather than compaining about folks who stick their heads in the sand, I'd like to know how we get those ostrich-like decision makers on the tour bus to France?

A TDY to examine the recruitment potential of "disaffected French 'youth'" ? Well, one old saw deserves another - you can lead a horse to water, but you can't make him drink.

Marc

[Rob Thornton]

From Marc,

A TDY to examine the recruitment potential of "disaffected French 'youth'" ? Well, one old saw deserves another - you can lead a horse to water, but you can't make him drink.

Marc, why does some of this remind me of the "we are French and so to preserve frenchiness, we must disdain all things non-french (or was that Montreal?).

The inability to predict /anticipate change and shape events as such to obtain an advantage vs. recalcitrant attitudes towards the global information environment that result in strategic inertia seems to be our recurring problem.

Why? For all the lip service paid to Transformation the emphasis has been on development of technology as a cure, vs. the application of technology by people (transformative thinking). This is why even with so many C4ISR assitance type tools, so many leaders still fail to recognize decision points in a timely matter (if at all) that allow them to put the enemy at a disadvantage. This seems to be the hallmark of centralized, bureacratic organizations vs. flat, decentralized ones - while both have values, there is a need to adapt/become flexible enough in the face of change to meet the needs of the problem at hand - I think this illustrates the need for more debate about how we prosecute this and future wars, and what type of organizations and leadership will be required to win them.

[wm]

For all the lip service paid to Transformation the emphasis has been on development of technology as a cure, vs. the application of technology by people (transformative thinking). This is why even with so many C4ISR assitance type tools, so many leaders still fail to recognize decision points in a timely matter (if at all) that allow them to put the enemy at a disadvantage. This seems to be the hallmark of centralized, bureacratic organizations vs. flat, decentralized ones - while both have values, there is a need to adapt/become flexible enough in the face of change to meet the needs of the problem at hand - I think this illustrates the need for more debate about how we prosecute this and future wars, and what type of organizations and leadership will be required to win them.

We will continue to have "horse and buggy thinking" until all the old horse and buggy thinkers are no more. Even then, we will have folks (many of whom who pass themselves off as academic historians) who reinvent the wheel by appealing to past successes of those who used what are now passe
methods.

The funny thing about change is that once you do so, you can't go back and undo it. As a result, many fear it because it produces something they can neither know with certainty (the future) nor control.

[marct]

Marc, why does some of this remind me of the "we are French and so to preserve frenchiness, we must disdain all things non-french (or was that Montreal?).

Je crois que c'est les Parisienne, mais, c'est possible, c'est les Quebecois aussi.

Yeah - it's a general inability of people to accept that their perceptions were (and will always be) not absolute "truth".

The inability to predict /anticipate change and shape events as such to obtain an advantage vs. recalcitrant attitudes towards the global information environment that result in strategic inertia seems to be our recurring problem.

Why? For all the lip service paid to Transformation the emphasis has been on development of technology as a cure, vs. the application of technology by people (transformative thinking). This is why even with so many C4ISR assitance type tools, so many leaders still fail to recognize decision points in a timely matter (if at all) that allow them to put the enemy at a disadvantage. This seems to be the hallmark of centralized, bureacratic organizations vs. flat, decentralized ones - while both have values, there is a need to adapt/become flexible enough in the face of change to meet the needs of the problem at hand - I think this illustrates the need for more debate about how we prosecute this and future wars, and what type of organizations and leadership will be required to win them.

This has been a big debate inside business and management for decades now. The one "advantage" that business has over the military, in terms of learning to adapt, is that it is constantly in its operational environment so you can usually get pretty quick feedback on what works and what doesn't.

I think that it is important to make a distinction between the prosecution of wars and the organizational body that allows for wars to be prosecuted - think of it along the Line and Staff division. Organizationally, Line units have to be increasingly flexible, technologically savvy, culturally aware etc. while Staff units have to be predictable. Since both types are needed within the military, then the overall organization has to be able to support both without destroying one or the other.

At the same time, changes in the operational environment are going to require that functional areas sometimes be shifted from Line t Staff and vice versa. In this particular case, we are seeing a certain type of IO function being grabbed by Staff when it should be a Line function.

Marc

[Merv Benson]

I was general counsel to an investment banking company back when personal computers were making their way onto the brokers' desks. The Compliance Department was concerned that it would lose control of communications with customers and unauthorized data might be used to induce a trade.

As it turned out the opposite happened. The computers and email enhanced communication with the customer and it enhanced the supervisors ability to monitor that communication as required by securities regulations.

Today, I arbitrate a lot of disputes involving the securities business and these electronic business records are a routine part of the evidence submitted usually by the brokerage firm to prove the customer was aware of things he now claims he was not.

The point is that commanders can deal with their concerns without inhibiting communications. They can control the inappropriate communication without shutting down legitimate communications that enhance the war effort. As others here have pointed out, the communication is still going to take place. If someone is making an inappropriate communication they will also have a record of that too.

[Merv Benson]

Three Republican senators have written Secretary Gates asking him to take a took at the new regulation and weigh the need for individual expression.

[carl]

At best, you'd be delaying the personal reports by a few weeks or months until the troops depart and start spilling their stories and photos from their home computers.

Those few weeks or months are very important to our bureaucrat. The time lessens the emotional impact of the stories; it is easier to get upset about those being killed than those who are dead. And it gives our man time to create a defense and muddy the waters.

These things won't eliminate the ensueing embarrassment. But they might reduce it just enough to allow our man to keep his job and get his promotion on time.

[SWJED]

Hat Tip to Blackfive and Danger Room for posting a link to Muddy Boots IO: The Rise of Soldier Blogs by Major Elizabeth Robins.

... be sure to read Major Elizabeth Robbins award winning paper about military blogs "Muddy Boots" - which General Petraeus praised. It is pure genius and I'm glad Noah linked to it. I believe that Major Robbins is or is on the way to somewhere dangerous.

[VinceC]

Those few weeks or months are very important to our bureaucrat. The time lessens the emotional impact of the stories

The hamlet-clearing action in the My Lai villages of Vietnam took place in March 1968. Army photographer Ronald Haeberle waited until he had come home from Vietnam and been discharged before making his photographs known (he shot a personal camera alongside his Army-issue camera). His photographs were published 18 months later, in November 1969, in LIFE magazine. They led to investigations, courts-martial trials and, inthe I/O realm, an image of the American soldier -- correct or not -- that echoes down to this day.

The bulk of the Abu Ghraib photographs were taken half a year before they reached the public. I would argue that their impact would have been lessened if they had immediately reached the public, while the events were taking place. Bad news delayed implies cover-up and apathy toward wrong-doing.

These days, every solder carries a camera. We live in an interactive Web 2.0 world. When mistakes are made, they will be documented, by people close to us, whether we like it or not.

[John T. Fishel]

The most problematic part of the new regulation - as I noted earlier, it isn't a new problem - is the specific inclusion of FOUO as if it were CLASSIFIED information. Please note that the briefing posted by Marc early in the threat is "protectively" marked FOUO with absolutely no good reason for doing so. Zealous military and civilian bureaucrats freely use the FOUO stamp (and classified stamps as well) on the (to be charitable) presumption of better safe than sorry. In reality, such stamps are too often used - as it apparently was in this case - to avoid the embarassment of public scrutiny of an ill considered policy.

As Sam so dramatically pointed out and explained so well, there is a real danger to OPSEC posed by the technology we are using. But my impression of the policy and regulation and my concern is with its focus on content. If content must be protected then we have three levels of classification and numerous compartments to keep information within need to know channels. We also have policies in place that provide relatively good ground rules for determining the appropriate level of classification. Using FOUO as a cheap and unthinking substitute for properly classifying information is, as this forum has pointed out, counterproductive and hamstringing to the war effort, in violation of the real First Amendment rights of both service personnel and government civilians, and just plain bad policy.

[carl]

VinceC:

I agree completely with all the things you said. But, just because something might not work doesn't mean people won't try it. After all, might not work also means it might.

In the My Lai case during those 18 months a lot of people got promoted or were able to retire. Ultimately only one person went to jail. The main stream media had turned against the war by that time and seized upon the story to beat on the military and the administration. If they, for arguments sake, had still supported the war maybe the time interval would have an effect on their coverage.

There is another example from Vietnam, the bomb shortage. We were sending two man jets up north with 2 250 lb. bombs apiece. They did it to keep up sortie counts. The brass denied it of course and by the time the pilots got back in great enough numbers to be believed, the shortage was over and the dead crews had been dead for weeks or months. Nothing much came of it; careers were preserved.

If a similar thing happened now, bloggers would report and people would know right now. That would be good for the country and the crews, but it would be bad for somebody's career. If the blogger were silenced, a career would remain unthreatened, at least for awhile and maybe for longer.

My basic point is inside the bureaucracies of which we speak, what is good for the country and the war effort is not the first imperative; what seems to be good for the organization and the career within it is.

Another good recent example is Pat Tillman's death. Talk about blatant and should have known better. But, I'll bet there are people inside the beltway who lay awake at night thinking to themselves "If only we could have shut those guys up. Wouldn't things have been fine."

[SWJED]

If a similar thing happened now, bloggers would report and people would know right now. That would be good for the country and the crews, but it would be bad for somebody's career. If the blogger were silenced, a career would remain unthreatened, at least for awhile and maybe for longer.

Bingo - Spot-On Carl...