This is a terrific piece, and could as easily (perhaps more appropriately) have been filed under Media and Info Ops as Triggerpuller. The recognition that the vision of the "Strategic Cpl" is a negative one, ie, make a mistake even at the squad level and you can have a strategic impact given today's media, is, I think, an accurate one. But so too is the recognition that it doesn't have to be only a negative impact.

Other folks have noted here the idea (captured in the piece) that it makes sense for troops to make sure that even down to the platoon level there are always cameras present, but that the change in thinking that needs to take place is that those cameras need to be used to document all the things that the troops accuse the media of not documenting -- school openings, wells being dug, hospitals being rebuilt, and just simple day-to-day interactions between people and troops.

That essentially inverts the way the enemy uses his "strategic cameraman," producing footage that is of propaganda value for us because it is positive, not negative. What it does, in effect, is to turn our Strategic Cpl. into a Strategic Cameraman -- for our side.

And the architecture, as the piece mentions, with outlets such as YouTube (and now the MNF-I channel there), and Liveleak, is already in place. Good video goes viral very quickly. This is all besides the fact that once the troops are in the habit of filming everything, the footage will also be available, as a natural side benefit, to counter false propaganda claims. Nothing answers a claim better than visual evidence, and nothing answers visual claims better than other visual evidence.

There have been several instances in which propaganda claims have lingered, have not been dealt with in such a way that all doubts were removed, because there was, for whatever reason, a reluctance to release official visual product. (For example, in one case because it was believed that it was more important to protect the security of Predator video, to preserve doubts regarding how good those cameras were, than it was to end debate over whether we had killed innocent Afghans without cause.) But if the cameras were privately held off-the-shelf videocameras owned by individual soldiers, it will be far easier to release the footage immediately, as soon as false claims are released to the press.

The irony is that during the combat phase, while certainly the entire battlefield was not being visually documented, more of it was being filmed than any in history (proportionally, I'd bet.) If this challenge is taken up, between our cameras and theirs, the same may be true again, except that since none of the cameras will be operated by professional (ostensibly "objective") photojournalists, there will be questions about the authenticity and trustworthiness of every bit of footage.

More irony: I bet the very networks which have been seamlessly integrating insurgent-provided footage for four years will only take soldier/marine provided footage with every possible visual and verbal cue imaginable.