Further Guidance on Military Blogging

The Army is preparing further guidance for military bloggers, a rather diverse group (of which I suppose I'm tacitly a member) that raises uniquely difficult questions about the propriety of personal web publishing:

Army Chief of Staff Gen. Peter Schoomaker circulated a memo to all Army personnel last week saying that "we must do a better job" at operational security -- "OPSEC" in military parlance.

"Some soldiers continue to post sensitive information" on the Internet and especially on their Web logs or online diaries, wrote Schoomaker, giving as examples "photos depicting weapon system vulnerabilities and tactics, techniques and procedures.

"Such OPSEC violations needlessly place lives at risk and degrade the effectiveness of our operations," he wrote.

Schoomaker promised that amendments to Army regulations would be promulgated within a month, and that officers would have access to new training materials on the issue by Sept. 2.

In the meantime, he ordered Army staff at the Pentagon to "tracks and report, on a quarterly basis, (such) OPSEC violations."

"Get the word out and focus on this issue now," Gen. Schoomaker concluded. "I expect to see immediate improvement."

Pentagon spokeswoman Lt. Col. Tracy O'Grady-Walsh told United Press International it was Department of Defense policy that military personnel, "while acting in a private capacity ... have the right to prepare information for public release through non-Department of Defense forums or media" so long as they did it in their own time and with their own equipment, and did not use "information generally not available to the public."

I tend to think that first-person accounts of soldiers are a great asset of any wartime experience. The letters of Civil War troops still amaze as a collection of brilliance and youth sacrificed in a bloody war, and the 20th-century has seen more of the same from Wilfred Owen to Philip Caputo. America has a long history of producing tremendous correspondence in wartime. Yet never before has the combination of immediacy and publicity been so complete. These military bloggers write posts with the timeliness and intimacy of private letters, but with the audience of a published work.

As such, they raise troubling questions about the safety and propriety of individual voices of wartime soldiers rising out of the theater. Troubling because it implicates the amount of frank discussion and/or dissent that a country should tolerate or encourage within the ranks, the proper venue for such discussion, and the free speech rights of those who put their lives on the line for the very freedoms at issue.

I am encouraged by what seems to be a slow, methodical, reasoned approach to this complex question. There appears to be a fundamental respect for the free expression of those who serve, restraining any reactionary instinct to shut the whole thing down. I hope that restraint is not unnecessarily tested.