Lately, a number of stories and diaries have highlighted the developing issue of the Defense Department clamping down on milbloggers and the rest of the media. Apparently, the days of embedded reporters living with troops in order to properly tell their stories have long since passed. Now, OPSEC, or operational security, is more important. In fact, in one recent Army slideshow, the "media" was lumped in with "al Qaeda" as a non-traditional enemy of American forces. As a former Army officer who has actually squared off against al Qaeda in both Afghanistan and Iraq, I have something to say about this.
You can read background on this story here, here, here, and here. The last link is to the excellent diary recently written by smintheus. The new OPSEC regulations require that a soldier’s supervisor approve anything written by the soldier beforehand. Wired magazine is suggesting that this may cause all soldiers to discontinue blogging from the war zone.
What’s happening, I believe, is what a psychologist would call "sublimation" on the part of the Army. Sublimation is generally (and loosely) defined as:
any redirection of energy from the socially unacceptable to the acceptable.
According to Wikipedia, sublimation is
the refocusing of psychic energy away from negative outlets to more positive outlets. These drives which cannot find an outlet are rechanneled.
An example of this "re-channeling" of emotion could be an Army that lashes out at its own, rather than attempting to confront the real threat to its existence—the Bush administration. After all, blaming your own soldiers for getting each other killed is much easier, and markedly safer career-wise, than coming out and criticizing the Bush administration.
And that’s what they’re doing. They’re taking it out on the messengers—the bloggers and the media—rather than confronting the true cause of this catastrophuck, George W. Bush. It goes like this: IEDs getting stronger? Blame the media for coddling Iran. Helicopters getting shot down? Blame some PFC for having a picture of an Apache on his website.
But this is flawed logic. Because blogs don’t kill soldiers. Unjust wars do. Once George W. Bush, the DoD, and the Department of the Army can get that basic fact through their thick fucking skulls, we may make some progress. We wouldn’t be having this debate if we hadn’t invaded Iraq based on a pack of lies in the first place. For every soldier killed as a direct result of something written on a blog or in a newspaper, a thousand others were killed as a result of George W. Bush’s reckless stupidity.
A free, inquisitive press and thoughtful soldiers who tell people what war is really about are not the enemy. And deep down, the Army knows this. At some level, the Army knows that it’s very purpose is to protect that same free press—and not the petty temper tantrums of a corrupt Presidency.
This isn’t about OPSEC. All soldiers know what they can and can’t post online. This is about message control. This is about an Army and a war that are both falling apart. This is about an Army that’s desperate to find someone or something to blame for its misfortune in Iraq. I understand that much. I simply wish that they would find a way to place the blame on the cause of the war—and not on its participants.