OpFor Does the Boston Globe

Earlier this week, Charlie and I talked with Bryan Bender of the Boston Globe about milblogs. The article ran earlier today, up online here.

There are hundreds of milblogs, and the Pentagon, which has cautiously supported some of them but also has deep concerns about the ability to control them, recently ordered a top level advisory panel to study the issue.

” ‘Googling’ and ‘blogging’ are making their way into military operations at all levels,” Kenneth Krieg, the undersecretary of defense, wrote in a recent memo requesting that the Defense Science Board look into the matter. ”But the full implications of this revolution are as yet unknown, and we have no clear direction and defined doctrine.”

Indeed, some say the new venue brings an institution that has long sought to remain apolitical perilously close to the public square. ”There has long been a separation between the military and political world,” said John, an active-duty Air Force officer who runs the blog op-for.com and asked that his full name not be used to protect his identity. ”I don’t want to say that milblogs cross that line, but they do gray it.”

The vast majority of milblogs focus on day-to-day military operations around the world; many are run by troops in combat. Others focus on weapons and technology.

But the recent furor over Rumsfeld has highlighted how many blogs have become venues for political debates.

”A portion of the milblog world has morphed into debating how things should get done,” said Charlie, an Army officer who also writes for op-for.com.

The op-for blog, for its part, has refrained from directly addressing the Rumsfeld fracas to avoid the appearance of taking sides. Rumsfeld is their civilian boss, while many of the former generals who have been critical of Rumsfeld retain friendships in the current forces.

The article painted OpFor as the “middle of the line” milblog as far as the SECDEF-retired generals spat is concerned, which is exactly where Charlie and I felt was appropriate. Milbloggers, particularly active-duty milbloggers, should bring a certain degree of cautiousness to their writing. That includes weighing in on controversial, politicized topics involving members of their chain of command. It only takes one blogger writing on one inappropriate topic to bring down anti-blogging regulations from the Pentagon, a misstep that would affect all of us.

This is a subject I’ll be talking about on panel 1 at the milblogging conference.