A few years ago I had to hand it to the US Army.  To a certain extent they encouraged soldiers to blog.  For a long time, they were the only branch of the Department of Defense that even had a policy on blogging.  As far as I know, the US Air Force still doesn’t have an official policy on blogging.   The Army’s new policy could become the gospel for all services though.

In the military, there is this thing called OPSEC.   Operations Security is the type of thing that gets people killed if not followed.  Things like talking about troop movements, posting pictures of high-value assets on your MySpace page, or talking about your daily routine at work can all fall under OPSEC violations.  The US Army has now banned blogging without the approval of your immediate supervisor and your OPSEC officer according to Wired (excerpt from Army Regulation):

g. Consult with their immediate supervisor and their OPSEC Officer for an OPSEC review prior to publishing or
posting information in a public forum.
(1) This includes, but is not limited to letters, resumes, articles for publication, electronic mail (e-mail), Web site
postings, web log (blog) postings, discussion in Internet information forums, discussion in Internet message boards or
other forms of dissemination or documentation.

This could easily be the death knell for bloggers and blogging from soldiers in Iraq and soldiers across the globe.  My question is how far will this go?  How long will it take for the US Army to reverse their policy?  If every blogger in the US Army actually went to their OPSEC officer today how overwhelmed would that OPSEC officer be?  There is no telling.  This isn’t really good news for Army Public Affairs either.

As a matter of fact, US Central Command, the Unified Combatant Command heading up the war in Iraq, has been making a huge push to get bloggers on their mailing lists so that CENTCOM can have a better and more public sounding board than they did before the war.  CENTCOM isn’t under the Department of the Army but most of the e-mails I receive from their Public Affairs department are from soldiers.  How can their be such disparity among different sections and sub-sections of the Department of Defense, you ask?  Good question.  At this point, I’ve found yet another reason why I’m glad I didn’t join the Army.  Air Power!