Free Republic

My Townhall.com column is on the Army's new policy concerning milblogging. For an opposing view, see Joe Carter's response to the widespread objection to the new rules. I hope Joe will consider the arguemnts I make in the column. He's right to worry a great deal about Operational Security, but there's no public record of milblogging leading to loss of life or comrpomise of a plan, though therte is a huge record of the benefits the public has derived from the open policy that has been in force to date. Nor do I think Joe is correct to wonder why...

The most excellent Noah Shachtman of Wired's Danger Room has a great article with lots of milblogger reaction to the new OPSEC regulations that will end military blogging as we know it. Yes, that's right - the end of soldier blogging from the war zones. Army Squeezes Soldier Blogs, Maybe to Death Noah Shachtman Email 05.02.07 | 2:00 AM The U.S. Army has ordered soldiers to stop posting to blogs or sending personal e-mail messages, without first clearing the content with a superior officer, Wired News has learned. The directive, issued April 19, is the sharpest restriction on troops' online...

One of my favorite Military Blogs, CDR Salamander, was made one of the finalists for the 2006 Web blogs. I though I would put out a Freep Request on his blogs behalf. Please get out the vote. Heres a discription of his competition below. Voting guide through 15 DEC Ymarsaker, there are three non-voting posts below, so don't get mad. To help everyone review their once a day voting requirements, for "The best 3501-5000 blogs" category I offer the following voting guide. When you click here or the banner to the right side of the page or the bottom of...

Milblogger BlackFive has just released a new book that contains dispatches from our outstanding men and women of the US military who are serving in Iraq and Afghanistan. If it weren't for the milbloggers much of the good news from Iraq and Afghanistan would never become widely known by the American people. --- It is the work of over 50 Americans who tell their stories about the experiences around the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan. In it you will meet: * The Warriors. Snipers, tankers, grunts. Readers who have never heard a shot fired in anger will come closer to...

J.P. Borda started a Web log during his 2004 National Guard deployment in Afghanistan to keep in touch with his family. But when he got home, he decided it was the mainstream media that was out of touch with the war. "You hear so much about what's going wrong," he says. "It gets hard to hear after a while when there's so much good going on." Mr. Borda, a specialist, read other soldiers' blogs and found he wasn't alone. Hundreds of other troops and veterans were blogging world-wide, and many focused on a common enemy: journalists. The 31-year-old software analyst,...

The other side of FOB Martello. Click image to view. An audio recording of a press conference with Colonel Chris Vernon on Operation Mountain Thrust is also available. Kandahar Airfield, Afghanistan: On Saturday night, Charlie Company from the 1st Battalion of the Princess Patricia's Canadian Light Infantry moved from Forward Operating Base Martello to the "430 compound", a small, austere ANP base infested with large ants and adorned with a well in the center. The Canadian soldiers took advantage of the rare running water to wash up from the dust bowl at FOB Martello. The Afghan National Police guarded...

I need your help: This John Murtha thing has me so fired up that, in the spirit of Shakespeare, I've decided to "kill him with kindness" by sending Mr. Murtha a belated Memorial Day gift...

Why I Fight I want to start something on my blog that I can continue on a weekly, bi-weekly, or monthly basis. I'm going to start with my personal story that led me to join the military, and I'm hoping to get some readers email me with theirs. I will share the stories I feel everyone should hear about. I'm sure there are plenty of amazing and moving stories about what series of events led them to join the United States military. I want to know yours!Here's mine: I still remember exactly where I was when I first heard we...

When you steal from a MilBlogger Posted By Blackfive ...you're going to get busted. I believe that many of you will recognize the photo on the cover of Shock Magazine. [see below] That's right. Stolen from Michael Yon. When I asked about it, Mike sends: The publisher, HFM, is one of the largest media conglomerates in the world with over 200 magazines and newspapers in 33 countries. This is a major launch with an initial print run of 300,000. Personally, I think Mike is more pissed about the photo being used for some kind of political agenda than getting ripped...

As the war in Iraq and the national debate over it continue, military-themed American bloggers have been voicing their support for U.S. troops and, in most cases, the war itself.Both John Donovan, whose milblog is at http://www.thedonovan.com, and "Beth," who runs Fuzzilicious Thinking, point out that connectivity is the key. Not all milblogs get large volumes of traffic, but even the seldom-read are often connected to other blogs that have larger readerships or are in turn read by those with access to a greater audience. Beth calls herself the "idea person" behind Project Valour IT, which provides voice-activated laptop computers...

Soldiers' online journals come under increased scrutiny By Mike Spector Iraq War veteran Colby Buzzell, at home in Los Angeles. He antagonized superiors with his frank Web log posts about Army life in Mosul. (Courtesy of Colby Buzzell) Army Spc. Colby Buzzell in Iraq. Commanders scrutinized his Web log after he posted details of a battle in Mosul. (Courtesy of Colby Buzzell) Army Spc. Colby Buzzell returned from a firefight in Mosul, Iraq, on Aug. 4, 2004, and collapsed on his bed, drained from the most intense combat of his tour.The next day, Buzzell headed to his base’s Internet cafe...

"Tainted" Embeds and the role of MilBloggers One of the big issues at the MiBlogger Conference was, of course, bias in the media. While there are those who will contest such claims, it seems pretty clear to Murdoc that (at the very least) the mainstream media suffers from gross ignorance of military strategy, tactics, and history. This, of course, is gross generalization, and there are exceptions to the rule. But the low number of exceptions do a lot to prove said rule. The mainstream media suffers from gross ignorance of military strategy, tactics, and history.The third panel at the conference,...

OK FRiends and PW's, we are here and we are cocked locked, and ready to rock.

Greetings,  Today we open a new frontier.  My site gets much traffic and exposure, making this an excellent venue for our people in harm's way to tell their stories.  Please click here http://flf.michaelyon-online.com/ for our first story from a soldier in Iraq.  The story is well written and complete with photos.   If you know someone at war who would like to submit a story to FLF, many people are waiting to read it.  Photographs are encouraged.   Please spread the word about the Frontline Forum--there are graphic links and related resources in the Press Room off the FLF main page.      Respectfully,     Michael...

I used to think blogs would transform ideologues into nonpartisan truth-seekers. Man, was I wrong.On December 13, 2001, I posted an essay on my personal weblog titled “Two Ships Passing in the New Media Night,” in which I contrasted the energetic, proletariat-embracing exultations of rising blog superstar Glenn “Instapundit” Reynolds with the dreary, public-distrusting defensiveness of then–Los Angeles Times columnist John Balzar. I had launched my blog (or shall I say “warblog,” which is what I named it, apparently coining a term I’ve come to loathe) five days after the September 11 massacre and almost immediately found myself swept up...

The U.S. armed forces have joined the Internet’s fast-growing blogosphere. U.S. Central Command is working with more than 250 bloggers "to try to disseminate news about the good work being done by U.S. forces in the global war on terror." (Defense Link News). That effort says CENTCOM--which has its own website for news releases, data and imagery--has reached more than 17 million online readers to date. From his desk at CENTCOM headquarters, Army Reserve Spc. Claude Flowers of the 304th Mobile Public Affairs Detachment from Kent, Wash., fights in the global war on terrorism daily in his own way. It...

MACDILL AIR FORCE BASE, Fla., March 2, 2006 – The widespread use of Web logs, or "blogs," by online writers has proliferated information on topics as varied as the authors. Blogs, in essence, are online journals or forums for their authors, known as "bloggers." Public affairs officials here said thousands of blogs are created each day, and they estimate that more than 21 million blogs are posted on the World Wide Web today. Blogs sometimes include information -- accurate and otherwise -- about the U.S. military's global war on terror. U.S. Central Command officials here took notice and created a...

Here we are again with this week’s successes with respect to finding, identifying, and neutralizing a threat the media likes to categorize as a hopeless cause. The area of IEDs is just another example of the successes we’re having in the war in Iraq against terrorism. Here we go: For those that don’t know, 1st Brigade Combat Team soldiers are training an Iraqi Combat Engineer unit to be IED hunters. These soldiers are highly motivated to fight IEDs and insurgents and love working with Coalition Forces to learn how to combat this menace. One [Iraqi] soldier was on his day...

He didn't have to go, it wasn't his job and nobody paid him to do it. But Michael Yon says he went to Iraq because he wanted to see for himself what was going on. The 41-year-old former Army Green Beret, self-published author and world traveler didn't know exactly what he was going to do when he got to the war zone last year, nor did he have any particular plans to report what he saw to the world at-large. But that's what he did. After getting himself embedded as a freelance journalist with troops last year, he used his...

I have been reading several Iraqi blogs over the last year, and two in particular because my daughter served a year as a US Army Combat Medic in Mosul. They are from a father and daughter living in Mosul, and are titled 'Citizen of Mosul', and 'A Star from Mosul', respectively. The daughter just announced that she is now a paid contributer to the NYT Opinion page. Interstingly enough, a couple of past posts have now disappeared from their sites, posts in which she openly stated her support for the insurgents who kill American soldiers. I was not surprised that...