Milblogging as a Strategy for Winning the 21st Century Information War

摘要

New media is quickly becoming the first and only source many go for information in today's technologically advanced world. Military bloggers (milbloggers) make up a small part of that new media but could be an important piece to keeping up with our enemies when it comes to the informational aspects of war. There are two camps when it comes to milbloggers, one side feels they are dangerous to operations security (OPSEC) and not capable of spreading the proper strategic message and the other side which feels milbloggers could have numerous benefits to military operations. Both sides have a great argument and this paper will find that neither is wrong in their assumptions. This paper examines the issue of milblogging and will weigh the arguments to identify solutions that could result in benefits to operations with mitigated risk to OPSEC. This paper analyzes current military doctrine on the subject and weighs that against what experienced senior military leaders think of the topic. The paper finds that milblogging fits within the doctrinal definitions of joint publications dealing with information operations (IO). It also fits the doctrinal definitions of a potential risk to security contained in publications on the subject. The conclusions reached find that the benefits of allowing individual members to communicate directly with the public far outweigh the potential security risks involved. Proper training and education could mitigate these risks down to an acceptable level in which the benefits could be experienced without the fear of the enemy gathering useful information for use against US forces.