Military intelligence
"Military intelligence" is a cliche of an oxymoron -- and, of course, not always an oxymoron because there are plenty of very smart people in the military. How do you find out what they are thinking? How do you find out what is happening on the ground in Iraq from the grunt's eye view?
The answer is that the universe of the blog has opening a portal into the soul of the hypothetical "every-person". A "blog" (or "web log"), of course, is a periodic web diary, with entries presented in reverse chronologic order. (Just like this one, heh, heh...)
Members of the military participate in the blog soul, thought, and opinion-baring just like everyone else. The researcher's problems lie not in finding these blogs, but rather in sorting through the multiplicity of them. Also, everything in a blog is just somebody's opinions and observations. Blog entries require even more validation than normal Web pages (which themselves can be pretty suspect, here are some tips for validating information found on the Web).
Blogs written by people who say they are members of the US armed forces range in tone from right-wing paranoid ("the US media is a vast left-wing conspiracy") to very caustic about American military command in Iraq. These apparent biases form something like the bell-shaped normal distribution curve. My impression is that the curve is heading a bit more towards the caustic, particularly among the reservists and national guard members who maintain blogs - but you should judge for yourself.
A good place to start finding these blogs would be a Google search like "US army Iraq blog" (you've got to make sure to put the US army first, or you mostly get opinions from Iraqis, and who cares about them?!)
Another approach is to go straight to the sites that specialize in blog aggregation. The best of these are Bloglines and BlogPulse. Bloglines provides a great way to search through a mass of blogs and RSS feeds. BlogPulse is more a specialty tool for understanding blog trends (an "automated trend discovery system") rather than an aggregator of blogs or feeds. As such, it is extremely useful but a bit crude: you can easily answer questions like how many times the term "military intelligence" shows up in the world's blogs, but it is (of course) harder to get an automated read on the tenor of a given blog's content.
Here are some specific army blogs:
- Boots on the Ground is written by a soldier serving in Iraq who notes at the top that his views "do not reflect those of the US Military or US Government," well duh!
- Line in the Sand, about operation freedom written by Sgt Missick, a member of the Signal corp
- My War: Colby Buzzell's blog entries about the truth about the war from the ground lead to a book contract -- he sure tells the military establishment where they can go and what they can do if they don't like his opinions
- American Soldier, a day in the life of an American soldier
Blogging has changed the way the world expresses opinions and blogging presents a window you can use to view the opinions of the world. This impact is huge, and I'll write about it more in another entry.
Posted by Harold Davis at February 13, 2005 09:01 AM
