Say Anything Blog

Is the military hiring bloggers to attack critics?  I doubt it.  At least, the military certainly hasn’t hired this blogger in any way, shape or form but apparently some military report made a suggestion along those lines which now has the left’s panties in a collective bunch:

A study, written for U.S. Special Operations Command, suggested “clandestinely recruiting or hiring prominent bloggers.”

Since the start of the Iraq war, there’s been a raucous debate in military circles over how to handle blogs—and the servicemembers who want to keep them. One faction sees blogs as security risks, and a collective waste of troops’ time. The other (which includes top officers, like Gen. David Petraeus and Lt. Gen. William Caldwell) considers blogs to be a valuable source of information, and a way for ordinary troops to shape opinions, both at home and abroad.

This 2006 report for the Joint Special Operations University, “Blogs and Military Information Strategy,” offers a third approach—co-opting bloggers, or even putting them on the payroll. “Hiring a block of bloggers to verbally attack a specific person or promote a specific message may be worth considering,” write the report’s co-authors, James Kinniburgh and Dororthy Denning.

Lt. Commander Marc Boyd, a U.S. Special Operations Command spokesman, says the report was merely an academic exercise. “The comments are not ‘actionable’, merely thought provoking,” he tells Danger Room. “The views expressed in the article publication are entirely those of the author and do not necessarily reflect the views, policy or position of the U.S. Government, Department of Defense, USSOCOM [Special Operations Command], or the Joint Special Operations University.”

Denning, a professor at Naval Postgraduate School, adds in an e-mail, “I got some positive feedback from people who read the article, but I don’t know if it led to anything.”

The report introduces the military audience to the “blogging phenomenon,” and lays out a number of ways in which the armed forces—specifically, the military’s public affairs, information operations, and psychological operations units—might use the sites to their advantage.

Hiring bloggers to flak for the military would be an astoundingly stupid move.  Bloggers known to be working for the military would be dismissed as, well, flaks.  And if the military attempted to pay them in some sort of off-the-record way it would inevitably be exposed the moment such an offer was made to a blogger with some principle (or perhaps an unprincipled blogger slips up and spills the beans).

Either way, why would the military even need to hire bloggers when there are so many out there already very supportive of the military without having to put anyone on the payroll?

It seems incredibly stupid to put a comment like “Let’s hire bloggers to verbally attack people” in a government report where some opportunistic reporter can seize on it and make all sorts of hay for the anti-military types, “academic exercise” or not.