US Blogs and Military Information Strategy

Pentagon documents leveraging bloggers have leaked to the Web. For the US military, this is a very burning issue, because they constantly have conflicts with their own fighters, who start blogging, as well as with information leaks through independent resources. For example, civilian journalists in Iraq periodically prevented the military from conducting correct information propaganda, which in our time is an inalienable attribute of any large-scale military operation.

What to do with bloggers who interfere with the Pentagon, how to use the blogosphere to their advantage and what is the “blogosphere” in general? At the request of the Center for Special Operations at the US Department of Defense, in 2006, a study was conducted to answer these questions. In the final report “Blogs and military information strategy” ( PDF, 50 pages ) you can find some recommendations.

The authors of the study recommend collaborating with bloggers and even paying them. Pay not only for loyalty, but also for active participation in the information war. “We can consider acceptable the practice of hiring a team of bloggers for a verbal attack of a certain person or for the promotion of a specific message (” it’s said ”),” the report says.
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Of course, these are not the official instructions of the Pentagon, but merely an academic study, but such statements by military experts are curious in their own right, aren’t they?