Milbloggers

Strategypage ("The News as History") military blogger Harold Hutchinson writes in TCS Daily:

Milblogger efforts have shown that the landscape has changed greatly from Vietnam. As Steve, who blogs at Threatswatch, pointed out, the Tet Offensive was a military defeat for the North Vietnamese, but the victory by American forces on the battlefield was taken away by misreporting from the media of that time. Today, such misreporting will not go unchallenged, as there is a check against the MSM.

The milbloggers largely agreed that this is the major difference between the War on Terror and the Vietnam War. This time, the people who know the facts and the good news stories have the ability to get them out without the filters of the major mainstream media outlets, changing the terrain of the information battlefield. This shift in the terrain has helped keep the United States from completely losing the war on the home front.

Helping to prevent such a Vietnamization of Iraq is only one of the milblogger contributions. And while most milbloggers (like Hutchinson, or Steve of Threatswatch or Blackfive) are generally positive about the War in Iraq, some--Chris Bray comes to mind--are not and have been allowed to express as much. Perhaps this is because the insight provided by men and women involved in the Iraq War or the GWOT--whether on the front lines or not--is worth having. In short, blogging has allowed soldiers to write modern day equivalents of To Hell and Back, With The Old Breed or even Catch-22 in "real-time." I think that the American public has been well served by the milbloggers and could benefit even more if the MSM did a better job of consistently bringing us such personal stories from Iraq.