I am Major Kenric Smith and I am currently a student at the Combined Arms Center at Fort Leavenworth, Kansas. I will say, first and foremost, that I am not in any way writing in any official capacity but I want to give an officer's perspective on this article.

While I was deployed in Iraq, it was absolutely prohibited to access any social network site on a military computer. All the common social networking sites were blocked locally by network administrators. This was not an issue of freedom of speech. I don't know of many private businesses that would encourage their employees to spend their time at the office finding friends on MySpace or Facebook. Work is work. The policy of blocking the social network sites is also in effect across most of the Department of Defense and its installations in the United States also. Would you as a taxpayer want your taxpayer dollars paying for me to surf MySpace on government time? I also note the fact that almost every soldier has access to non-military Internet sources. In my case, my unit purchased a commercial satellite that many of used so that we could have Internet in our quarters. This access was not censored in any way--with one exception, which I will talk about later. Our location also had a common Internet cafe that was uncensored and accessible by all. Soldiers could access all their network sites in this recreation facility.

Now there is a separate issue that was brought up in the article. Operational security is extremely important to the army and other service components. "Loose lips sink ships" applies now as much as it did in World War II, except now the threat is a very technologically sophisticated enemy that surfs common social sites looking for any information that they can exploit. I give you this example. A soldier returning from a patrol in Iraq returns to his base and writes a blog about the events in his day. He writes that he's tired of running the same patrol day after day. He gets a chance to eat a quick bite to eat and has to be on the road by six o'clock in the morning because they have to leave before they open to the gates to the numerous commercial vehicles that line up at the front gate every morning. He writes that they swing by the same mosque every day and that they practically could drive the route in their sleep. He writes about the only time that he's seen action was a few weeks ago when his buddy’s vehicle was caught in an IED explosion and it really messed up the vehicle but thankfully the IED was detonated a few seconds too soon and it spared the cab of the vehicle. He then closes his blog out about the "funny of the day" in which he explains that his company never gets any of the glory missions and they are so disgruntled at hearing about the other company's war stories that his higher headquarters decided to give most of his squad's ammunition to that other company. He closes by saying that his buddies have decided if they ever do see any action they will just have to yell "bang" because they will only have a few rounds of ammo. This example is very similar to real things that have been blogged in Iraq. His blog has given the enemy a clear advantage on times, routes and vulnerabilities of his unit. So this is the dilemma that DoD has to struggle with. The intent of restricting blogs is not to stop soldiers from telling their story but to ensure that the enemy is not able to exploit information from a seemingly innocent blog.

The last thing I will say about the blogging policy is that there is one other reason that needs to be taken into consideration. I mentioned that there was only one exception to our civilian Internet sources being blocked or censored. That one exception was the death or significant injury of a soldier. If a soldier is killed or injured in combat, it is unacceptable for a family member to hear of it neighbor who received an e-mail from her husband. The military will notify the family member officially and can't accept the chance of an inadvertent slip from someone who sent an errant e-mail. Until the family is notified, all communications from the unit to home will be limited. The respect for the family will outweigh the need for a soldier to get on Facebook.

Now with all that said, I wholeheartedly agree that all soldiers, sailors, airmen and Marines should blog about their perspectives and experiences in the military. We are not mindless drones that think and act the same. We have ideas and perspectives that vary as much as the population we represent. Very few people know what we do, and it is our duty as servicemen and servicewoman to tell our stories. Students at Fort Leavenworth are encouraged to tell all forms of media our stories with no censorship. None of us are spokespeople and there is no message that we are required to talk about. Senior general officers understand and support this. Technology changes rapidly but DoD policies are slow at adapting to the quickly changing technological capabilities. I thank Ari Melber for writing about this complicated issue.

Kenric Smith

N. Las Vegas, NV