Monthly Archives: January 2013
The Few, The Proud, The Bloggers
Source: Terminal Lance, 29 January 2010
For the Marine Corps, the Global War on Terror coincided with the rise of social media, also known as Web 2.0. While many senior military leaders saw this as a threat — the rapid spread of the Abu Ghraib pictures, the puppy tossing incident, and the Scout Sniper urination videos, seemed to confirm their worst fears — it also gave Marines a soapbox that they wouldn’t have had even a decade ago. The Marine Corps maintained a formal ban on social media until late 2009, calling it “a larger attack and exploitation window, [which] exposes unnecessary information to adversaries and provides an easy conduit for information leakage,” but saw that ban overturned by the DOD in early 2010. Read more
Whatever happened to … ?
A former Taliban commander speaks to members of 1st and 3rd Battalion, 3rd Marines, May 2010.
Recently the New York Times had an article on how former insurgents in Mehtar Lam who embraced the Afghan government’s reconciliation program are slowly drifting back to the insurgency. On its 2004-05 deployment, 3/3 helped multiple insurgents in that area, most famously Najmuddin, lay down their arms and integrate back into the Afghan government.
Whatever happened to them? Read more