The Lack of British Milbloggers Explained
In response to a FOI request filed last month with the UK’s MOD, Assistant Director Robin Riley of the Directorate of Defense Public Relations today provided the following statement:
UK military personnel and MOD civilians are not forbidden from keeping a
blog so long as they stay within the existing, common-sense regulations
on security, and writing or speaking in public, and within the
overarching rules on personal and professional conduct set out in
Queen’s Regulations, the Civil Service Code and elsewhere. These rules
require that UK personnel seek approval before publicly releasing
official information or commenting on defence matters.
(emphasis mine)
And there, in a nutshell, is why there seem to be few if any Tommy milbloggers. In some ways a better policy than the U.S. Army one - explicit approval is evidently only required if you’re blogging about “defense matters” - and in some ways more onerous, in that there aren’t, apparently, any specific guidelines on blogs per se.
Much of it probably, in my view, is attributable to a difference in both the organization of the respective militaries, and the cultural norms of their countries. Where American milbloggers are often criticized for their at-times unobjective positiveness, and indeed openly-admitted propensity towards self-censorship, a quick trawl through a British military forum or two exposes one to a much less controlled, and much more honest, view of things. Operational Security (OPSEC) concerns are clearly never far from anyone’s mind, but that doesn’t - and shouldn’t - preclude (often brutal) honesty, as seems to be the case in the American military. Or, at least, the American military as represented online.
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