Troop Troupe

I've written a lot about the ways that common vernacular video practices have embarrassed the U.S. military. For example, when videos appear in which American soldiers seem to be taunting children, mocking the destruction of mosques, or killing puppies, not to speak of the Abu Ghraib footage, there are often obvious costs to public diplomacy efforts. Of course, defense department officials often express anxiety about how digital technologies and ubiquitous recording devices compromise national security rather than set back public relations or will emphasize sanctioned portals with approved content that gives a supposedly "truer" picture of the military.

In contrast, there are feel-good videos with soldiers hamming it up to popular songs, like this video of "Hey Ya." (See here, here, here, here, and here for more; these videos get a lot of views.) Music companies are also smart enough not to send take-down notices to those who post these expressions of remix culture. There are also examples like "This is Why I'm Hot (Deployed Edition)" that use new lyrics. There's a lot to draw attention to these videos: viewers want to express support for the troops by disseminating the links, people like displays of vernacular dancing, and its an ironic send-up of the military ideal of coordinated action.

That's why I find the latest military video getting a million plus views interesting. It's much campier than the other videos, with soldiers dancing to Lady Gaga's "Telephone" in homoerotic poses and transgender costumes. It seems to show a military more comfortable with its own potentially subversive digital video practices out in the field.



(Strangely, the official video original from Lady Gaga doesn't show the cellphone communication described in the lyrics; the choreographed action is largely set in a women's prison and a roadside diner for some reason, and little is depicted with the cellphone as the "electronic leash" that the song laments.)

The Eye of the Crosshairs

This is difficult viewing, which is prefaced by two and a half minutes of text. The video comes from the U.S. military and shows the shooting of two Reuters employees and two Iraqi children in a van that has come to rescue them.

In the Virtualpolitik book I wrote about the WikiLeaks website, which is now hosting a site exclusively devoted to the shootings, Collateral Murder. For more about the incident, see coverage here on Bag News Notes.

Rambo is on Facebook

Given that just last year, under the Bush administration, many online social network sites were forbidden to be used by members of the military, because policy makers were worried that more incriminating or operationally confidential information from the theater of war could be too easily leaked to the public or terrorist sympathizers, it is extraordinary to see the DoD Social Media Hub now prominently on display. Entries like "Social Networking and Foreign Policy" quotes officials saying things like "The very existence of social networks is a net good" and "The freedom of communication and the nature of it is a huge strategic asset for the United States." The screen shot above shows a poll being taken among service members about their preferred portals of choice, and a register of official sites includes popular Web 2.0 companies like Facebook and Flickr. There are, however, some seeming inconsistencies. Once banned MySpace continues not to have an official presence and still may be considered an "OPSEC Nightmare," although YouTube is back in the military's good graces and can be used to send a Holiday Video Message to the Troops.

Droning On

Stories from CNET and the Christian Science Monitor about the recent hacking of U.S. Predator drones over Iraq to acquire images from their video feeds explain how jihadists were able to use low-cost SkyGrabber software to gain access to unencrypted data.

Of course, the fact that the main audience for this software is composed of those who want free and uncensored television broadcasts without paying or having permission may just feed into the conflation of piracy with terrorism that I have already argued in the Virtualpolitik book is part of a general rhetoric of criminality around the Internet. More information about the technical specifics is in this YouTube video below.

Wrong-Way Allocation

Reader Michael Thomas points out the amazing story of this bandwidth sale in which the "U.S. Federal Communications Commission inadvertently sold the operating frequency band of the B-2 bomber’s Raytheon AN/APQ-181 radar to an obscure firm headed by a Russian-educated citizen of Mali." According to the article, "Installing new radar arrays on the 20 surviving jets will reportedly cost 'well over $1 billion.'"

Truth Be Told

Since I happen to know that the U.S. government has created military videogames about washing hands to avoid dysentery, this doesn't seem so unlikely to me. Games about learning common nouns and verbs in Arabic, negotiating with the locals, and spotting IEDs in monotonous landscapes are already in the field.

Thanks to Michael Zyda for the link!

Following Heroism

As the news media begins to publicize the apparent heroism of police officer Kimberly Munley who shot Fort Hood gunman Nidal Hasan four times despite being wounded herself, it is interesting to see so much attention paid to Munley's Twitter feed, even though her most recent post was from July, where she remarks that she is "still recovering from a long night of work from Saturday!" Hundreds of people have become followers of Munley, who is still hospitalized, and many have sent messages of thanks and well wishes.

Too Many Gizmos

In "The Digital Fog of War," military blogger for the New York Times Captain Tim Hsia

Instead of something akin to a smartphone, soldiers lug around several disparate pieces of equipment: GPS devices, iris and fingerprint scanners, charts for calculating collateral damage estimates related to artillery or airstrikes, hand-held radios, cameras, notepad and pen.

Hsia takes what could be called a "platform studies" approach to the problem of computational media in the military and even makes what an uncomplimentary analogy to the Atari system that is the star of Ian Bogost and Nick Montfort's book Racing the Beam: the Atari Video Computer System: "To members of the Xbox generation, however, military hardware and software seem to date from the Atari era: Too often it is bulky, confusing and impractical."

In terms of software, the main culprits for the Army’s Luddite setup here is a weak architecture and lack of interoperability between systems.

Without going into operational and technical specifics, there are multiple systems the military uses for tracking vehicles and units, but many of these systems do not speak to one another. Even within systems one unit often cannot speak or synchronize with another because a software upgrade or patch makes their equipment incompatible. This results in a confusing battlespace where units sometimes lack complete situational awareness of other units operating around them.

There are also too many platforms being tailored to specific uses, inadvertently adding to the fog of war. Command and control, intelligence, logistics, and medical systems all have a plethora of platforms with their own hardware and software requirements. These operating systems are an extreme hindrance for forward-deployed personnel operating in austere environments as they entail a greater support tail, and, more importantly, they all need power.

In contrast, Iraqi forces are content with their one-size-fits-all bomb-detecting device from Cumberland Industries, even though the Amazing Randi has directly challenged the company to prove the following advertising claims:

Simultaneous Detection of Multiple Types of Explosives or Drugs. The ADE651® incorporates electrostatic ion attraction [ESA] technology to target the specific substances. It can accommodate multiple substance detection cards to detect a broad range of explosive or drug [narcotic] substances. It can more specifically identify a substance by removing detection cards from the ADE651® after detection is received until the attraction is lost.

Ignores All Known Concealment Methods. By programming the detection cards to specifically target a particular substance, (through the proprietary process of electro-static matching of the ionic charge and structure of the substance), the ADE651® will “by-pass” all known attempts to conceal the target substance. It has been shown to penetrate Lead, other metals, concrete, and other matter (including hiding in the body) used in attempts to block the attraction.

No Consumables nor Maintenance Contracts Required. Unlike Trace Detectors that require the supply of sample traps, the ADE651® does not utilize any consumables (exceptions include: cotton-gloves and cleanser) thereby reducing the operational costs of the equipment. The equipment is Operator maintained and requires no ongoing maintenance service contracts. It comes with a hardware three year warranty. Since the equipment is powered electro statically, there are no batteries or conventional power supplies to change or maintain.

High Explosives or Detonable Explosives Trinitrotoluene (TNT), DNT, Nitro Esters (PETN, nitroglycerine, ethylene glycol dinitrate), Ammonium nitrate, Dynamite, RDX/Hexogen/Octogan, Black Powder, ammunition & Propellants, Tetryl, Narcotics, Cocaine/Heroin/Morphine, THC/Marijuana/Cannabis, LSD/Ketamine/Midazolam, Amphetamine / D-methamphetamine, Ecstasy, Opium/Opiates, Chloro-Methyl & Benzodiazepine drugs, Ivory, Human Recognition (Detection).

For more about this device, read "Iraq Swears by Bomb Detector U.S. Sees as Useless."

Friends and Foes

What Mitch Wagner has described as the Department of Defense's "on-again off-again romance with social networking sites" is supposed to be back on again, according to his post "Defense Department Loves Social Networking Again." As evidence, Wagner cites this memo, which he interprets in the following manner:

The memo, written by Deputy Defense Secretary William Lynn III, is a move back in the direction of embracing social media. "This policy recognizes that emerging Internet-based capabilities offer both opportunities and risks that need to be balanced in ways that provide an information advantage for our people and mission partners," it states. It applies to the public Internet--non-.mil-domain, non-Defense-owned networks and services.

It calls on the Defense Department to "permit and encourage official use" of social networks. "to leverage their potential while managing risk," and also permit "personal, unofficial use" of social media, so long as users don't "claim representation of the Department or its policies, or those of the U.S. government."

What's tricky about the memo has to do with what rhetoricians call ethos or how people represent their public characters to seem credible and trust-worthy. Online authors often draw upon their experiences and social roles to bolster the authority of their claims. However, the memo stipulates that "personnel acting in their official capacity shall maintain liaison with public affairs staff to ensure organizational awareness." Even as an academic, I am aware that defining when I am speaking in my "official capacity" and when I am expressing a person opinion can be difficult to differentiate. For members of the military, who are stationed in foreign countries and representing the U.S. government 24/7, these distinctions may be even harder to make.

Navy Squeals

Although this video was composed a few years ago, it is interesting to see it back in circulation, during a time long after when vernacular video shot by service people and posted to social network sites was creating a very different reaction, as many members of the public responded negatively to scenes of taunting, desecration, and mockery that reflected poorly on all soldiers in uniform. Speculation about the production methods and the consequences for those who created this light-hearted video is still being generated on comments pages.

General Wiki

Given the importance of field manuals as an arbiter of army doctrine, there has been a remarkable development in how this official discourse may be generated. During the Bush administration the "capstone doctrine" represented by more than 500 different guides included controversial new provisions about interrogation or counterterrorism. "Care to Write Army Doctrine? With ID, Log On" in the New York Times describes a new plan to use wiki technology to

In July, in a sharp break from tradition, the Army began encouraging its personnel — from the privates to the generals — to go online and collaboratively rewrite seven of the field manuals that give instructions on all aspects of Army life.

Unlike the institutional authorship that a traditional field manual presents, the system will allow no anonymous edits, so the individuals who contribute content will have public identities.

Close reading of the article shows that it is only a test program and that very little editing has taken place in the six week's since the program's launch. In light of army personnel's anxieties about potentially displeasing superiors, it is not surprising that soldiers have been reluctant to try to rewrite the rules.

The Few, The Proud

"US marines barred from social networking sites" points out that a recent military order bars this branch of the arms services from engaging in common online social computing practices, which already have both the military acronym "SNS" and elaborate waiver process. For previous prohibitions on use of these sites, see Virtualpolitik coverage here and here.

Thanks to Alex Tarr for the link

Cover Stories

Joystick Soldiers: The Politics of Play in Military Video Games is now available for order from Routledge. I have an article about military game development at the Institute for Creative Technologies, and Ian Bogost wrote the introduction.

Lifting the Base Gate

The big digital rhetoric story for the week has already been reported in Wired: "Army Orders Bases to Stop Blocking Twitter, Facebook, Flickr."

It is “the intent of senior Army leaders to leverage social media as a medium to allow soldiers to ‘tell the Army story’ and to facilitate the dissemination of strategic, unclassified information,” says the order, obtained by Danger Room. Therefore, “the social media sites available from the Army homepage will be made accessible from all campus area networks. Additionally, all web-based email will be made accessible.”

It's interesting to note, however, that MySpace is still on the prohibited list, presumably because of conventions that encourage more public posting, although the class divisions described by danah boyd may still play a role in this distinction. After some of the embarrassing video incidents that I describe in this article, it may not be surprising that YouTube will also still be blocked.

GI Game

CNN reports in "Army hopes interactive videos make smarter soldiers" that military planners continue to invest in serious games designed to teach cultural sensitivity to U.S. soldiers, such as Army 360: Immersive Cultural Simulation from InVisM, based on the expectation that games and simulations designed for the theater of war in Iraq and Afghanistan could minimize the number of offensive acts by soldiers who offend Muslim sensibilities and compound the problems of occupation. A company web page touts the benefits of their product:

Fusing together a combination of 360º video with HD live-action supported by eight channels of dimensional binaural audio, users are placed inside the scene. When supported by a Head Mounted Display (HMD) and motion tracker, users maintain intuitive control of the environmental perspective as they turn their head providing various points of view of their surroundings. Additionally, the scenarios use character actors and is based on documented real-world scenarios. At the end of each scenario learning point, the video pauses and the user must make limited time-allotted decisions. Depending on their answers, ICS branches to a consequence-based outcome related to the decision made and maintains a score of the player's performance. Additionally, the culmination of decisions made throughout the training results in multiple endings

The company also takes a dig at those who use videogame engines on their website: "Unlike conventional serious game technology, the training methodology effectively reveals the micro expressions and subtle body language of the scenario's characters." CNN also helps the company make their argument against the competition as a government contractor in the actual article:

Robinson believes the simulator program is more effective then a traditional video game because soldiers relate more to human characters than virtual avatars.

"Nobody cares about an avatar that gets killed. You just get another avatar," he said.

Although the use of computational media may be different from the military videogames that I describe in the Virtualpolitik book, CNN indulges in the same uncritical reporting that I describe coming from other news outlets when it comes to stories about the military's use of proprietary technologies.

It is also worth noting that the CNN story opens with a "staff sergeant in Iraq" who "decided to practice his shooting skills" by taking aim at "the Quran, Islam's holiest book."

In the 21st century, the Army was sending younger soldiers into an arena they had little cultural experience in, and at the same time, new social networking sites were poised to broadcast their mistakes to the world.

Although the original incident is no longer accessible on YouTube, there have been scores of imitators, including a person firing pork bullets into a Koran, a Koran being riddled with bullets to the tune of "God Save the Queen" while photographs of terrorist violence are intercut with the video, and a "Christian Apology" in which the Bible gets similar treatment.

One wonders about the efficacy of a few sessions with a computer game, given the hardened ideological stances and groupthink described in "Jesus Killed Mohammed: The Crusade for a Christian Military" by Jeff Sharlet in a recent issue of Harper's. In other words, what if cultural insensitivity is intentional and part of a larger geopolitical theological strategy?

Thanks to Michael Zyda for the link to the CNN story.

Numbers Game

An e-mail with the subject line "Just the Facts, Ma'am" has been circulating among Republican loyalists that purports to show statistics about military deaths that make mortality appear higher under Democratic presidential administrations than under Republican ones.

However, as Snopes.com reports, the data, supposedly drawn from Table 4 on page 10 of this Congressional Research Service report on military deaths, tells a different story.

When I received the e-mail that follows, I was struck by the a number of features of its rhetorical strategy: 1) this logical appeal to the validity of a numerical argument didn't use any data visualization techniques, 2) the collection of congressional reports about national security that the e-mail references comes from the Federation of American Scientists, a group often associated with the political left, and 3) the version I received avoids the sarcasm of the "Surprise, Surprise (not really)" opening line of the Snopes version and instead addresses its audience in a bipartisan fashion.

Subject:

Whatever your politics, however you lean and however you feel about the Bush administration, this report is interesting.

As tragic as the loss of any member of the US Armed Forces is, consider the following statistics:

The annual fatalities, by any cause, of military members while actively serving
in the armed forces from 1980 through 2006:

1980 -- 2,392 (Carter)
1981 -- 2,380 (Reagan)
1984 -- 1,999 (Reagan)
1988 -- 1,819 (Reagan)
1989 -- 1,636 (George H W)
1990 -- 1,508 (George H W)
1991 -- 1,787 (George H W)
1992 -- 1,293 (George H W)
1993 -- 1,213 ( Clinton )
1994 -- 1,075 ( Clinton )
1995 -- 2,465 (Clinton)
1996 -- 2,318 (Clinton)
1997 -- 817 (Clinton)
1998 -- 2,252 (Clinton)
1999 -- 1,984 (Clinton)
2000 -- 1,983 (Clinton)
2001 -- 890 (George W)
2002 -- 1,007 (George W)
2003 -- 1,410 (George W)
2004 -- 1,887 (George W)
2005 -- 919 (George W)
2006 -- 920 (George W)
2007 -- 899 (George W)

Clinton years (1993-2000): 14,107 deaths
George W years (2001-2007): 7,932 deaths

Are you surprised when you look at these figures? They indicate the loss from the two latest Middle East conflicts are less than the loss of military personnel during Clinton 's presidency when America wasn't even involved in a war -- unless you include Bosnia and Mogadishu, Somalia . (Remember "Blackhawk Down"?) Even more surprising is that in 1980, during Carter presidency, there were 2,392 US military fatalities!

These figures appear to indicate many members of our media and politicians pick and choose the information on which they report -- that they present only those "facts" that support their agenda.

The Snopes entry does not address the second part of the e-mail I received, which addresses the racial politics of military fatalities. This section reads as follows:

Consider the latest census of Americans. It shows the following distribution of American citizens by race:

European descent 69.12 percent
Hispanic 12.50 percent
Black 12.30 percent
Asian 3.70 percent
Native American 1.00 percent
Other 2.60 percent 0D

Many members of the media lead us to believe the military death ratio is off-balance compared to the distribution by race in America. Here are the fatalities by race over the past three years in Iraqi Freedom.

European descent 74.31 percent
Hispanic 10.74 percent
Black 9.67 percent
Asian 1.81 percent
Native American 1.09 percent
Other 0.33 percent

Surprised again? Hopefully, intelligent Americans can decipher -- the facts from the spin, the spinners from the leaders, those who seek even more power from those that seek justice, the dividers from the uniters.

These statistics are published by the Congressional Research Service and may be<>

Troop Tube

As Wired initially reported, there are ironies with having military personnel banned from YouTube and other popular social media sites, merely because they enable broadcasting soldiers' gaffes like the ones I describe in an article in the Video Vortex Reader. Apparently some soldiers are now also banned from TroopTube the sanitized substitute for disseminating online video that the military itself had created.

TroopTube describes itself as "designed to help military families connect and keep in touch while miles apart" and suggests wholesome uses to its members such as creating online video birthday cards.

Just Put Your Lips Together and Blow

Whistle blowers who expose government corruption produce a number of digital genres in the Web 2.0 era. In the forthcoming Virtualpolitik book I write about how waste, abuse, corruption, and incompetence are exposed in YouTube videos, digital maps, and widely circulated e-mails.

As a case in point, the blog Ms Sparky's Mishaps & Misadventures is devoted to publicizing the incompetence of mega-contractor KBR in doing electrical work for the military in mobile encampments set up inside the Iraq warzone. Here she appears in the Rachel Maddow show in conjunction with her domain name.

Visit msnbc.com for Breaking News, World News, and News about the Economy

General Beauty Queen

In "General Touch Up," BAGNewsNotes analyzes doctored photographs from the US military using the "before" and "after" images of a female commander that were published by the BBC, along with an editorial note about non-inclusion of such altered pictures from the Associated Press.

Beyond the fact that the Army doctored a photo of Ann Dunwoody, America's first female four-star general, I'm curious about how the National Press Photographers Association, along with other media, chose to describe the doctoring itself.

Comparing the grainy original to the redo, NPPA singles out just two aspects. One is the removal of the background and the insertion of old glory. The other is the removal of the stars on Dunwoody's uniform. Naming only these elements, however, gives the sense NPPA purposely avoided the main point, which is the tuning up of Dunwoody herself, including her hair color and complexion.

Fox in the Henhouse

Today's story in the Los Angeles Times about how a "Cyber-attack on Defense Department computers raises concerns" explains a recent ban on portable flash drives being used by U.S. military personnel as an attempt to quarantine a massive attack on Defense Department computer networks by agent.btz variant originating in Russia.