14 August 2009

Looks like things have settled down somewhat…

You may remember Dave Dilegge's post the other day in Small Wars Journal asking all of the amateur Afghanistan pundits to quiet down. At first, it seemed a little strange, coming from him. After all, the community which typically gathers on Small Wars Journal certainly understands the importance of honest feedback and analysis of the situation on the ground. Surely, Dave wasn't telling us all to simply STFU?

As it ends up, he wasn't. In an interview on the radio program "Outside the Beltway"*, the Small Wars Journal editor-in-chief noted that the massive amount of sudden Afghanistan analysis from the mainstream media and the milbloggers was simply overwhelming the planners in General Stanley McChrystal's headquarters with the large volume of contradictory evidence.

In other words, General McChrystal's staff reads the milblogs.

This shouldn't come as a surprise to most of us, since we all know that one of the participants in General McChrystal's policy review group was none other than Andrew Exum of Abu Muqawama fame.

*--okay, actually, the bandwidth here is such that I couldn't actually listen to the program myself, so I'm stealing the executive summary from Zenpundit. Sue me.

3 comments:

Schmedlap said...

I can understand frustration with the think tankers and pundits from major news outlets. But bloggers? I don't see how they contribute to the noise level. If I don't go looking for blog commentary, it doesn't find me. That was especially true when I lived on SIPR and other non-NIPR nets.

Regarding OTB - download the RealPlayer plug-in for Firefox. It allows you do one-click downloads of audio or video. Just hover over the item, a RealPlayer download link appears and click.

Starbuck said...

Yeah, I really need to listen to Dilegge's interview for myself. I think (and this is me not having heard the interview, just reactions) he might have been referring to SWJ and the more mainstream blogs (Abu Muqawama) that are accessible on SIPR.

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