POST: The Blogosphere at War

With so much uproar over Joe Rago's op-ed condemning blogs in the WSJ, this is an interesting and well-reasoned (albeit implicit) reply. Not Wretchard's ambition, I suspect, but that's how I read it. What Wretchard describes is essentially the competition the unclassified blogs are already offering the classified world of the intelligence community, which is why the IC is replicating this function from within (problem being, it's still the same isolated, self-selecting community inside the IC, just armed with different conversation tools). Can the same be said about the blogosphere? Sure. It's just a bigger and more diverse community, far more so than even the world of MSM journalism (also highly insular and self-selecting). That opponents already actively target this realm says several things: 1) the blogosphere is more immediate and responsive than the IC to both pulsing from without and self-correction on bad analysis (the blogosphere is nothing if not cruelly self-critical,and gleefully so); 2) this gap is likely to widen, thus making the blogosphere the more natural target for information operations (which means we should meet this challenge symmetrically, and yes, the IC considers this option very seriously, but I suspect it will be terrible at it (and already is) for all the usual cultural reasons (it's just not the personality they attract, not in the individual skills, but in the confident capacity to act en masse, although a generational shift within the IC may fix that with time); and 3) shaping hearts and minds goes both ways (an essential reality of 4GW). Many in the U.S. national security establishment will want to go symmetrical on this score, but I think that would be a mistake and probably fruitless. I believe the blogosphere will evolve and grow in such way as to allow it to handle this field of perceptions battle quite nicely, making it within a decade or so to be more important than the IC itself in the Long War. Thanks to Lexington Green for sending this.