Should the Pentagon keep the troops from blogging?

Everyone likes to blog, even the military. At the highest levels of the Pentagon, civilian officials and four-star generals are embracing the power of social networking to communicate with the troops and shape public opinion.

Last month, DoD unveiled a website with links to its blogs and its Flickr, Facebook, Twitter and YouTube sites. But now comes a dilemma: The DoD is worried about the troops. In the next few weeks, it will issue a new policy that is expected to lay out departmentwide restrictions to social networking sites, according to the New York Times.

This means that access to this great new medium may be limited to people who can demonstrate a clear work need for it.

"We as an institution still haven't come to grips with how we want to use blogging" and other social media, said Lt. Gen. William B. Caldwell IV, the commander of the Army Combined Arms Center at Fort Leavenworth, KS.

It may already be too late to stop the progress toward a new and more open way of communicating though, especially since the Obama administration has been calling for transparency and using social media at every turn.

For more on the Pentagon and social networking:
- check out this New York Times article