What are we entitled to know... and when?

I feel compelled to bring up something that has really bothered me since the very beginning of this war. Something that, I believe, has put lives in danger and has hampered a lot of our ability to fight this insurgency. It is operational security, keeping information from the wrong people. We get lectured on it daily, and as a scout, the operations I usually do depend heavily on it. So why do we broadcast what we are doing on CNN, and publish it in our newspapers?

During the initial invasion I was able to track what my old unit, the 4th Infantry Division was doing. The fact that they were delayed access to Iraq through Turkey, and were eventually rerouted through Kuwait. I knew all of this while it was going on. Also, embedded reporters saying things like we were at this location X amount of hours ago. It really isn't that hard to figure out where you might be now. More recently, it is published what units are going where, sometimes even what they will be doing. The new strategy, the troop surge, we are telling them exactly what is coming at them, and where they are going. Finally, what spurred this rant, this morning I saw a headline on CNN. "Baghdad offensive set to begin"... why do we need to let the people we are trying find know this?

In World War II we took extreme measure to hide the identity of units deploying, and went out of our way to mislead our enemy so that our troops on the ground had the greatest chance for success. Any military commander will tell you that the element of surprise is priceless. I understand with today's technology and the type of war we are fighting the possibility of a surprise attack is quite small. We should still make them do the work to find out, instead of telling them in a month you are going to have an additional 4,000 soldiers and marines in this province, and 16,000 more over here. Oh, and by the way, they are deploying early or being extended. So their morale is going to be lower. This is all information I have been trained to find out about our enemies on the battlefield, so why are we giving it away?

My point is our media feels they are entitled to all sorts of information, because the citizens of our county deserve to know. I agree with that too a point, does the American public need to know that we are sending more troops to Iraq? Maybe... Does that need to include exact numbers and where they are going? Do they need to know when the offensive is supposed to begin? These are all questions that I wish our leaders and today's media would ask themselves before they go putting out possibly sensitive information. People ask me what I know about certain subjects and events, being that I am over here. Well, let me tell you, we get most of our updates from CNN, just like you! Heck, we even found out about our extension from the Star Tribune! There are so many things wrong with this, I can't begin to list them.

With the world the way it is now days, I don't think there will be any change to any of this. I just felt compelled to say something about the way it is supposed to be. Thank you all for listening to me rant, I will now step off my soap box. :)