Indeed, civilians have "rushed the field," says David Kilcullen, author of The Accidental Guerrilla, a renowned expert on counterinsurgency and a former special advisor to General David Petraeus during the Iraq War. Their communications can now directly affect a military operation's dynamics. "Information networks," he says, "will define the future of conflicts." That future started unfurling when Libyan networks—and a long list of global activists—began an information war against Qaddafi. Thousands of civilians took part, but one of the most important was a man who, to paraphrase Woodrow Wilson, used not only all the brains he had but all the brains he could borrow.

The report concluded that the allies struggled to share crucial target information, lacked specialized planners and analysts, and overly relied on the United States for reconnaissance and refueling aircraft.

The findings undercut the idea that the intervention was a model operation and that NATO could effectively carry out a more complicated campaign in Syria without relying disproportionately on the United States military. Even with the American help in Libya, NATO had only about 40 percent of the aircraft needed to intercept electronic communications, a shortage that hindered the operation’s effectiveness, the report said.

The news stories about the event are disturbing.   Some stories reported that they were acting like a bunch of battlefield tourists, strolling in the park and taking pictures.  Some depicted the soldiers as having opened fire indiscriminately in the aftermath of the attack, killing children in the process.  One such story appeared in Stars and Stripes, of all places, who apparently cut and pasted their story directly from al Jazeera.  None of them are true.  Not one American fired a shot following the blast.  They were performing a mission, not wandering around like a bunch of carefree war tourists.

Newspapers in the US and the UK published photos of the grim aftermath, violating the dignity of the dead and dying.   For that, I am eternally angry.  The editors of any publication that did so had best never meet me and be identified as being responsible for the publication of such war porn.  It would not go well for them.  Just because they could didn’t mean that they should.

Has ruffled a few feathers...

Mapping Digital Media: Digital Media, Conflict and Diasporas in the Horn of Africa

We mourn the loss of a very brave Syrian journalist
This morning LIVE footage by one citizen journalist, Rami Ahmad Alsayeed -  also known as one of the people behind the broadcaster Syriapioneer on Bambuser, was aired all over the world by BBC World, SkyNews, Al Jazeera and many more. All showed live footage from the roof where Rami and his friends have put their camera, as they've done many times documenting the heavy shelling from the Assad Forces hovering over BabaAmr in Homs, Syria. Rami Ahmad Alsayeed has for months been one of the bravest and forefront fighters in getting the world's attention on what’s going on in Homs, Syria. This afternoon, cameraman and journalist Rami Ahmad Alsayeed did his last broadcast – he and three of his friends were soon after this killed by the Assad armed forces on the streets of BabaAmr.

"The deployment of such systems would reflect … a major qualitative change in the conduct of hostilities," committee President Jakob Kellenberger said at a recent conference. "The capacity to discriminate, as required by [international humanitarian law], will depend entirely on the quality and variety of sensors and programming employed within the system."

Weapons specialists in the military and Congress acknowledge that policymakers must deal with these ethical questions long before these lethal autonomous drones go into active service, which may be a decade or more away.

The video of U.S. Marines urinating on dead Afghan fighters is horrific. The images reflect a breakdown in discipline and an appalling absence of supervision from the noncommissioned and commissed officers charged with making sure these kinds of things do not happen. These Marines have embarassed themselves and have disgraced their country and the U.S. Marine Corps.

One big difference today is the diffusion of camera phones and other media allow the ugly dehumanizing effect of war to go viral. In a way, I am glad.

[See comments for bashing of "liberals". Aim is to hate the enemy - otherwise we will lose the war. This is nothing compared to what the Taliban do.]

Scripted mini-series, too, have taken on the impact of the wars; in 2008 HBO was praised for the mini-series “Generation Kill,” based on an embedded reporter’s experience in Iraq. But for the most part, “I think network executives think war zones are too rough and real for American viewers to watch week to week,” Ms. Gordon said. “Americans are used to stylized violence,” not war violence, she added, citing “ ‘CSI’ dead bodies, car chases with gunplay, vampires killing people, and now zombies slowly chasing their prey in a never-ending pursuit.”

A zombie attack, it’s fair to say, is less likely to affect a family than a military deployment.

America’s air force is developing a range of them based on a type of radar called an active electronically scanned array (AESA). When acting as a normal radar, an AESA broadcasts its microwaves over a wide area. At the touch of a button all of its energy can be focused onto a single point...the target’s electronics will be zapped.

...the Boeing Growler first saw action in Iraq in 2010 and has been extensively (though discreetly) deployed in Libya. It is fitted with 5 pods: 2 under each wing and 1 under the fuselage. Some pods contain electromagnetic weapons. Others have eavesdropping equipment inside them. In combination, the pods can be used either to spy on enemy communications or to destroy them; to suppress anti-aircraft fire; to disable the electronics of ground vehicles; and to make life so hazardous for enemy aircraft that they dare not fly... America has ordered 114 of the planes, and has taken delivery of 53.

...the remotely-piloted Predator MQ-1 or Reaper MQ-9 aircraft.

Laden with sophisticated sensors and carrying Hellfire missiles and laser-guided bombs...

...each Reaper requires more than 180 people to keep it flying. A pilot is always at the controls (albeit from a base that might be 7,500 miles, or 12,000km, away); and another officer operates its sensors and cameras.

Drone use increasing.

Since 2005 there has been a 1,200% increase in combat air patrols by UAVs.

the defence secretary, Robert Gates, went out of his way to exempt drones from future cuts.

Under Barack Obama, the frequency of drone strikes on terrorists in Pakistan’s tribal areas has risen tenfold, from one every 40 days during George Bush’s presidency to one every four.

Mr Gates conceded that the F-35 would probably be the last manned strike fighter. It may take longer than the visionaries think, but the pilot in the cockpit is already an endangered species.

"There was no way to undo the vow of every soldier who had knelt on this soil and let his tears mix with the spilled blood of his comrade and who had promised that he would never forget to hate the man -- and every man who looked like him -- who took the life of his brother. You can't rewind war. It spools on, and on, and on. Looping and jumping, distorted and cracked with age, and the stories contract until only the nuggets of hatred remain and no one can even remember, or imagine, why the war was organized in the first place."<br />
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Alexandra Fuller, Scribbling the Cat.

Pursuing a theme which some in the audience may have been astounded to hear from a former boss of MI5, she said terrorist campaigns – she mentioned Northern Ireland as an example – could not be solved militarily. She described the invasion of Iraq as a "distraction in the pursuit of al-Qaida". She added: "Saddam Hussein was a ruthless dictator but neither he nor his regime had anything to do with 9/11." The invasion, she said, "provided an arena for jihad", spurring on UK citizens to resort to terror.<br />
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September 11 was a "monstrous crime" but it needed a considered response, an appreciation of the causes and roots of terrorism, she said later in answers to questions. She said she hoped there were those – she implied in western governments – who were considering having "talks with al-Qaida".

The idea of a British army ever again confronting a national army of a hostile state, or groups of insurgents, in the open is anachronistic. Electronic warfare, cyber attacks, small groups of commandos and special forces will take the place of traditional army units, just as pilotless drones will take the place of conventional aircraft.<br />
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Few serious commentators, outside or inside the Ministry of Defence, now deny that last year's security and defence review was eccentric and bizarre, leaving the navy with two costly aircraft carriers, neither of which will carry aircraft for a decade, one due to be mothballed as soon as it is completed. The government excluded from its review plans to replace the Trident nuclear missile system, described even by Tony Blair in his autobiography, A Journey, as "non-existent in terms of military use".

Six months on and it is heartbreaking to look at how eerie the Libyan blogosphere is, row upon row of bloggers in Libya are silent because of the Libyan war. From the silent ones you realize that they are in the cities under Gaddafi control and therefore have no access to the internet.<br />
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The Libyan war though has brought some of the bloggers out of the woodwork at least those that had left the country for studying.

Indeed, many Germans believed that newspaper propaganda had been the decisive weapon of the war. "Today words have become battles," declared the German supreme commander, Erich von Ludendorff: "The right words, battles won; the wrong words, battles lost.

He's right to identify the danger - "embedding" only ever provides one piece of the jigsaw. That's why, in Baghdad and Kabul, the BBC - at some cost and risk - has bureaux that report the other bits of the story. In Iraq, Gabriel Gatehouse and Jim Muir have covered the threats to Baghdad's Christians, while in Kabul, our opinion poll this week focused on the attitudes of the people of Afghanistan - not the military.

Anyone who is serious about challenging misogyny in Afghanistan is required, at the very minimum, to acknowledge this depressing reality. Equally, regardless of whether the troops stay or are withdrawn, it's important, if only for the sake of honest debate, to state clearly what's at stake. Aisha's experience is not the whole story, but it does symbolise a critical subplot that ought not be neglected. That much, at least, is as plain as the nose that is missing from her face.

Just seconds after the news broke, South Koreans tweeted madly regarding possible future scenarios and evacuation plans, as well as re-tweeting news updates. Many scoured for accurate sources, as some unconfirmed rumors, such as North Korean leader Kim Jong-il had died, circulated online. Twitterers, quoting friends in the army, said the Korean peninsula was in a near-war situation. South Korea's presidential office, Cheongwadae (@BlueHouseKorea) has tried to calm public sentiment.

he conduct of three British military units in Afghanistan has come under serious question after the Ministry of Defence released unprecedented details of incidents in which troops attacked Afghan civilians.<br />
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The disclosure, in response to a request under the Freedom of Information Act made by the Guardian, revealed that of the casualties caused by British forces, two-thirds involved troops from the three units, triggering calls for an inquiry into their behaviour.<br />
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Releasing information about 21 incidents, the MoD revealed that the Coldstream Guards shot four civilians in Kabul over a period of three weeks; the Royal Marine commandos killed or wounded civilians eight times in six months; and the third unit, the Rifles, were involved in three incidents last year.

Harder to go to war in the future?

IBC: "These logs contain a huge amount of entirely new information regarding casualties. Our analysis so far indicates that they will add 15,000 or more previously unrecorded deaths to the current IBC total. This data should never have been withheld from the public."<br />
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The logs record a total of 109,032 violent deaths between 2004 and 2009. It is claimed that 66,081 of these were civilians. A further 23,984 deaths are classed as "enemy" and 15,196 as members of the Iraqi security forces. The logs also include the deaths of 3,771 US and allied soldiers.<br />
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No fewer than 31,780 of the total deaths are attributed to the improvised landmines laid around Iraq by insurgents. There were 65,439 successful IED blasts in the period, according to the logs, with another 44,620 IEDs found in time and disarmed.<br />
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The other major recorded cause of death is the civil war that broke out during the US military occupation. There are 34,814 victims of sectarian killings recorded as murders in the logs.

This issue was discussed on WHYS on 11 August 2010. Listen to the programme.

That same month, American soldiers in Balkh Province, in the north of Afghanistan, were planning a search-and-clear operation. It was not going well. According to a report written by a member of Task Force Warrior, a unit of the 10th Mountain Division, local civilians would not coöperate, whereupon Afghan soldiers and policemen “harassed and beat” them. The area’s residents “had a negative opinion” of their nation’s security forces, the writer noted. A police district commander

Used by the BBC in news story about her death.

However, it is her personal blog, Dr Karen Explores Healthcare in Afghanistan, which provides the most revealing account of her experiences.

Assange’s justification for putting hundreds of lives at stake—“All of this material is more than seven months old, so it has no operational significance… there is no danger”—is as false as it is naïve. Many of the operations he details through these leaks are still ongoing, and many of the people involved in them are still there, hoping these leaks don’t make them into targets for assassination. Indeed, Adam Serwer, a staff writer for The American Prospect, tweeted this morning, “Former Military Intelligence Officer sez of wikileaks, ‘Its an AQ/Taliban execution team’s treasure trove.’”

According to Amnesty International at least 14 media workers have been killed in the country since 2006 and more than 20 are thought to have fled – more per capita than have left Iran...

During the Israel–Hezbollah War of 2006, bloggers caught Reuters publishing doctored images from Lebanon. Known by bloggers as Fauxtography, the scandal provides an important site to analyze the ability of blogs to challenge mainstream media. One blog in particular was almost single–handedly responsible for unearthing and for publicizing the scandal — Little Green Footballs. This paper uses the scandal as a case study to assess how Little Green Footballs was able to mount a challenge to mainstream media. Despite theorizing to the contrary about the collective promise of networked publics, Fauxtography reveals that one of the biggest challenges of late to mainstream media came from the activities of a single blogger.

When Gen. Stanley A. McChrystal opened his inner sanctum to a Rolling Stone reporter, he violated more than just the military chain of command. The general broke core tenets of President Obama's code of conduct: When it comes to the media, keep your guard up, your mouth shut and control of the situation.

Sacked US General Stanley McChrystal issued a devastatingly critical assessment of the war against a "resilient and growing insurgency" just days before being forced out.

The war in Afghanistan is winnable for three reasons: because for the first time the coalition fighting there has the right strategy and the resources to begin to implement it, because the Taliban are losing their sanctuaries in Pakistan and because the Afghan government and the security forces are growing in capability and numbers. None of these trends is irreversible, and they are not in themselves determinants of victory. But they demonstrate that the war can be won if we display the kind of determination that defeating an insurgency requires.

Akayev succeeded by Kurmanbek Bakiyev in the Tulip revolution 2005. Bakiyev concentrated power within his family and allegedly plundered state funds and secured lucrative contracts for friends and relatives. Human rights abuses were widespread as dissidents were killed or disappeared. Journalists were muzzled and often detained, and the presidential elections last July were judged by international observers as having been rigged.