Admiral Encourages Sailors to Blog

We observe him to be one of the most innovative thinkers serving in a major command today. To borrow a phrase from Mike, in many ways we see him as the Navy's Petraeus, and by that we mean he is a rising star leveraging innovative approaches in applying a smart soft power strategy to a region the US needs to be better connected with. An unknown to most Americans, we have stated many times we believe he will be the next CNO, despite the snark against SWOs after three in a row as CNO. His book is sitting on my stack, 2nd from the top, and I'm still looking forward to reading it.

Adm. James Stavridis, the four-star chief of U.S. Southern Command, had some interesting words today about blogging at the US Naval Institute sponsored 2008 Joint Warfighting Conference & Exposition.

The four-star chief of U.S. Southern Command urged service members to become published writers and bloggers at a three-day conference of the U.S. Naval Institute beginning here Tuesday.

Adm. James Stavridis, author of several guides and books on the Navy, said it’s important for members of the military, contractors and retirees to “read, think, write and publish.”

But this is the money quote:

Either through published works or through weblogs, the goal is an exchange of ideas, knowledge and information — such as on the participator-driven Wikipedia, he said.

“No one of us is as smart as all of us together,” he said. “The speed of ideas you can get in the blogs is remarkable.”

He gets it, that last sentence is on the money, and the primary reason we value the commenters of this blog so much. Without input and opinions, the contribution of content by just us would severely limit the value of this blog to the naval conversations we have. Blogging is about building communities of ideas, or the dissemination of information towards a positive contribution.

When it comes to the blogger roundtable discussions, we have noticed that among the few discussions the Navy has had to date, the majority (yes three makes a majority 1, 2, 3) have centered around activity taking place under the umbrella of the Southern Command. We also observe the Admirals comments are very consistent, one thing probably not well known is that LCDR Heidi Lenzini, the public affairs officer for SOUTHCOM, has been remarkably open to bloggers. Examples of this will be more evident later this year. We think it is very unlikely the Admirals comments and the PAOs initiatives are unrelated.

I'm still waiting to see an official blogs though. Lt. Cmdr van Avery has done an excellent job, and we read Captain Willey's blog daily, but these two make up a rare pair in the Navy. I'm not going to tell the Navy how to run their shop, but if I was that guy, I'd instruct every webmaster to strive for this kind of excellence, and I'd give the PAOs a blog on such a fine website to publish contributions from.

We see some irony that Adm. Stavridis would talk to the folks at the USNI about blogging, because one of the biggest complaints we hear all the time about the USNI is how so many articles written for Proceedings have been purchased over the years, but never published. I can think of at least a dozen people in the last month who have emailed us to remind us they see the USNI as a place where thoughtful published works go to die. Once purchased, those thoughtful pieces cannot be utilized elsewhere, so essentially the USNI has a reputation for preventing "ideas, knowledge and information" from being widely discussed, because if purchased but never printed, the work is wasted and lost to the writer. Maybe the USNI needs a blog to get all those purchased but not published works a place a place to see the light. Should the USNI go that route, we'd suggest Jim Dolbow could be editor. If that is a non-starter, perhaps Jim can talk the board into allowing us to publish all those old articles laying around on behalf of the USNI. Worst case scenario, the USNI gets more submissions once people realize what they write will see the light whether published in Proceedings or not.

One final thought, with Adm. Stavridis bringing up the topic of naval blogging, given there really aren't very many blogs out there dedicated to the naval centric subjects, and on the slim possibility the Admiral is a casual reader, maybe he would entertain the idea of signing a couple copies of his book? I'll buy the books and pay for the shipping. After all, signed copies of the book would make a great item to auction off for Valour-IT.