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Can anyone tell me if there were any restrictions on types of information a US soldier could communicate to family back home in the middle of the Iraq war? If so, can anyone tell me how they were enforced?
There are always restrictions on information — which the military had a really hard time enforcing because of social media. The DOD site should have a number of articles and press releases discussing the problem, and you should also visit the specific service for additional ones. The term you’ll need for your research is OPSEC (Operational Security). Try also “OPSEC AND Social Media Networking.”
The information restrictions would have included:
Number of soldiers
Location
What kind of missions they were on
Timelines/schedules
Mission names
Photographs
Geotagging (a new thing for the Iraq War)And anything that would add up to other information. A lot of people have trouble with that because they don’t connect the dots to what else the information can be used for.
During Desert Storm, we were told to burn all our envelopes so the enemy wouldn’t get our families’ addresses and send mail to them. Probably what the unit would have done is at one of the morning formations, the first sergeant would tell all the soldiers the requirements of what they could and couldn’t do, which is how a lot of the information is conveyed. Squad leaders would have been responsible for making sure their soldiers followed the orders and counseled anyone who didn’t (meaning it’s written up on a counseling form and put in the records).
In this most recent time (2003 to present) they shut shut off all communication with the outside world until next of kin were notified after a death. (Relatively easily done via a software or hardware switch) This gave the best chance of next of kin learning of the death via official, in person notification, but added anxiety for everyone else when loved ones didn’t make those calls or show up in chat windows at the expected time.
They also trained in OPSEC (Operational Security) the types of information not to discuss. To a lesser extent, they tried to teach families as well. Think “Loose lips sink ships” from Word War II).
I also have one more question and I hope someone can see it, I didn’t want to take up space with a new thread.
Does anyone know what the limit was for the number of skype communications a soldier could make in a given amount of time and how long those communications were allowed to last? I’m just trying to get an idea for how often and how long they could communicate. If you have any further information, I would be very grateful. Thank you.
When I was there, (Left in ’08) there wasn’t a limit per say, but that’s because none of the units I dealt with had skype officially. If you were somewhere that there was internet (a big if) and had your own computer with you (another big if) and the bandwidth wasn’t hosed (the biggest if of all! There were times when bandwidth was so low on base you couldn’t open two text based web pages at once without getting booted for exceeding bandwidth limitations and 20kb/second was fast and rare.) You could skype as long as you weren’t on duty.
The bases in Bagdad would have had more resources than most places elsewhere. Later in the Iraq War there were more resources available than earlier in the war. The unit would have more bandiwidth than the individual but the tended to prefer to hand out phone cards by the gross or let you use the unit phones than skype because computers were more limited than phones. I don’t know what arrangements the field units had. It was STRONGLY encouraged that soldiers have no pattern to how they called and that they NOT call home every day, because it was too easy for something to happen and communication to be cut to back home for days on end, even if nothing had happened to the individual in question, and being too habitual about it would freak the family back home out when the expected communication didn’t come.
My son was a Marine in the first wave of the invasion. He managed to call us – once – while he was over there, and that was after he was out of Iraq, and preparing to head back to the States. I can also tell you – although there are people who have leaked information they shouldn’t – one of the best tools the military has for enforcing security is simply that fact that anyone who understands they are at risk when the wrong details get out tends to ‘police’ the ones who don’t get it.
I don’t know exactly what happened in any detail, but the basic idea is pretty obvious. But at least my son’s unit didn’t have much communication other than official channels for official business. They even overran their supply column, so they were down to one meal a day for a week or so, and the whole time they were there, they didn’t get showers – until my son and a few of the other guys rigged something up themselves. Of course, they were Marines. The Army and the Air Force and Navy tend to have better facilities except in the very worst circumstances. So I don’t know what they had – although, when my son was in an MEU (Marine Expeditionary Unit) on the USS Oak Hill (which they called the “Broke Hill” 😆 ) in early 2002, they had internet access on board – but I believe they had some type of “filter” in place to try and trap leaks (this was the first MEU to leave US shores since 9-11, and they were naturally pretty careful).
A footnote since you’re interested in security issues. The “yearbook” (I forget what they called it, ‘cruise book’ or ‘float book’ or something like that) for the MEU my son served on – and as far as I know, everyone who serves on an MEU gets one of these if they want to buy them – included photos that gave away a surprising amount. Enough that, ten years later, I don’t feel comfortable going into much detail. And one of my son’s officers prepared a digital slide show for them – which held enough information to let me guess something that wasn’t revealed to the public until months later, in the State of the Union address. (The ships in my son’s MEU defeated some unspecified terrorist threat in the Straits of Hormuz – and I’d seen pics of the “threat helos” taking off in the Straits of Hormuz, and the incident was significant enough to be included in this slideshow, so it wasn’t hard to guess they’d been attacked but the attack was repulsed.) So things do leak, in odd ways. But the leaks I’ve personally experienced were delayed enough I don’t think they endangered anyone in the field, at least directly. On the other hand, I’m not an intelligence analyst – I was a professional genealogist, which does give me an appreciation for how much data you can pick up from various sources. If I’d studied the right information, then peeked at those same sources, I could probably have put together enough information to have half the Pentagon up all night.
Since you’re writing a story in this setting, I will tell you this much – the news and the official reports will not tell you enough to give you a good picture. I was glued to the news – after all, my son was over there – and as I say, I’m used to gleaning what information I can. And when I looked through the digital photos my son brought back, I was surprised several times at the picture I put together of what things were like over there.
Edited to add: To expand on what I said about what a trained person could extract from the things I’ve seen – I don’t think they were careless. One was prepared by an officer for distribution to his men, and the other was semi-officially published. I’m sure it was “vetted” before it got printed. But most people just don’t understand how much you can learn from putting tiny pieces together. Since both of these sources were ‘delayed’, I doubt they were as worried about that angle – but in any case, unless you forbid all photos, all discussion of the tiniest detail in letters, etc., you simply cannot avoid this possibility. What software can do now in terms of discovering all about you on the internet is faster, and easier, but not really different from what was possible for any person with knowledge of where to dig up scraps of information and a decent ability to fit those scraps into a picture could always have done.
Thank you for your very detailed and personal response. You’ve given me an idea that solves another problem in my story with some of the other things you touched upon in your reply, so many, many times thank you. Much thanks to you and your wonderful son. Thank you!
That’s a good question and reminds me to mention location differences. If you’re in a unit in the field, you’d be more like Wandering Author’s son — only able to check in on the way in or out of the country or if you got some R&R to a major base in the region — or maybe if you were lucky enough to have some business on one of those bases.
If you were assigned to a smaller base, your experience would be more like Ambermoore’s.
I was fortunate enough to be assigned to communications units both times I was deployed, and we were on major installations. We could call home every day if we wanted. Some people did. On my second deployment, we had a DSL connection in our off-base villa. We could hook our personal laptops and access the Internet. One of my co-workers got a web cam and was able to talk to his wife and see his children playing in the background regularly. (This was in 2004 and may have been preSkype). My second deployment was to Bahrain, so, while I was technically in a hostile area, in reality, it was a pretty cushy deployment.
Bandwidth is always a concern, but most of us had much better communication with family than how things used to be. When I was serving my remote in 87-88, we were authorized one five minute morale call a month. Again, I was in a communications unit, so we knew how to get more calls than that, but the official policy was that one five minute call a month.
Thank you very much for your response, it’s very helpful. Sounds like you’ve been around.
I haven’t actually yet decided where I’m going to set that aspect of the story specifically, it really deals with a character in the States who has a relative in Iraq during the war. I’m still in a planning phase. But right now I’m leaning more toward a FOB in Baghdad probably around 2007 either before or during the surge, or at least when that part of the story takes place. But I may change it still as I learn more about what exactly I’m going to do.Thank you very much for the information, I’m really glad I decided to post my question here. Thank you!
I just came across another question I have while I was working things out here, so I’m really sorry if you’ve got this topic set to notify if this is getting old. I’m just kind of knocking around with my outline and something else came up related to this-
In communications with loved ones in the US, how much information can a soldier share about another soldier who happens to be a friend or just other troops in general around him? I kind of need to know because the soldier character has friends who die in the field, and I really have no idea how much if any info about that can be shared. Can anyone help me?
I’m very sorry again for not being organized with these questions, but I think this one should be the last. Thank you all again for the help and the information you’ve provided, it’s all been extremely helpful to me. Thank you all so much.
I don’t know what formal orders were, but on the one hand, I don’t think every call home was monitored, exactly – although the one we got was clearly in public, with twenty million other Marines (well, it sounded like twenty million
) waiting for their turn. On the other hand – if someone is killed, official channels are probably going to be as fast or faster; the holdup might be in sending people out Stateside to notify the family. But I think it would be a very rare situation where someone here would find out ahead of official notification reaching the family.If you’re interested in a Stateside perspective, I can give you one little detail – while my son was over there, one time (that I noticed) an official car with some sort of seal on it came down our street. I have no idea what it actually was, and with a bit of thought, I’m pretty sure it was not a Navy or Marine sedan – but when I saw that car, I got very, very tense until it passed on by. In hindsight, it’s funny the little things that can scare you… at the time, I was not amused.
FYI, for notification of next of kin, that’s done by whatever unit is geographically closest to where the family is. When I was stationed in NYC, we were responsible for performing notifications in that area. Thankfully, this is one process the military really strives to get right and quickly. We all know how terrible it is to be the one waiting and dreading the news.
As for what one soldier can say about another, once next of kin are notified, there aren’t restrictions. Some guys aren’t going to want to talk a lot in public about that kind of thing, so placing restrictions isn’t really an issue.
Casper, communication might also depend on where the base is located. Afghanistan was lousy when it came internet communication. Most of the Iraq bases had much better communication via phone and internet.
My husband was military for years, plus he went to work with the military for three years in Afghanistan and Iraq. Communication was much better in Iraq than Afghanistan. In Iraq he was at three bases, and each one had different time alotted for communicating back to the US. On almost every base he was stationed at all communication went down when solidiers died from the base so this way no one would leak information as to who died until the family was notified. Usually within 24-36 hours.
Now, something else I wanted to touch on, us wives used to talk about about how tight lipped our husbands were when they lost someone close to them while on deployment. Granted it depends on the person. When my husband was deployed, he didn’t exactly share a lot with me via phone or internet. He wanted to know more about what I was doing and hear about our children. It felt like we were his lifeline to a normal life.
I would also imagine it depends on the mission as well. My husband still can’t and won’t talk abut things from the 90’s for security reasons.
Good luck with the writing.
Maripat
Thank you very much for your message, Maripat. What you say about your communications with your husband related to how he and others handled the deaths of friends as well as the general conditions of communication in the country is very helpful to me, especially your note about commonalities with other wives and their husbands. This really helps me a lot with an important aspect to what I hope to do. Thank you so much for sharing it.
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