Stryker Brigade News

Buzzell had posted entries anonymously up until the Mosul battle. But The News Tribune in Tacoma, Wash., published an article about the skirmish and quoted extensively from Buzzell’s blog.

That drew attention from the Pentagon’s internal clip service. Eventually, the article made its way to Buzzell’s commanders.

Buzzell’s battalion commander, Lt. Col. Buck James, lectured him on the inappropriateness of revealing operational details — how he loaded weapons, what kind of weapons his Stryker brigade used and specific combat locations. From now on, Buzzell’s platoon sergeant would read his entries before they were posted.

After another troublesome post, a different commander confined Buzzell to the base and for a time he was forbidden to go on missions.

Buzzell, who is now 29 and lives in Los Angeles, is known among military bloggers as the “Blogfather,” one of the first soldiers to write a candid, regularly updated Web log from a combat zone. Such online journals, or blogs, began as unfiltered portals into the day-to-day travails of American troops, a 21st-century version of a soldier’s letter home.

But as the visibility and popularity of the blogs have increased, so, too, has the watchful eye of military officials. The Army, Marines, Navy and Air Force have all recently issued directives related to blogs, reminding soldiers and their commanders what information is unsuitable for posting.

In the last year, for example, the Army released specific blogging guidelines, requiring soldiers to register their online journals with commanders and establishing units to monitor Web sites for information that might violate Army policy.