San Antonio Express-News (Sunday)
What’s lost in DOD purging of archives
The internet is one reason the Forever War veteran generation is lucky. Or maybe cursed.
The web lets us fly through time and place to hear songs, see pictures, watch videos or read notes anchored to a specific time and feeling. A pocketsize but endless multimedia scrapbook and archive.
Those who served before the web didn’t have this endless resource while the internetgeneration’s wars are thoroughly archived across cyberspace.
Many depended on Defense.gov, the Department of Defense’s official website. It is the holy grail of authoritative sources and the mother of all DOD websites. This most official of official repositories once held countless images, transcripts and news releases dating back to 1994.
But all that’s changed because DOD recently purged everything posted on the website before 2014.
Nobody announced the change, and I only discovered it while researching during the final days of the Afghanistan war. While trying to find some older content, a message announced that pages from before August 2014 had moved to an archive site.
“No problem, that makes sense,” was my initial reaction. Then I tried the archive site, got a broken link, and that’s when frustration crept in.
What the hell? Tech glitch? Upgrade? Something else?
On Aug. 20, I fired a query to the DOD public affairs office. A Navy Reservist referred me to a woman who never responded to my notes or calls and then to
Russ Goemaere, an ex-Army officer-turned-civilian DOD spokesman, who’s been responsive and helpful.
You see, for many families, veterans (myself included) and those still serving, access to that archive material is more than professional, it’s also personal. Beside reports on worldwide operations, the site is an official public release venue for DOD casualties.
It’s also a stark electric memorial to the fallen.
We could visit Defense.gov to see that formal statement about lost friends or loved ones. Our memories of the fallen — as the people they were — stood in contrast to the cold concrete language of those statements. We could stare at the words silently or curse and try to deny the bleak truths on the glowing screen.
Defense.gov let us understand what was happening when our friends and loved ones were still with us. And we could see how the world continued after their loss. During the height of the wars, it didn’t take long before another death appeared on the website.
The Defense Media Activity, or DMA, at Fort Meade in Maryland oversees Defense.gov.
DMA officials declined an
interview, but Goemaere provided emailed statements that said the site is a “news service” that upgraded its technology and now focuses on “current news information.”
DMA said the archive was “deactivated,” due to “cybersecurity concerns” without elaborating further.
“No archive records are maintained on Defense.gov,” it said. The “website material does not contain official government records and is therefore not archived.”
Head-scratcher here.
The change means that all DOD releases and content posted on Defense.gov before 2014 — nearly everything from the fighting days of Iraq and Afghanistan — is gone. Well, it’s not really gone. It’s just not accessible to the public via the DOD website.
To put it in Catch-22 terms:
Publicly released public releases aren’t accessible to the public.
Of course, they reside on disparate sites across the web and are buried on some DOD servers, but it’s not the same. If you don’t know what you’re looking for, you’d never find it.
Other DOD websites, including the Defense Visual Information Distribution Service, or DVIDS, still have ample content going back decades.
Officials had no answer for how to access the archived material but said they “are exploring options to make the data from before 2014 accessible.” There’s no timeline for that.
DOD said the archive’s slaying had nothing to do with Afghanistan, but the timing is too coincidental.
Could there be a murky “Operational Security” aspect to the archive purge? Might it have
something to do with protecting our Afghan allies who we bragged about for years in DOD stories, photos and videos? Maybe it’s also a way to save face after our protégé Afghan military crumbled in days? We wouldn’t want the Taliban, ISIS-K or other groups creating propaganda from our propaganda.
Regardless, it’s a sledgehammer approach to a scalpel problem.
The episode is another sleight of hand and step back from transparency by DOD. Veiling the past is hard to do, especially in the internet age.