Admin announcement: The Progressive Realist blog network

Just a note to let everyone know that we've accepted an invitation to become a part of The Progressive Realist blog network, which the editors describe as "a metablog about American foreign policy." The site doesn't produce original content, but it's not an automated aggregator, either; the editors choose a selection of posts from the blogs that make up the network in order to populate the site. (I'd expect you might see something from Ink Spots on there perhaps once a week.) Read more about the site and the concept here.

I'll admit that I felt some initial trepidation about associating with such an expressly political label. While we do often cover the subject of defense politics, and while several of us have very strong positions staked out along what you might call the defense-ideological spectrum (I think it spans from "Dinosaur" on one end to "Enthusiastic COINdinista" on the other, or something like that), our blog isn't about liberal or conservative or anything else that might connote the primacy of political platform over pragmatic analysis. But I think you'll find that The Progressive Realist represents a wide array of political and policy views and has no truck with ideological orthodoxy or litmus tests, and if it did, we wouldn't be a part of it.

Personally, I'm pleased at the way this development reflects evolving perceptions of Ink Spots: my impression is that we're increasingly viewed not just as a narrowly-focused "COIN blog," but as contributors to the broader dialogue on strategy, policy, and a range of national security topics. Many of the other participants in The Progressive Realist network are folks you'll be familiar with from our blogroll and Twitter feeds. They come from a range of analytical viewpoints and sub-specialties, and I'd encourage you not only to read those posts that are lined up for aggregation on the metablog, but also to click through to their sites and take a deeper look.

Thanks to all of you who take the time to drop in and read us, and thanks to The Progressive Realist for making us a part of what they do.

New to the blogosphere: Carl Prine

Well, he's not exactly "new to the blogosphere": he's been haunting the comments section at SWJ, Abu Muqawama, and here (though not for a while, and often under a pseudonym -- or what he likes to call an "avatar"). Carl's now running the blog Line of Departure at Military.com, taking over for Jamie McIntyre.

My day job makes me an investigative reporter of the Pittsburgh Tribune-Review. There, I cover war, terrorism, football and all sorts of other things. Most people who watch TV remember me from CBS 60 Minutes or the PBS series on chemical terrorism, but mostly my gig involves finding really smart people, asking them to say interesting things, and then figuring out how this democracy will talk about it all. 

So that’s what we’re going to do here, too. We’re going to talk about battle and reporting and find smart people to interview and then we’re going to converse about like adults because these are serious topics and we’re a nation at war. 

I’m going to be intentionally provocative at times. I’ll tell crass jokes. I warn you that I’ll be combative and pointlessly obstinate but often enough vaguely sane. 

I'm sure it'll be a sight to see, so add him to your blogroll.

On the bright side, at least these weirdos at MPRI don't know who we are

So apparently the U.S. Army pays contractors to surf the internet looking for blog entries that mention the service. (Because that's not creepy or anything.) If the government wasn't so damn stupid, they'd just have some E-5 reading Small Wars Journal.

Danger Room reports:

You’d think all the criticism from left-wing websites like the Huffington Post, Daily Kos, and Salon would royally piss off the Army. But at least one Army report finds the sites’ posts to be consistently “balanced.”

Every week, the defense contractor MPRI prepares for the brass a “Blogosphere and Social Media Report,” rounding up sites’ posts on military matters. It’s meant to be a single source for top officers to catch up on what’s being said online and in leading social media outlets. Items from about two dozen national security and political blogs are excerpted, and classified as “balanced,” “critical,” or “supportive.” The vast majority of the posts are considered “balanced” — even when they rip the Army a new one.

But let's get to the important part, and the question you're all asking yourselves: How often do they talk about Ink Spots?!

Well, never, now that you ask. And I don't mind telling you that I'm sort of pleased at that fact. Friends of the blog Abu Muqawama and Armchair Generalist aren't so lucky, nor are SWJ, Attackerman, Michael Yon, Blackfive, and some of your other standard big-timers. (Oh yeah, and Danger Room.) So just in case you think we've gotten too big for our britches, the Army is still blissfully unaware of our existence.

(OK, I'll admit it: me calling the government "stupid" is a really thinly-veiled effort to get included in the "Critical" section of the next one of these things.)

CT Lab is dead. Long live Current Intelligence.

One of our favorite blogs, CT Lab, and shuttered its windows and started a new site called Current Intelligence. The "about" on the new site states:

Current Intelligence is a journal of opinion and analysis. Its editors and writers are preoccupied broadly with culture, politics and current affairs; narrowly with conflict,crisis, and the state of the world "out there"; and laterally with the intellectual concerns of those who research, teach, and write about the issues.

There are quite a few contributors - all very impressive - to the new endeavor, led by frequent Ink Spots commenter Mike Innes. Other contributors that you may recognize from these pages are Christopher Albon, Josh Foust, and Tim Stevens (I name these three only because they have commented here or their own blogs are likely well known to our readers). The new site is on the blogroll and we'll keep the old one up as long as it stays up. So go read and enjoy!