Has anyone seen this? It hit the news this last weekend. My first
reaction is that after 95 years, the surface navy is still having its
way with us lowly airedales.




News | San Diego
Navy stops video on YouTube


'Propriety' of clip made aboard carrier questioned
By Steve Liewer
UNION-TRIBUNE STAFF WRITER

August 18, 2007

The Navy has pulled the plug on a YouTube video shot aboard the San
Diego-based aircraft carrier Ronald Reagan because it shows sailors
inappropriately using safety equipment, a Navy spokesman said.

The four-minute, 18-second music clip, titled "Women of CVN76: 'That
Don't Impress Me Much,' " was posted May 23 on the popular Web site
for
videos. It was viewed more than 31,000 times before its removal last
week - reportedly at the urging of Adm. Kirkland Donald, the Navy's
director of nuclear propulsion.


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Navy commanders have counseled the airman who produced the footage,
said Lt. Cmdr. Charlie Brown, a spokesman for the San Diego-based
Naval
Air Forces command.

The incident illustrates the challenges that the military faces in an
age of digital cameras and online video-sharing. The Pentagon
frequently has found itself on the defensive - for security or other
reasons - on issues involving the Internet and technology.

The theme of the Reagan video, set to a tune by country singer Shania
Twain, is that women serving aboard the Reagan can do the same jobs as
men. Until 1994, the Pentagon barred women from serving on combat
ships.

"The video was a lighthearted and positive depiction of the service of
women officers and sailors aboard aircraft carriers and in Navy
squadrons," Brown said. "It showed the good humor and camaraderie of
the ship's crew."

But it also included fleeting shots of the door to the ship's nuclear
power plant and of a sailor dancing while wearing a full-body
radiation
suit - items that might alarm the Navy's nuclear-propulsion officials,
who are hypersensitive about the security. Under Pentagon rules,
images
of any part of a ship's nuclear plant cannot be shown to foreign
nationals.

"The nuclear community is totally paranoid," said Norman Polmar, an
independent Navy analyst from Alexandria, Va. "They should be security
conscious. But we're not the only people in the world with nuclear
technology."

Brown denied that anything in the video compromised operational
security. What worried Navy officials, he said, was the "lack of
propriety" in a few scenes involving the use of safety equipment.

Neither the Navy nor the ship's command sponsored the video, Brown
said. But "Women of CVN76" spotlighted sailors from many departments
of
the carrier. Even the commanding officer, Capt. Terry Kraft, made a
cameo appearance.

Brown said someone brought the video to the Navy's attention last
week.

Kraft was then summoned to the Pentagon for a meeting with Donald, a
four-star flag officer who is near the top of the Navy's chain of
command.

The Navy didn't identify who made the video, except to say that it was
a sailor assigned to an aviation squadron. The man who posted the
footage uses the online moniker "PUMPIT01." His other YouTube videos
prominently feature members of VAW-113, a flight squadron based in
Ventura County that embarks aboard the Reagan.

Earlier this year, the Army tightened regulations on war-zone bloggers
out of fear that enemy fighters would glean useful intelligence from
them.

Last week, the military newspaper Navy Times revealed that the online
mapping site Google Earth carried a satellite photo that showed the
exposed propeller of a U.S. nuclear submarine in drydock. The
propeller
is considered to be highly sensitive military technology.

Recently, the Department of Defense cut off access to 11 Web sites -
including YouTube and MySpace, a social-networking forum - from its
workplace computers. In doing so, Pentagon officials cited concerns
about the amount of bandwidth used in accessing the sites, but some
critics said it amounted to censorship.

At the same time, the Defense Department has used YouTube to post
battle footage from Iraq, according to The Washington Post.

"It's kind of a double-edged sword," said William Knowles, a
Chicago-based analyst who operates C4I.org, a Web site about
government
and military security. "It's one thing to have digital cameras on the
battlefield, on the warship. But you'd hope there would be guidelines
(about how to use them)."

Staying ahead of the latest technology is immensely difficult for
Pentagon security officers, analysts say.

"It's just like wildfire," said Fred Villella, a retired Army colonel
from Encinitas who runs the military security consulting firm System
Defenses International. "I don't know if we're ever going to be able
to
catch up with the capabilities that are out there."

Steve Liewer


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