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Christian Hill spent five years as a reservist with the British army's media operations group. In 2011, he went to Afghanistan with a combat camera team.*
I am pleased to provide him with a guest spot on this blog to highlight policy changes at the defence ministry that will see the military distributing more of its own media content in future.
by Christian Hill
It has been a busy time for the top spin-doctor at the defence ministry (MoD), Stephen Jolly, who has been moving desks around in his Whitehall press office.
The department which incorporates his office – known for years as the DMC, or directorate of media and communications – has changed its name to the DDC, or directorate of defence communications.
It isn't the most exciting of name-changes, admittedly, but what it does represent in the real world is the biggest shake-up to military reporting in a generation.
Jolly, officially known as the director of defence communications, has described it as the most radical change in 25 years, referring to the overhaul in the wake of the Falklands war.
Back then, the MoD and the British media clashed repeatedly on issues of censorship and access to troops. The ensuing outcry prompted a more tolerant approach to the media that anticipated the vast embed programmes later seen in Iraq and Afghanistan.
The drawdown in Helmand will see the weekly procession of reporters through Camp Bastion more or less come to an end. The British military is unlikely to be involved in an operation on that scale for some years, if ever again, so what better time for the MoD to update its relationship with the media?
Already, the news-management teams in Jolly's outfit are being cut as he redeploys his troops for a push into the world of direct-to-audience communications.
In layman's terms, that means the military devoting more of its resources to filming and photographing its own operations, before posting the edited material online.
In a post-Afghanistan world, our overseas campaigns will lack the kind of logistical weight needed to support a Bastion-style conveyor belt for reporters, so it makes perfect sense for the military to train more of its own personnel to produce the material themselves.
Although embedded reporters won't disappear altogether, there will be many fewer of them. Military journalists – or "media operators" – will fill the gap instead.
I speak from experience, having served as a "media operator" in the British Army's Media Operations Group (MOG) for five years until this summer. In a tour of Afghanistan in 2011, I led a combat camera team across Helmand and Kabul.
Our job was to film and photograph our troops in action before distributing the material to an increasingly disinterested press and broadcast media.
Jolly, a former instructor with the 15 (UK) Psychological Operations Group, is keen to see a greater emphasis on this kind of in-house news-gathering, in which material is channelled through the open gateway of digital communication and social media.
The shake-up will now see the MOG sharing its training facilities with 15 (UK) Psyops under the banner of the newly-formed Security Assistance Group (cue another odd acronym, SAG).
Both the MOG and 15 (UK) Psyops have moved into Denison Barracks in the Berkshire village of Hermitage, their offices just yards apart. This is all part of Jolly's plan for greater co-operation between the two groups, sharing expertise in the field of content creation.
This approach is not without its detractors. Traditionally, the two worlds of the MOG and Psyops have existed in separate universes, the former being expected to deal in the honest-to-goodness truth, the latter being more closely associated – fairly or unfairly – with the "dark arts", usually directing its material at an enemy's audience.
Nato's public affairs policy clearly states that the two functions should operate separately.
The potential for controversy is not lost on Jolly. In a July interview with the online defence forum Defence IQ, he admitted that other Nato member states might be uncomfortable with the idea of the two spheres working so closely together.
He said: "I do understand that if you're sitting in the United States, this seems quite radical because over there they have a very strong dividing line."
Certainly, the new commanding officer of the MOG, Lieutenant Colonel Rolf Kurth, who took up the post last month, has plans for closer cooperation between the two units. He spent his first week in command looking at how the two units will work alongside each other.
An MOG member, speaking to me on a confidential basis, said: "The aspiration is to work together more closely. Otherwise, what's the point?"
How this arrangement will play out with the media remains to be seen. Major news organisations across the world are tightening their budgets, while the murders of US journalists James Foley and Steven Sotloff have highlighted the dangers faced by free-roaming reporters operating without the backup of "big media."
In this climate, maybe the MoD has spotted the perfect moment to ramp up its own news-gathering operation. Whether the public will take to the idea of their news coming straight from the military, however, is another matter.
*Christian Hill is the author of Combat Camera: from Auntie Beeb to the Afghan Frontline (Alma Books)
NB: See also Press Gazette's report today, "Secret state: Members of armed forces must notify press officers even if they meet a journalist socially"
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