'Propriety' of clip made aboard carrier questioned

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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.


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.”