Art of War: Information & Spin Control

[Locarnus]

The Art of War always included the fields of information and spin control.

With the internet and its further development those parts got a new significance.

92,000 documents about the Afghan war were leaked.

They were analyzed by the New York Times, the Guardian and Der Spiegel and accepted to be authentic.

NYTimes
Inside the Fog of War: Reports From the Ground in Afghanistan

Guardian
Afghanistan war logs: Massive leak of secret files exposes truth of occupation | World news | The Guardian

SPIEGEL
Enthüllung brisanter Kriegsdokumente: Die Afghanistan-Protokolle - SPIEGEL ONLINE - Nachrichten - Politik

They will likely be published by WikiLeaks in the near future in full or in part.


What are the consequences of these developments and what strategies will be implemented to adjust to them?

For the military, the goverments, the media and the public among others?

EDIT:
This thread is supposed to cover the general discussion about information and spin control, not only based on the occasion stated above with regards to Afghanistan.

EDIT2:
There is a thread about possible strategies for Afghanistan:
http://www.defencetalk.com/forums/military-defense/what-strategy-can-we-use-win-afganistan-8861-9/

There is another thread specifically about the state of the Afghanistan army:

http://www.defencetalk.com/forums/military-defense/need-train-afghans-fight-10442-2/

It would be nice to keep the threads largely on topic, although that might not be fully possible due to their relatedness.

 

[furymonkey]

From what I have been hearing, there aren't anything considered to be controversial or highly classified from these reports. Many of these facts were either plain usual, or suspect of, if not already known.

They aren't as explosive as wikileaks or media have hyped out to be. In fact some people seems to think it was release by the administration to create pressure from the public to end the war, or justification to enter Pakistan to fight Taliban, depends which way you look at it. There are many other theory.

Politically aside, I think as long the governament don't do anything rash or silly, this will simply die down in a few weeks.

Here are my non-expert opinion.