So the other day, thanks to the U.S. Naval Institute’s blog — more on that in a moment — I saw and posted a great video made by some sailors flipping "I’m On A Boat." Tweeted it out and got a lot of justifiedly positive responses, both military and civilian. And why not? The video is awesome. Sadly, the officers who posted it originally have taken it off of YouTube. The internet will not be stopped, but still: let’s have a talk for a minute.

Everything that follows is on the presumption — not fact, but presumption; I don’t know what really happened here — that the junior officers who made the video got in some trouble for it. Again, I don’t know if that’s the case, but given the military’s uncomfortable history with the blogosphere, it certainly can’t be ruled out. Anyway: there is nothing offensive to the Navy about this video. If I was in the Department of the Navy and I saw this, I would think, "Great! These sailors glorified the service by making a four-minute commercial for it based on a popular-with-the-young-people sketch! They even put John Paul Jones in the T-Pain role!" A friend tells me it was getting a hundred thousand hits daily and you can see a number of sailors with similar ideas. Unless you want to tell me that sailors are offended by harsh language, this ought to be seen as a positive thing for the Navy. It’s extremely unlikely that anyone the Navy might want to recruit could come away from that video thinking, "A Naval career is less attractive to me now."

And what makes it even harder to understand is that the Pentagon is, in theory, making a concerted effort at embracing social media. The chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff — whose previous job, I might add, was Chief of Naval Operations — tweets near-daily. The Pentagon has a new principal deputy assistant secretary of defense who has focused a lot on social media. The U.S. Naval Institute, one of the most respected pillars of military thinking, has a blog, and even more surprisingly, it has a good blog, written by some of the best navy-bloggers around. What’s more, as this commenter at the USNI blog notes, the video suggests that there was at least some level of command knowledge of what these sailors were filming:

 There might have been some coordination with a couple of HSL bubbas, but although I’m sure CO/XO were aware (would’ve been hard to ignore a JO on the bow pulling a ‘Titanic’ during flight quarters), I will GUARANTEE this was not cleared at any level. We’ve played (the censored version of) this song on breakaways before, and the crew LOVED it, so much so that they were dancing on the foc’sle.

A friend speculates that maybe  the Navy was unhappy at the appearance of the helicopter, since maybe it left the impression that taxpayers are putting up all this money for YouTube props. Maybe. I hope that’s not the way this video was approached. Parody videos that represent for the service are things that you’d think the Navy would encourage. (And, again, I don’t know what happened here.)