By Natalie Sambhi and N.R. Jenzen-Jones.
By chance, we stumbled across an interesting addition to the Department of Defence’s Afghanistan frontpage: video footage of Australian troops in Afghanistan, including the SOTG.
The latest SOTG footage (video here) relates to an incident on 6 May 2011 in which members of the SOTG administered first aid to Afghan civilians injured by an IED. While the faces of SOTG soldiers and Afghan civilians have been obscured, the footage (which appears to have been recorded with a helmet-mounted camera) provides only momentary insight into operations there.
Moreover, there appears to be no announcement of what seems to be a step towards greater visibility of Australian operations in Afghanistan.
Defence still appears to be lurching towards greater (though currently modest) openness but lags behind coalition partners. ISAF partners including US, UK, Germany and the Netherlands to name a few, have defence ministries and departments that have extensive and regular video footage as a part of their Afghanistan media operations. We acknowledge that some of these partners may have greater capacity to conduct media operations. It seems as though the Dutch have no shortage of video footage of their troops in Afghanistan. In comparison, one decade into the conflict, Defence’s output is sparse.
We have been critical of Defence’s PR machinery here at Security Scholar and can only hope this development marks a milestone on a road towards modernising the public image and accessibility of the ADF. With any luck, an announcement will be forthcoming from Defence so that this latest step towards greater accessibility is not lost on the general public.
Photo courtesy of Flickr user ISAFMedia.
Security Scholar 
I agree with the critique. Greater dissemination of information to the public would be a positive step for the ADF. It would give the average person a better insight to why we are there and what sort of things we are doing (it would probably also boost their current recruitment drive). Greater disclosure (and I don’t mean of classified information etc.) would as you say also bring us in line with other countries. For instance I found more information on Germany’s involvement with NATO in Afghanistan than I did on Australian deployment in Afghanistan. Not only was it more readily available it also painted a very positive picture about German involvement.