For better or worse, the U.S. military last year banned the use of YouTube and other video-sharing sites on its bases overseas. But now, soldiers stationed in Iraq and elsewhere have a new way to share videos with their loved ones—with a few strings attached.

More than a year after the Defense Department's ban on YouTube, MySpace, and the like comes TroopTube, a searchable video service that lets our troops, their family and friends post and share video clips—albeit, ones that have been pre-screened and approved by the military.

The powers-that-be at the Pentagon banned YouTube and other social networking sites form military-run networks back in May 2007, citing security and bandwidth issues. As this MSNBC story notes, the ban didn't affect Net cafes run by private companies, but soldiers using Net-connected PCs on base or on the front lines were out of luck.

Videos on TroopTube (up to 20MB and/or five minutes in length) are automatically optimized for a given users Net connection—helpful for streaming video to far-flung locales with limited bandwidth—and (no surprise here) they're also screened by the military before they go live.

So yeah, Big Brother is watching—but given the choice between DoD-censored videos from home or nothing at all, I'm guessing our fighting men and women in Iraq, Afghanistan, and elsewhere would settle for the pre-screened videos. Thumbs up.

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After banning YouTube, military launches TroopTube [Wired News/AP]