Army's Virtual 'Front Porch' Preps G.I.s for War

Blocked blog access on Air Force networks. A Navy blog opposed by Public Affairs. Crackdowns on YouTube and other social media. The military has really struggled to come to terms with the internet era -- in stark contrast to jihadists, for whom the internet is the major medium for recruiting and spreading tactics and weapons plans.

But one small team of officers and civilians, headquartered in a rooftop office at West Point, is quietly spreading the internet gospel through the U.S. Army.

The so-called Center for Company-Level Leaders runs internet forums where officers deployed all over the world can swap ideas. That's the subject of my latest piece in World Politics Review:
**

The forums compressed a junior officer's learning curve. Before, it would take a typical officer more than a year to "figure it out,"
[Lt. Col. Pete] Kilner said -- and by then the officer was in the final months of his command. "By the time I got good [at command], I was almost done,"
Kilner recalled.*

The Web site "made the whole force better," said Maj. Tyson Voelkel, a
West Point instructor who uses the forums to help connect cadets to serving officers deployed to war zones. ...

Although they would never agree with the term, today [forum co-founder Lt. Col.* Tony] Burgess and Kilner function as insurgents in the heart of the Army's intellectual citadel.
To supplement a meager budget, they raise their own money by publishing books. Instead of just publishing forums, they have quietly taken on new projects, including interactive, video-based ethics training for cadets. Though their methods are unconventional, they stress that their values are strictly in line with the larger Army's. "If our values weren't in line with the institution's, we'd have been crushed -- and rightly so," Kilner said.*

(Photo: me)

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