David Axe
Security

Army Secretary: We're Falling Behind Online

Senior Army leaders have fallen behind the breakneck development of cheap digital communications including cell phones, digital cameras and Web 2.0 Internet sites such as blogs and Facebook, Army Secretary Pete Geren said at a trade conference on July 10. That helps explain how "just one man in a cave that’s hooked up to the […]

Imgp4183
Senior Army leaders have fallen behind the breakneck development of cheap digital communications including cell phones, digital cameras and Web 2.0 Internet sites such as blogs and Facebook, Army Secretary Pete Geren said at a trade conference on July 10. That helps explain how "just one man in a cave that's hooked up to the Internet has been able to out-communicate the greatest communications society in the history of the world -- the United States," Geren said, according to Inside Defense. (Subscription required.)

"It's a challenge not only at home, it's a challenge in recruiting, it's a challenge internationally, because effective communication brings people over to our side and ineffective communication allows the enemy to pull people to their side," Geren continued. He said the Army brass needs to catch up -- fast. But how exactly?

One solution: "Find a blog to be a part of," Geren said.

Young people embrace social media "as a fluent second language," he added. Army leaders have to do the same.

But embracing that high-tech, second language could be hard for the
Army, just as it poses challenges for the defense industry.

"I was talking to a senior executive this week, one of our major defense contractors," Geren recounted. "And he said that they've assigned a young person to every senior executive to be like his or her translator and connect with the new information technologies."

This remark triggered laughter throughout the hotel ballroom.

This isn't the first time an Army big wig has called for the service to embrace the digital, Do-It-Yourself age. Despite the occasional crackdown on soldier-bloggers in Iraq, the Army is still way ahead of the other military services when it comes to the Internet.

At the U.S. Military Academy in West Point, a tiny office of Web-savvy mavericks is creating Army-specific Web 2.0 tools (blogs, forums, social networks) for soldiers. At the Army's graduate school in Kansas, blogging is a new addition to the curriculum.
And just recently the Army launched its own "blogger's roundtable"
program to arrange press conference for online journalists.

Meanwhile, the Air Force, the Pentagon's main agency for "cyberwarfare," continues to view the Internet primarily as a battlefield to be "dominated."

ALSO:

(Photo: me)