Social networks and the military

. . . and Connections, by Fred Schwarz
The Tank/NRO, Friday, February 20, 2009

In the Digital Age, military forces are struggling, as they have since the Bronze Age, to circulate information efficiently among themselves without cluing the enemy in as well. Strategy Page reports that, ostensibly for security reasons, the British Army recently tried to bar its soldiers from blogging, posting comments on websites, using social-networking sites, and playing on-line games. The Brit brass quickly learned that this particular horse left the barn long ago, as a virtual mutiny among the troops led to a quick withdrawal of the order.

Meanwhile, the U.S. Army is finding ways to take advantage of modern information technology while addressing legitimate secrecy concerns:

The military got into the act by establishing official message boards, for military personnel only, where useful information could be discussed and exchanged. All this rapid information sharing has had an enormous impact on the effectiveness of the troops, something that has largely gone unnoticed by the mass media.

. . . Most junior officers grew up with the Internet, and many of the older ones were using the Internet before it became popularized in the 1990s. Even the generals of today, have experience with PCs when they were young, so have no trouble getting into this new form of communication. The military is eagerly building a "battlefield Internet" for use during combat, and parts of this are up and running and heavily used in Iraq and Afghanistan.

So information technology, properly used, can promote intra-military communication and keep it from going extra-military. At Counterterrorism Blog, Roderick Jones discusses another part of the communications revolution: Twitter, and how it promotes communication between the military and the public, with benefits for both.

Twitter emerged as a powerful networked communications platform during the Mumbai terrorist attacks, when a stream of tweets marked #Mumbai (# being the global tagging system Twitter employs) gave a seemingly real-time commentary on events as they unfolded in Mumbai. Similarly, Twitter has been used to communicate the message and activity surrounding the riots in Greece using the #Griot tag. These are examples of the network effect working with a rapid communications platform and developing a powerful narrative from many different observation points. The style is anarchic but increasingly compelling. . . . Twitter in conjunction with other tools, continues the trend of making ordinary citizens active producers of potentially actionable intelligence.

While the potential remains for accidental disclosures of sensitive information, on the whole, Jones writes, Twitter has already shown itself to be a valuable tool “in the National Security space.”

02/20 05:13 PM