Goldfarb already linked this article from General William Caldwell on "changing organizational culture," but it's worth revisiting:
The technology of the Twenty-first Century - the "new media" - has made it possible for virtually anyone to have immediate access to an audience of millions around the world and to be somewhat anonymous. This technology has enabled and empowered the rise of a new enemy. This enemy is not constrained by the borders of a nation or the International Laws of War. The new media allows them to decentralize their command and control and disperse their elements around the globe. They stay loosely connected by an ideology, send cryptic messages across websites and via e-mail and recruit new members using the same new media technologies.
Responding to this challenge requires changes in our approach to warfare. The one thing we can change now does not require resources - just a change in attitudes and the organizational culture in our Army. Recent experiences in Iraq illustrate how important it is to address cultural change and also how very difficult it is to change culture: After MNF-I broke through the bureaucratic red-tape and was able to start posting on YouTube, MNF-I videos from Iraq were among the top ten videos viewed on YouTube for weeks after their posting. These videos included gun tape videos showing the awesome power the US military can bring to bear. Using YouTube - part of the new media - proved to be an extremely effective tool in countering an adaptive enemy.
Appropriately enough, Caldwell posted the article on an excellent blog dedicated to insurgencies and low-level conflicts, the Small Wars Journal. He even followed unofficial milblogging protocol by assigning himself a blogging handle: Frontier 6.
The Department of Defense is split into two basic camps on military blogging. One camp believes that in-theater blogging is too serious of an OPSEC risk, arguing that our enemies and their sympathizers can gain access to troop movements, deployment schedules, base defenses, etc., by reading military blogs. The reaction is to try and keep their finger in the information dike by banning sites like YouTube, Myspace, and Blogspot, separating soldiers from the New Media's common tools.
The other camp, of which General Caldwell and General Petraeus are members, views blogs as a tool that can be used to the military's advantage. In an age where the United States finds itself engaged in a variety of smaller wars and counterinsurgencies, conflicts that will be won or lost in the halls of Congress instead of on the battlefield, Caldwell views the intensely personal war-stories flooding the internet as critical to the war effort, helping to sustain the American public's stomach for a protracted fight. They're also critical in fighting our media saavy enemy, who use contacts in global news outlets to widely and rapidly communicate their message of jihad to the world. Caldwell argues that:
...we need to Equip Soldiers to engage the new media. If we educate them and encourage them, we need to trust them enough to give them the tools to properly tell/share their stories. The experience of trying to gain YouTube access in Iraq and even back in the United States is a prime example. A suggestion for consideration might be equipping unit leaders with camcorders to document operations but also daily life. The enemy video tapes operations and then distorts and twists the information and images to misinform the world. What if we had documented video footage of the same operations which refuted what our enemies say? By the way, that is not enough, we have to get our images out FIRST! The first images broadcast become reality to viewers. If we wait until we see the enemy's images, we are being reactive and we have already squandered the opportunity.
The Caldwell solution--encourage, empower, educate, and equip--is the right one. Proper education can kill OPSEC violations before they happen, while the normally cumbersome military public affairs apparatus is brought down to the micro-level, bypassing the filtered layers of editing that is inherent in the military-to-media relationship. By atomizing public relations capabilities, we effectively negate an enormous advantage that the enemy enjoys over our forces: the ability to message on the global level.
The blogging fight is an excellent example of the typically risk averse old-school style of military thought versus the daring, innovative 21st century approach to warfighting. To be honest, I couldn't tell you who is winning. For every article like Caldwell's I read, I'll receive two emails from military types complaining that their base network has banned access to a certain milblog or journal-style website. I'm not sure what it would take to translate Caldwell's proposal from vision to reality, but I do hope that metamorphosis occurs soon rather than later.
