Tweeting From the Front Line 84
blackbearnh writes "There's an interesting article up on O'Reilly Radar talking about how the US military is reacting to the increasing use of social media by soldiers in hostile territory. In an interview, Price Floyd, Principal Deputy Assistant Secretary of Defense for Public Affairs, talks about the trade-offs between operational security and allowing soldiers and the public to interact, and how social media has changed the way the DoD communicates with the public. 'I think that we need to become much more comfortable with taking risk, much more comfortable with having multiple spokesmen out there, thousands of spokesmen in essence. But, for me, there's nothing more credible than the men and women who are out there on the front lines, fighting the wars that we're in, sending messages back to their family and friends.'"
Brother in active duty (Score:5, Interesting)
Right now my brother is in active duty in Afghanistan, and the fact that they have internet from their barracks is huge for their morale, and for the morale of his wife and my parents. The level of communication we can have with him is beyond what I imagine people in any past war would have dreamed possible.
He got to see his new nephew who was born while he's been deployed thanks to skype.
Military Tracking? (Score:5, Interesting)
With some sort of Algorithm could one not track troop movements and strengths then?
Re:American "Freedom" (Score:3, Interesting)
"It's hilarious that American troops, who are supposedly from a culture that emphasized "freedom" and who are supposedly fighting for the "freedom" of other people, basically have all of their freedom stripped away"
Operation security means denying the enemy information. While communication and warm-fizzy exchange with the home folks is important, real-time chatter about trifling subjects is not.
There are two kinds of conversations from a military theater, "Emergency" and "Bullshit". Bullshit can wait.
Modern commo rocks (and is MUCH nicer than snail mail and moral telephone calls of old, been there and done all the above) but if you can't temporarily disconnect the electronic umbilical cord now and then, GTFO the military and let someone else get that sweet career path and tasty benefit package.
Re:Military Tracking? (Score:5, Interesting)
If fighting a more technically advanced and well organised foe this would be more important.
it's a tradeoff, morale vs intelligence leaks and the morale factor can be worth it.
Also I image you could also be mislead just as easily.
An intelligence channel which you know the enemy has access to is orders of magnitude less valuable to them than a channel which you don't know they have access to since once you know about it you can feed false info when it's useful to you.
it's why quite a bit of effort went into convincing the germans that enigma hadn't been broken when it in fact had.
Also troops on the front line who's necks are on the block as it were will tend to pay more attention to the stuff about loose lips sinking ships etc.
Psychological Tweet Warfare . . . (Score:5, Interesting)
Before the Normandy invasion, the Allies used fake radio traffic, to convince the Germans that the real invasion was coming to Pas de Calais by an army led by Patton: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Operation_Fortitude [wikipedia.org]
Why not Tweet a couple of fake attacks to scare the bejesus out of the enemy?
Enough of these, and the enemy won't be able to determine who's who, and what's what.
C'mon lazy ass psych-op guys! Get on it!
Re:American "Freedom" (Score:3, Interesting)
And that's what the Pentagon is trying to balance: the desire for morale boosters, without violating OpSec.
Hell, even saying "talk to you in a week" broadcasts to enemy inteligence officers that your division is likely deploying for a week where you will be off-line, and to track you.
In other words, the Pentagon needs reasonable standards for what constitutes 'loose lips' which may 'sink ships'. Obviously Twitter is the worst possible medium if OpSec is your goal.
Re:Brother in active duty (Score:2, Interesting)
Maybe in future we can have soldiers coming home after 5.
We do, and it's a problem. Pilots are flying 'combat missions' from Nellis AFB via satellite link to armed Predators. So they'll engage in a firefight, kill people (and watch friendlies/enemies people die), then come home to errands, soccer, and dirty diapers.
It actually causes a lot of stress the military is learning. There are a couple golden rules about communicating with home they teach spouses... a key one is don't bother the person deployed with the routine problems at home, they can't do anything about it and it just stresses them out worrying. The nice thing about being deployed is that life is pretty simple. Facebook/Twitter add communication, but still within limits.
But coming home when you may have watched a platoon you had overwatch for get wiped out to the normality of daily life, only to go back the next day, is HARD.
US military had a dose of that in Yugoslavia, when people stationed at Aviano permanently with their families were flying missions from 'home'.
Damn straight (Score:3, Interesting)
During a previous excursion into sandy bloodletting, under Bush The Elder, one of the few completely trustworthy accounts I got from the battlefield was a letter from the son of a co-worker. She was kind enough to share with me.
There had been a friendly-fire incident that made the news. All the news accounts didn't seem to make sense. Everybody was spinning the story every way they could, madly, with little regard for truth. This mom, knowing her son was in the same group as the incident occurred, asked him about it. His letter, recieved well after the media circus had died out, was perfect.
What I mean was, the man was *right there*, 20 yards from the source of the friendly fire. He was *right there* pulling dead Americans who had just been killed by other Americans out of their vehicles. And his story of who was where and when they did what was the only account of that situation that I had ever seen that actually made sense.
Once you get off the front line, stories of war accrete bullshit until they're unrecognizable as even possible, much less the truth.