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Tweeting From the Front Line
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.'"
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.
With some sort of Algorithm could one not track troop movements and strengths then?
"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.
"This post is an artistic work of fiction and falsehood. Only a fool would take anything posted here as fact."
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
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!
Schroedinger's Brexit: The UK is both in and out of the EU at the same time!
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.
Write your representatives! Repeal the 2nd Law of Thermodynamics!
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.