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.'"

Comments

Brother in active duty

[spyder913]

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?

[TheKidWho]

With some sort of Algorithm could one not track troop movements and strengths then?

Re:Military Tracking?

[HungryHobo]

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 . . .

[PolygamousRanchKid]

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!