When these majors talk it's best to listen, with one or more combat deployments under their belt and as serious students of our craft, they more often than not cut to the quick in identifying what works, what is broken and what needs to be done.
Hopefully we'll hear much more from the Army iron majors with the recent decision by Lieutenant General William Caldwell, IV, Commanding General of the US Army Combined Arms Center, as excerpted from a recent CAC memorandum below:
Command and General Staff College faculty and students will begin blogging as part of their curriculum and writing requirements both within the .mil and public environments. In addition CAC subordinate organizations will begin to engage in the blogosphere in an effort to communicate the myriad of activities that CAC is accomplishing and help assist telling the Army's story to a wide and diverse audience.
LTG Caldwell's memo detailed the purpose of his directive as an essential part of CAC's responsibilities to provide information to the public and usher in a culture of change within the Army's officer leadership, development and education community as well as to support military operations - leaders within the Army need to understand the power of the internet and leverage as many communications means as possible to communicate what CAC is doing. You can visit the new CAC Blog here. And of course; faculty, staff and students at our PME schoolhouses have an open invitation to blog here at SWJ, contribute to the online magazine or spar with Council members at the SWC.
Comments
Great idea and a promising step away from the fear that has marked the Army's interaction with the medium in the past. Just don't forget the <a href="http://www.yankeesailor.us/?p=113">ROE</a>.
Senior leadership often sort of gets the information age, sort of doesn't. I was reminded of the months right after we first got email at the War College. Often when a crusty old colonel (is that redundant?) received an email that he thought he needed to share, he'd print it, attach a "buck slip" distribution memo, put it in a shotgun envelope, and mail it to the other person.
Steve - you might be quite right - that said, it is time to get into this century, not everyone will be "on message" nor should they be. I guess we have to go along for the ride to find out how this will end up. My personal opinion is that it is a good thing - the positives will hopefully outweigh the negatives. - Dave
There's an important dissonance here, though. What has fueled the blogsphere is that it is a place for unstructured communications with few formal rules. General Caldwell is approaching as simply a different venue for official strat comms--where every Marine is a rifleman, every soldier is, presumably, a Public Affairs Officer. It leads me to wonder what will happen when the newly-unleashed bloggers get off message.