When the YouTube Generation Goes to War

If Secretary of Defense Robert M. Gates had a blog, most people in the military wouldn't be able to read it.

At military bases throughout the world, the .mil domain filters out and restricts access to blogs and other "personal" Web sites such as Yahoo! Mail. The theory is that blogs and Webmail applications are not "official," and thus users of "official" networks don't need access to them. It's one of those military rules that remind us that if the military didn't have annoying and nonsensical rules, it wouldn't be the military.

The Pentagon cites the need to preserve bandwidth and protect against viruses as the justification for its new ruling restricting soldier access to social networking sites such as YouTube and MySpace. But let's be clear about what is going on here: It's all about control.

For a military to be an organized force that executes plans and follows orders, individuality has to be suppressed and rules have to be enforced. The Web, which is essentially free-flowing and uncontrollable, assaults this regimented and hierarchical world.

On the one hand, I don't doubt that the good people at Strategic Command are sincere when they say the explosion of social networking could choke their electronic system of command and control. On the other, the real and ultimate target of this policy is Soldier 2.0. The young men and women who serve our nation today believe that they deserve, even require, to be connected to their homes 24/7.

The details of the policy announced this week are straightforward. The Defense Department now blocks access from department-owned computers to many popular Internet sites. Currently 13 sites will be blocked from government computers: YouTube, myspace, Metacafe, IFilm, StupidVideos, FileCabi, BlackPlanet, Hi5, Pandora, MTV, 1.fm, live365 and Photobucket.

Soldiers in Iraq and Afghanistan increasingly use such sites to keep in touch with their families, and shared photographs and videos now rival e-mail and traditional chat as a popular way to communicate. If brownies (or body armor) could be sent electronically, mail call of yesterday could probably be eliminated altogether.

Defense Department officials insist that they are not judging the blocked sites. They say that such "recreational" sites pose "a significant operational security challenge." Of course, there is a lot of hype and misconceptions associated with the new ruling, even from military spokesmen.

Most soldiers overseas access the Internet not through official machines on the .mil domain but over computers supplied by Morale, Welfare, and Recreation (MWR) organizations (military-supplied non-appropriated recreation), at private Internet cafes, or even through private satellite dishes that soldiers pay for themselves. Service members are not banned from going to the 13 sites; they just can't use government computers to go there.

In other words, the new rules might affect nothing -- except, that is, the increasing power of blogs and other social networking sites to influence what the military does. My guess then is that lurking somewhere in the back of the military leadership's mind is the bigger question of how to handle the Soldier 2.0 demand and expectation for instant personal communication, regardless of the bandwidth and security issues.

All of which brings us to the question the relationship between the changing nature of society and the changing nature of the military. Are the sacrifices necessary to fight in a sustained war more difficult for the YouTube generation, which expects to be connected 24/7? Conversely, are the expectations of 24/7 personal communications in a war zone, with all of the infrastructure and support they require, undermining U.S. military capabilities and security more than overloaded networks possibly could?


Source : blog.washingtonpost.com


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