In Aug of 2006, the Department of Defense issued an Immediate Infosec/Website Alert Message to ban blogs and other activity sharing information across the internet. Flash forward to early 2008 and you find General Caldwell, formerly the top spokesperson in Iraq and now head of the Combined Arms Center at Ft Leavenworth, urging the military to blog, post videos to Youtube, and engage across the Social Web.
Gen Caldwell briefing on the death of Zarqawi
The Pitch, a Kansas City News source, recently covered Gen Caldwell’s efforts in “At Fort Leavenworth, officers are marching on a new target: the blogosphere”. While positive, the article concludes on a slightly sour note as it wonders if Caldwell’s social media push will disappear when he leaves.
General Caldwell will certainly move on and we expect he’ll bring his vision and commitment to social media with him. That’s a good thing – we can only hope to see this man spread his vision to new commands. But I certainly doubt that his commitment to the Social Web will soon disappear after any change in command. Caldwell left his mark in Iraq, pushing for increasingly sophisticated strategic communications, transparency and media engagement, and I’m certain his legacy will live on at CAC.
Most importantly, Caldwell’s legacy will live on in the minds and actions of the men and women who attended CAC courses and learned to appreciate and embrace the role of social media. Each of these hundreds of military leaders have and will continue to fan out across the military, spreading the use of social media and in turn encouraging their peers, subordinates and senior leaders to do the same.
While General Caldwell has inspired and educated many future leaders and warriors, I’d like to highlight two key lessons from his career with respect to social media and the military.
Lesson 1: Transparency
Transparency, or as Caldwell would say in his four Be’s “Be Honest, Be Open, Be Relevant, and Be Ready” is a key foundation for engagement on the social web. During his time as spokesperson and Deputy Director of Strategic Effects in Iraq, Caldwell took several actions to ensure transparency. He had intelligence officers assigned to his command to quickly declassify information and make it available to reporters, bloggers and ultimately the global audience. Declassification is still a critical issue and smart military commanders must plan ahead of time to get influential information declassified and distributed in a coordinated manner. Caldwell also embraced reporters, often allowing them to travel with him under escort. Caldwell’s views and practice of strategic communication should serve as a model for all military leaders. Once arriving at CAC, Gen Caldwell published a policy memo on “Interactive Internet Activities” [.pdf] stating that military use of social media is an “essential part of our responsibilities to provide information to the public” and then set in place the training and tools necessary to create a generation of military bloggers and social media enthusiasts. Well done general!
Lesson 2: Simple Blog Rules
At the Combined Arms Center, General Caldwell approved a set of simple blog rules (not guidelines) that provided clear direction to military bloggers. If your agency or command doesn’t have a set of rules, you may just want to borrow the set below:
- Comments should be based on personal experiences unless documented by verifiable information
- DO NOT divulge or discuss classified or sensitive information
- DO NOT discuss planned or ongoing military operations or tactics, techniques and procedures that have not been officially and publically released already.
- Entries should not contain profane or belittling commentary; constructive, intellectual criticism and debate is encouraged.
- Entries are not to be used for commercial gain or promote or endorse financial or other interests.
- Entries and discussions should not be political in a nature, contain political bias or be construed to advocate a political party.
- All remarks made by military personnel MUST be fully attributable in accordance with CAC CG’s Polic Memo on Blogging
{ 6 comments… read them below or add one }
Simple rules that allow Soldiers to be effective spokespersons. Too cool!!!!
LTG Caldwell’s efforts will contribute to sustained transparency and expanded efforts in the Social Media realm. Army Secretary, Pete Geren, is also a proponent of blogging. Expect to see more in the future. Army culture, most often, trickles from the top down.
As an active duty Coast Guard blogger, I think it’s refreshing to have our senior leaders embracing new technology and debate mediums. It allows the military to leverage the benefits that come from open discussion and dialogue within our own organizations and the world.
This is great that the military is embracing this. I wish that I could post videos of some of the tasks that I do in my job. Some training would go a long way in explaining to personnel how to be a military blogger. But this needs to come down the command structure to the supervision, explaining that it is ok to post good information. It would create good checks and balances within this new blogging concept, so that sensitive info or jobs do not get posted. I would like to have the support of my supervisors that if I do shoot a video such as showing how we jack a plane and raise landing gear to do performance testing on my Flip Video Camera that it would be ok. But on the other hand I would like them to be knowledgeable of the wrong information so that the blogger doesn’t post sensitive tech data.
There also needs to be a formal disciplinary action set up for people who abuse this and divulge Top Secret, Secret or Confidential information. Because this opens up the door to information leaks to wrong organizations or foreign governments. Depending on the severity of the information a blogger could be charged with treason. And these needs to be addressed in the UCMJ.
I think most importantly that everyone could be public affairs with training. And this humanizes the military to people that are not fond of what we in the military do. But this is a step in the right direction.
Chris,
I like your idea – airmen, soldiers, sailors, and Marines could use Flips to create instructional videos to share across DoD community. Great idea! I sent you a Facebook friend invite – hit me back and we can chat.
Who was the team member who posted this blog under “Admin?” You’ve laid out a nice case-study here of the work I did in changing the culture at FTLV, and more germane, getting LTG Caldwell the cover story of the Pitch article you referenced.
It’s nice to see other folks taking note of the good work we’re doing out here!