Social Networking and the Armed Forces

I was reading some EMails being exchanged amongst a group of us♠ when one of the writers admitted to being angry about what is going on with Iraq and Afghanistan.  Maybe blogging about this will give me one more excuse to put off talking about my own views on Afghanistan. This extract is from an EMail by Pittsburgh Tribune star reporter Carl Prine.  I checked with Carl and he gave me permission to put his words out on my blog.

There are two points to doing this.  The first is that what Mr Prine says about social networking is important,

But, secondly because this social networking will impact how our Service members interact long after they put away their uniforms and put on mufti.♥  I hope we all realize that former Service Members have been a factor in our politics since right after the beginning of our Nation.  There was the Society of the Cincinnati.  There was the Grand Army of the Republic (GAR), followed later by the United Confederate Veterans.  There is the VFW, coming out of the Spanish American War (I am a member) and following World War One the American Legion, along with those who associate with the "40 and 8" society.

Just as veterans of Viet-nam had grievances, so the veterans of Iraq and Afghanistan will bring back grievances.  And, if it was all for naught and the veterans think it was all due to incompetence, they will be disaffected.

Not that I expect extreme disaffection, but if you want to know what that looks like and how it impacts civil-military relations, read what Jean Larteguy wrote, first in The Centurians and then in The Praetorians.

But, here is how Marine Rifleman Carl Prine (one a Marine, always a Marine, but also a tour in the Army) explains it:

Why is Carl Prine so danged angry?

While this is an all-volunteer force fighting two endemic wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, one might need to begin to fathom the depths of anger percolating from the bottom, where I served, much as one eventually had to come to terms with the feelings of those who fought in Southeast Asia.

It's a different sort of rage, but it nevertheless exists.  Not with everyone, but with enough of them.  Ironically, I'm one of the tamer sorts because I mix my anger with heavier dollops of pride in having served.  But because of social communication networks, we remain connected as never before, both with those still in the military overseas and with those back in the States, in uniform and out, and so we continuously talk about what we see.  The bottom, in other words, talks incessantly to the rest of the bottom in ways impossible to earlier generations.

Part of how Pharaoh controlled his armies stemmed from his monopoly not only on information but on his control over the ability to share it.  What happens when technology allows Pharaoh's army to speak amongst themselves and with those back home, indeed even with the enemy if they so choose?

A soldier in the legion in Gaul could speak to those on his left and right, but his perspective on what was happening in Rome or even 500 meters away on the battlefield was arbitrated through the control of the Centurion and his superiors.

A literate fighting force in the major industrial democracies many centuries later altered that—an English captain could receive missives and mittens mailed to him from London that morning, along with the Times—but the officer still had trouble knowing exactly what the company only a few hundred meters down the trench line was doing, or why, except as communicated through their superiors.

Because it's not a conscripted army serving Pharaoh but one bepopulated solely with professional volunteers, the anger at the bottom takes on that of the professional.  Instead of bleating like sheep on our way to the slaughter—as the drafted French screamed through the communication trenches during WWI♦—we typically attack the competence, character, bravery, intelligence and morality of those who led us into bad campaigns on the rosiest of assumptions for little apparent foreign policy gain.

We often do so with a satire cribbed from unhealthy doses of "South Park" and the detritus of Generation X and Y pop culture.

The ramifications of this anger won't be so severe as that of the Vietnam generations because we are so small.  But it will nevertheless long exist, and it likely will be articulated, as I have explained.

Whether that ultimately is good or bad for civil-military relations remains to be seen.

A lot of folks in this country are after the President to make a decision on Afghanistan.  I, for one, want him to take the time to make a reasoned decision, since he is playing with peoples' lives, and their hearts.  Service members fight wars with their hearts as well as their minds and muscles.  It is not just a job, it is a vocation.

In the Summer of 1973 I took leave and went home, rather than fly the "last combat mission" into Cambodia, because I didn't want to be associated with that symbolic abandonment of those people we had been supporting against the Khmer Rouge.  In our home in Florida I watched on TV someone else taxi back into the parking spot at Korat Air Base, in Thailand.  The gentleman was playing my role as Instructor Pilot, flying with the Wing Commander, and I was glad I was not there.  Less than a week later I was back flying sorties, but none in support of the Cambodian Army, as it slugged it out with the Khmer Rouge, an Army that included at least one gentleman I have talked to since moving to Lowell, where we are both now residents.

Regards  —  Cliff

♠  This is a group that exchanges EMails on topics related to national security affairs and the membership has, aside from me, the credentials to make such discussions interesting and informative.
♥  Mufti—plain clothes worn by a person who wears a uniform for their job, such as a soldier or police officer:   I was a flying officer in mufti.
♦  In fact, France, during World War One, experienced a revolt in the Army following the disaster of the 1917 Nivelle Offensive.  By this time 1,000,000 men out of 20,000,000 men total had died in the war.  During the mutiny some 49 Army divisions were to some degree impacted.