David Axe posted a very interesting piece today in The Danger Room.  He examines the emerging role of new media in the U.S. Army:

Senior Army leaders have fallen behind the breakneck development of cheap digital communications including cell phones, digital cameras and Web 2.0 Internet sites such as blogs and Facebook, Army Secretary Pete Geren said at a trade conference on July 10. That helps explain how “just one man in a cave that’s hooked up to the Internet has been able to out-communicate the greatest communications society in the history of the world — the United States,” Geren said, according to Inside Defense. (Subscription required.)

“It’s a challenge not only at home, it’s a challenge in recruiting, it’s a challenge internationally, because effective communication brings people over to our side and ineffective communication allows the enemy to pull people to their side,” Geren continued. He said the Army brass needs to catch up — fast. But how exactly? One solution: “Find a blog to be a part of,” Geren said.

The popularity of new media tools like Facebook, MySpace and YouTube have grown by leaps and bounds over the past five years.  These tools are cheap, user-friendly and have the capacity to reach a global audience.  Today, there are “professional bloggers” and you can’t go a day without “Googling.”  The military applications of new media require further exploration.  Certainly, new media can support psychological operations, strategic communications and information operations.  U.S. adversaries have already begun to utilize this new virtual toolkit.  Terrorists have been using blogs to communicate and advance their message for years.

While the U.S. military needs to ramp up its new media efforts, Axe chronicles the Army’s efforts to integrate new media training into its military education system:

At the U.S. Military Academy in West Point, a tiny office of Web-savvy mavericks is creating Army-specific Web 2.0 tools (blogs, forums, social networks) for soldiers. At the Army’s graduate school in Kansas, blogging is a new addition to the curriculum. And just recently the Army launched its own “blogger’s roundtable” program to arrange press conference for online journalists.

Each Service should study how new media capabilities can augment their kinetic and non-kinetic portfolios.