Social networking and its cousins may not be the answer to world peace (see "Why Twitter may lead to world peace") but that's not stopping some highly placed military folks from promoting it. Paul Levy has done a thoughtful post over at Running A Hospital about the efforts underway at the US Army's Combined Arms Center under the direction of Lt. General Bill Caldwell, which I've written about before ("Let soldiers blog, post to YouTube"). Now Caldwell has introduced a blog central kind of device that "encourage[s] intellectual comments and debate."
Paul calls out an important point about perceived risks when senior executives open the windows to information exchange and debate as Caldwell is doing:
It is impressive, too, that General Caldwell has not been held back by the traditional view that public disclosure of military topics represents a breach of security. As we all know, many of these topics are in the public gristmill anyway, and many claims of a need for secrecy are overstated. While I am sure that some areas will always have to remain off-limits for national security reasons, it is good practice for military officers and others to express their ideas in a public forum and experience the nonhierarchical give-and-take of social media.
Makes me very happy to see people like this hospital CEO and this three-star general turning popular assumptions upside down. Adding blogs to the traditional military arsenal (Caldwell) and replacing bureaucratic double-speak for simple disclosure (Levy - see his blog generally for this ongoing campaign) are exactly the leadership strokes that will indeed lead to peace.
