US Armed Services: Twitter may also have some positive uses

Twitter may make Army Intelligence nervous, but examples of two current online efforts by the Air Force and Coast Guard show that tech remains value-neutral, and vital to American military interests.

The news over the weekend that the 304th Military Intelligence Battalion worries that Twitter has become "a social activism tool for socialists, human rights groups, communists, vegetarians, anarchists, religious communities, atheists, political enthusiasts, hacktivists and others to communicate with each other and to send messages to broader audiences" induced a certain amount of eye-rolling around the Web. The Federation of American Scientists, which posted a PDF of the report on its site (PDF available here), snarked that Twitter was thus comparable to credit cards and can openers.

Leaving aside why the Army finds vegetarians worthy of note, a look around the Web reveals some excellent use of social networking and other advanced tech by "our guys" -- despite sustained conflict within the military over which social-networking sites are permitted for use and what individual users can do on them.

The US Coast Guard got some critical press earlier this year for allegedly cracking down on blogging and other online efforts, but the service has recently stepped aboard Facebook with an official presence (several unofficial versions already existed) as well as longstanding YouTube and MySpace presences. Commandant Thad Allen has his own page, and the AMVER reporting project has both Facebook and Twitter presences.

AMVER's mission is to identify ships underway near areas where help is needed and divert them if they may be of assistance -- think of Carpathia coming to the aid of Titanic -- so Twitter's rapid propagation, which raised an eyebrow in the Army's report, is beneficial for AMVER's purposes. (Those interested in following Coast Guard blogs are recommended to the unofficial yet impressive cgblog resource lists.)

Of the other four branches of the service, the Army has no significant Facebook presence, but milblogging.com lists it as the branch of the service with the largest blogging presence, at 776. The Navy's band is on Facebook but not the larger organization; Navy policy is however explicitly fine with blogging by individuals.

The Marines keeps a low profile though it is, behind the Army, the branch with the second liveliest blog contingent; milblogging counts 134. (The universe of military bloggers is both vast and various; for an ongoing roundup, keep an eye on milblogging.com.)

The Air Force has been remarkably aggressive, not to say inconsistent, about blocking access to blogs, video, and other forms of online content. But better things seem to be afoot, as information filters out concerning MyBase, a Second Life-like virtual classroom environment the Air Force is looking to develop. The project, for which the service has budgeted $23 million, would allow for sharing of MS Office documents and audio and video files. Users would be able to complete "lab projects" inside the environment as well.

According to current information on FedBizOpps, the site where bidding for such projects is announced, the contract for the virtual environment is expected to be revealed in mind-November, with the system up and running 18 months or so after that. The ideas framing MyBase were originally described in a white paper, "On Learning; The Future of Air Force Education and Training" (PDF available here) and in -- ironically, considering previous Air Force antipathy to such services -- a YouTube video.