Stratcom (DOD) wants to blog

This is a fascinating bit of news to me.  Strategic Command (Stratcom), according to this story, wants to fight the war on cyber-terrorism by speeding up the methods of communication at the Department of Defense via blogging and virtual meetings.  Of course this will occur on the DOD secured network.  "The command seeks to implement 24-hour, real-time communications from generals to warfighters while protecting those communications from adversaries." 

Here's what is interesting, and it has nothing to do with the security piece.  The government, and especially the military, is very "chain of command" centric.  Meaning, if you have an issue, you go to your supervisor or whoever ranks above you in the chain of command.  That guy goes to the guy above him and so on and so on and so on, until the information finally reaches someone who can actually do something about the issue.  It's a lot like playing the game telephone.

In the game telephone, game participants sit in a circle or around a room and the person who starts off the game whispers a message in the next person's ear.  That person in turn whispers the same message in the next person's ear, and so on and so on.  The last person in the chain speaks the message out loud to see if it is close to the original message.  It is often very different than the original message and everyone gets a kick out of discovering where in the chain the message changed and how much it changed.

The game is fun.  But national defense is not a game.  From what I have read and heard, 9/11 could have been prevented if communications had been streamlined between the various agencies within our government responsible for protecting our country.  I completely understand how important this initiative is for our government and country in the war against terrorism.

But, here's the part that fascinates me.  It will be an enormous cultural change for the government and the military.  What will happen to chain of command if a regular Joe blogs on important issues and the General in charge reads the blog post before Joe's supervisor does?  I can just see the volumes of policy that will have to be written around blogging protocol, which might even stymie the original intent of blogging as a communications device.

I admire the effort.  Maybe Stratcom's idea of blogging is completely different than what we are used to - speaking our minds freely.