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The article Culture of Engagement summarizes LTG Caldwell's remarks to the FA30 students at the Information Proponent Office:

Every leader in our Army needs to be thinking about how we inform, educate and engage others, and what tools and mediums we will use.

[He] emphasized the importance of the message getting out. With new media, there is no news cycle. The command climate must embrace speed, creativity, and adaptability.

The list of government wikis and the variety of purposes for which they are used continues to expand. The versatility of wikis’ freely editable Web pages makes them a great tool for the types of knowledge sharing and collaborative projects that government employees work on every day.

Here is a sampling of government wikis that illustrate that wide range of uses.

Two views of the Air Force:





• Air Force Makes Social Media a Priority


• Air Force Unplugs Bases’ Internet Connections





Cognitive dissonance anyone?

Lt. Col. Paul Owen, West Point Class of '90, came back to the academy to tell his story about Iraq. Sitting before a video camera in his dress uniform, Owen described the oppressive heat, the "moon dust" sand and a string of some 300 night raids in search of insurgents.

"We were quick," he said. "If they heard us coming, they'd flee."

Owen's recorded recollections will be transcribed and posted on the Web as part of an ambitious oral history project under way at the U.S. Military Academy's new Center for Oral History. He is among some 150 Soldiers - most West Point graduates - who have so far taped interviews destined for the Web before year's end.

"The trouble with this technology is that it is easily available but devilishly hard to crack," the source told the Mail. "The technology can now be accessed on mobile Internet devices and the country's mobile-phone network is expanding rapidly."

It's true that Skype's encryption is impossible to crack. It's also true that Skype is available for Windows Mobile smartphones.

But it's doubtful that a Taliban commander standing by the side of a dirt road 20 miles outside of Kandahar is going to get much mobile broadband Internet access on his $600 phone.

More likely, any insurgents using Skype to evade Western ears are sitting in front of regular old PCs, using fixed lines to route calls over the Internet.

Taliban fighters targeting British troops in Afghanistan are using the latest ‘internet phones’ to evade detection by MI6, security sources said last night.

Skype, a popular piece of consumer software that allows free calls to be made over the web, has been adopted by insurgents to communicate with cells strung out across the country.

Unlike traditional mobile calls, which can be monitored by RAF Nimrod spy planes, Skype calls – the commercial application of a technology called Voice Over Internet Protocol (VOIP) – are heavily encrypted.

Collaboration, one of the Enterprise Objectives in the first publicly available US National Intelligence Strategy, has been elevated to one of the intelligence community’s “values” in current DNI Mike McConnell’s Vision 2015 document. Furthermore, in the US’s Intelligence Community Directive 205, analysts have been ordered to “leverage outside expertise as part of their work.”

Collaboration and outreach imply openness and a variety of easy to use, off the shelf tools to maximize it.

Increasingly, however, students attracted to intelligence careers are pursuing those interests in more traditional academic settings.

As the demand increases for entry level analysts and other intelligence professionals with these skills and abilities, the supply of colleges and universities offering such specialist programs will also likely increase. Already there are a number of schools offering bachelor's and master's degrees in intelligence studies or applied intelligence in the US and in other countries and this number is set to grow.

The revolution is coming

Commander’s Appreciation and Campaign Design

Army Pamphlet 525-5-500

The Geography of Thought

By Richard E. Nisbett

The Starfish and the Spider

By Ori Brafman and Rod A. Beckstrom