[Infowarrior] - Care to Write Army Doctrine? With ID, Log On

[Richard Forno]

August 14, 2009
Care to Write Army Doctrine? With ID, Log On
By NOAM COHEN
http://www.nytimes.com/2009/08/14/business/14army.html?_r=1&pagewanted=print

Join the Army, where you can edit all that you can edit.

In July, in a sharp break from tradition, the Army began encouraging  
its personnel — from the privates to the generals — to go online and  
collaboratively rewrite seven of the field manuals that give  
instructions on all aspects of Army life.

The program uses the same software behind the online encyclopedia  
Wikipedia and could potentially lead to hundreds of Army guides being  
“wikified.” The goal, say the officers behind the effort, is to tap  
more experience and advice from battle-tested soldiers rather than  
relying on the specialists within the Army’s array of colleges and  
research centers who have traditionally written the manuals.

“For a couple hundred years, the Army has been writing doctrine in a  
particular way, and for a couple months, we have been doing it online  
in this wiki,” said Col. Charles J. Burnett, the director of the  
Army’s Battle Command Knowledge System. “The only ones who could write  
doctrine were the select few. Now, imagine the challenge in accepting  
that anybody can go on the wiki and make a change — that is a big  
challenge, culturally.”

In recent years, collaborative projects like the Firefox Internet  
browser or Wikipedia pages have flourished with the growth of the  
Internet, showing the power of thousands of contributors pulling  
together.

Not surprisingly, top-down, centralized institutions have resisted  
such tools, fearing the loss of control that comes with empowering  
anyone along the chain of command to contribute.

Yet the Army seems willing to accept some loss of control. Under the  
three-month pilot program, the current version of each guide can be  
edited by anyone around the world who has been issued the ID card that  
allows access to the Army Internet system. About 200 other highly  
practical field manuals that will be renamed Army Tactics, Techniques  
and Procedures, or A.T.T.P., will be candidates for wikification.

As is true with Wikipedia, those changes will appear immediately on  
the site, though there is a team assigned to each manual to review new  
edits. Unlike Wikipedia, however, there will be no anonymous  
contributors.

Many in the Army have been suspicious about the idea, questioning if  
each soldier — specialist or not — should have an equal right to  
create doctrine, Colonel Burnett said.

“We’ve gotten the whole gamut of responses from black to white,” he  
said, “ ‘The best thing since sliced bread’ to ‘the craziest idea I  
have ever heard.’ ”

The colonel said that he was hopeful that by reaching out to the  
140,000 members of the Army’s online forums, he would be tapping the  
kind of people who would be comfortable collaborating on the Web.

“Our motto is, ‘If you ever thought what would I do if the Army let me  
write doctrine, now is your chance,’ ” he said.

The idea has support at the highest ranks. Lt. Gen. William B.  
Caldwell, the commander of the Combined Arms Center at Fort  
Leavenworth, Kan., wrote on the center’s blog on July 1, that “by  
embracing technology, the Army can save money, break down barriers,  
streamline processes and build a bright future.”

The seven guides in the pilot program frequently touch on areas that  
the rank-and-file soldier has had to master because of the wars in  
Iraq and Afghanistan, including topics like Desert Operations, Army  
Unmanned Aircraft Systems Operations and the movements of an infantry  
rifle platoon within a stryker brigade combat team.

For example, on July 7, a staff sergeant added his personal experience  
in Iraq to a guide for a stryker brigade combat team. Soldiers must  
understand, the original field manual says, “their vital role as  
collectors of combat information during the platoon intelligence  
activities.”

The sergeant illustrated the idea with an incident in 2004 where a  
soldier met “an Iraqi family who was fluent in the Spanish language.”  
An officer investigated and found “no ill will towards the United  
States or our allies, the goal of the family was to travel through  
Spanish-speaking nations into Mexico and then enter the United States.”

But, the wiki contributor noted, there was a potential for terrorists  
trying to enter the country, concluding that this encounter  
demonstrated “the importance of passing along such intelligence to the  
proper channels.”

The introduction of wikis is part of a revamping of the Army’s field  
manual system, which currently has more than 500 different guides that  
cover crucial, so-called capstone doctrine — like interrogation or  
counterterrorism — as well as highly specialized guidance on, say, how  
to stay warm during cold-weather operations.

Under the new plan, 50 or so capstone guides will remain field manuals  
and will not be open to collaborative editing, said Clinton Ancker, a  
retired colonel who, as director of the Combined Arms Doctrine  
Directorate at Fort Leavenworth, is supervising the pilot program.  
More than 200 other former field guides are likely to be consolidated  
or even scrapped, he said.

Christopher R. Paparone, an associate professor in the Army Command  
and General Staff College’s Department of Logistics and Resource  
Operations at Fort Lee, Va., who has been advising the Army to change  
its hierarchical thinking, wrote in an e-mail message that he was  
heartened by the Army’s willingness to experiment.

“My view (not an official view) is that we have been much too rigid in  
our doctrine,” he wrote. “By using wiki, we begin to challenge  
dogmatic thinking,” adding that wikis made rank “immaterial.”

Still, the reaction of the rank and file thus far has been tepid. A  
visit to the site hosting the seven wikified guides shows that there  
has been little editing over the first six weeks. In part, this slow  
acceptance reflects the different priorities between Army theorists  
and the working Army, according to Mr. Paparone, a retired colonel  
with a Ph.D. in public administration.

“The field Army is very busy and many who are out there ‘operating’ do  
not necessarily see much usefulness in doctrine anyway (except maybe  
as a start point to improvise from and something taught at our Army  
schools),” he wrote.

Mr. Ancker said he remained optimistic, however, in part because  
soldiers, even in an open-source world, still know how to take an order.

“One of the great advantages we have is that we are a disciplined  
force,” he said. “We are hierarchical. When the boss says ‘do this,’  
it tends to get done. Even those who don’t like to write will add  
something.”