When is it too much for our military?
Never thought I’d see the day when some military leaders are bitching about too much comm. In the fast-paced swirl of modern military events, too much comm is never enough. Until it is.
And to some serious extent, down on the level of PFC Rudy Rearanks, we are definitely dancing around comm overload. All this has nothing to do with tactical radios or laser-link satellite stuff. What’s at issue here is your basic and now ubiquitous cell phone. Private cell phones—or mobiles if you’re serving on the other side of the Atlantic—are anywhere and everywhere in modern military ranks.
Scout any military facility and you’ll find uniformed folks strolling or standing around with noses deeply buried in a cell phone. And they’re tightly focused on these devices to the exclusion of virtually all external stimulus. If an officer passes expecting a salute, it’s likely to be ignored. Either that or the recipient of some half-hearted wave that doesn’t take too much effort away from a text chat or whatever’s trending on YouTube. No big deal. The officer is probably distracted by something pinging on his or her phone anyway.
Call me a Luddite if you will. Accuse me of channeling old Ned Ludd, the terror of technology in the 19th Century, but I think there’s a threat to duty, good order, and military discipline in all this constant connectivity. Got a problem, personal or professional? Never mind talking it over with a buddy, a senior, or someone who has lived through a similar experience. That would require an actual eyeball-to-eyeball encounter and stuff like words. Just whip out the old cell phone, scroll the internet, or commune with Claude the AI guru. Job done, problem solved.
More devious and potentially destructive is the wide-open and constantly flowing pipeline to families who have no real feel for what’s happening in your unit, no context in which to judge your complaints or military concerns. Hit Mom, Dad, spouse, or random relatives with enough whining and they will push your problems right through to blustering politicians or rabid journalists in their never-ending quest for controversy. Now you’ve done it. Undermined leadership in the chain of command, got away with it, feeling proud, and looking at a text from your buddies that says you made a truly cool move.
Enough of this stuff—especially among deployed units on long and difficult deployments—and you no longer have a cohesive, interdependent unit in which you can always rely on the man or woman at your shoulder. You’ve got a gaggle of cell-phone junkies connected by nothing more solid than memes or cute pet videos. That won’t work when the defecation strikes the oscillation. We need to think our way out of this situation and that’s going to present a major leadership challenge. Reducing reliance among young people who grew up internet addicted won’t be easy.
No suggestion here to knee-jerk and ban cell phones in our military services. They are handy tools used properly as communication devices to send important messages, conduct off-duty research, or provide family sitreps. But phones and PCs can’t—nor should they—diminish reliable personal relationships vertically in our chains of command or horizontally among the people with whom we serve. We need and should encourage a close bond with the folks we sweat alongside or maybe bleed alongside when military situations turn kinetic. They do that a lot these days with little or no warning.
Maybe it’s a weaning process. Maybe we prohibit cell phones during certain activities such as meals, PT, field training exercises, or immediately following traumatic events on base. It won’t be easy. The tsunami of screaming about 1st Amendment and other human rights will be long and loud. But our military people are in the business of defending those rights, not exercising them to the detriment of the command in which they serve.
Communication was a hell of a lot easier when we had to wait for first-person word from the CO or the First Sergeant, swap gossip with a buddy, or wait on mail call for a letter from home. Does anyone actually write letters anymore? No? Maybe we should. Luddite 6, waiting, out.
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