Technology Review has an excellent article describing why soldiers need social networks on the battlefield right now. The amount of information that is not disseminated or just plain lost is staggering. The hierarchical systems of the Cold War are not working in today's wars.

http://www.technologyreview.com/printer_friendly_article.aspx?id=20202

If the tools designed for the hierarchical Cold War are not working in the current war, what chance was there that they were going to work in a traditional big war? Perhaps even military organizations have always needed social networks for sharing information, but our hierarchical command and control structure has prevented us from officially pursuing it.

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Jack Repenning Location: Hidden Member since:5/28/2008 View Full Profile >

jackr on 5/28/2008
At one time, it looks to me like military organizations probably *had* social networks: when the size of an army was limited to the range of the commander's voice, the troops could also talk ("what was that he just yelled?"). But when radios liberated the commander's vocal chords, the costly equipment and limited bandwidth took that away.

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